Day 125: Painters working on a public holiday!

We went by the house today with some brooms just to sweep it out a bit, heaps of wood shavings from the cable installations, and found the painters were there, hard at work since 7am! Apparently they had to do it today, because the scaffolding is due to be taken down tomorrow. Nice to see tradies hard at it, though I do feel a little sorry for them, working on a public holiday!

This pic was taken after the cladding was finished, but before the eaves had started - you can see the cutting in of the eave borders.

Will look a heap better when all the scaffolding is taken down tomorrow. I've got a feeling that sometime this week we'll get the lockup stage bill - it's the biggest one at 25% of contract price!

The cladding is painted Surfmist to match the Surfmist fascia. Also, the metal capping (that was over the bricks at the bottom of the cladding) has also been painted to match, which is nice. The eaves colour is something else, think it's White-On-White for a slight bit of contrast. The white window frames are slightly different to the Surfmist, and it looks good; real good! Happy we chose a two-tone gutter and fascia, the idea was that the gutter matches the roof tiles and the fascia matches the eaves, and it's worked out well. That's the trouble with choosing your colour selections months ahead of starting the actual build - it's taken 7-8 months to see our colours in real life!


Rear cladding and eaves also been finished off.. of course, some roof tiles still need to be replaced. Apparently the scaffolding comes down, and the roof tilers use some sort of harness system to make sure they don't fall off the roof. They'll need to replace heaps of tiles on the ground and first floor roofs, and much of the roof pointing as well; we don't want a single leak in our new house! Maybe the ground floor bricks will be cleaned sometime too, after the scaffolding is off.

We're wondering when things will be finished - everyone says that after lockup things take longer. If by some miracle we're done by Tina's birthday in mid August, that would be perfect (!!!) but that might be hoping for too much? The problem for us (and for many other people building houses) is that knowing your completion date as far ahead is possible is a real help, to organise rentals and other things. We're housesitting at various places until September, but if we know we'll be done August, September, October or whenever, we can arrange our interim accommodations a whole lot better. Of course, the builder isn't in direct control of trades, supplies etc, but so far our SS has done a great job co-ordinating all the work to get us to lockup - hopefully this continues smoothly, with good quality, and an earlier-than-expected completion date!

T&T