July Nearmap Photo

Thanks to Janine Kimberley for the update to Nearmap.  I got to see the latest.  This was taken on the day that they were doing the stumps.

Plumbing and Heating Going In

Her indoors did a midday drive by and this is what she saw:

Got to love the iphone updates in the middle of the day.

Lintel Up

One of the Lintel's magically jumped up onto the brickwork yesterday and the scaffolding has disappeared.

Cabinets and Electrics

Wow, what a day.  We are getting close to needing to finalise everything so we thought that we would combine our final cabinet maker appointment and our electrical appointment into one day and get them over with. We started early so I could get to work in the afternoon.....

Cabinets appointment went well.  We managed to convince the guy that we could get the bin to work mounted high under our bench, which is something that we have really wanted.  Now we will have two 17L bins in a pull out drawer with a drawer, hopefully 286mm deep beneath the bin drawer.  We will have garbage in the front drawer bin and compost in the back drawer bin and we will put a liner in the lower drawer for recycling.

We had to change our kitchen cabinet colours because the alabaster in the vinyl wrap that the cabinet maker used was a lot darker than the sample that we were going from.  So our kitchen and laundry cabinets are now parchment (looks exactly like alabaster).

Then we had to go from Pakenham for cabinets to Tullamarine for Electrical.  This is a very long way. When we arrived they didn't seem terribly ready for us, apparently they thought we were coming next week.  Given I'd organised a morning off work and we had to get relos to look after the kids and we had just driven a huge distance we didn't really want to have to come back some other time.

Luckily they found someone else to go through the plans with us.  Just like the estimate for electricals that we received from our Premier Salesperson the estimate for the time was discounted by 70%.  We received a letter that said to allow for 1 to 1.5 hours and even excluding the extra hour we had to wait for the replacement electrician it still took over 3 hours to go through our plans.

So over $4,000 in electricals we now have a reasonable comfortable house with switches, lights, tv points and other minor modifications.  I would hate to see what it would cost to get a good home automation system.

Now that I know where all of the light switches are I will have to try to draw them in 3D (I'm not too good with curves yet though).

Weekend Site Explore

I thought that I would write a little about what else I saw on Sunday other than the timber spacing.

I took a photo of the delivery slip for the steel.

It looks like they had too many 2400 long sections and not enough 3000 but we'll see how things go.

Most of the timber looks good.  Except I found a knot right near the edge.

This knot is right at the back of her indoor's walk in robe so unless she goes all Imelda Marcos with heavy shoes I think we will be OK.

I also found all of these holes dug for our alfresco.  I assume that this will be for the posts for our timber alfresco.

Drawing Up Kitchen

I'm in the process of trying to get a better representation of the kitchen.  I thought that I would note down how I went as a bit of a guide to other that may be interested in drawing their house or kitchen.  Feel free to pop by to my new blog "Blending a 3D kitchen."  This is where I am up to:

It certainly isn't much at the moment.  It is really just the walls around the kitchen, however I will try to progress this further.

Review of Timber Strengths

I had a wander around the site today and checked out the types of timber used and the general spans etc.

It looks like a combination of MGP12 and MGP10 were used.  Also spans went from 1400 to 1650 for the bearers and the joists were typically spanning similar lengths with spacing of 450 consistent across everywhere.  The bearers were 2/95x35 sections and the joists were 95x45.

Unfortunately I could only access the code for F7 grade timber which has the following properties compared to MGP10

E = 7900 cf 10000
f'b = 18 cf 17

As deflection often governs span lengths in timber framed construction it is really only the ratio of the E values that matters.  Therefore I can just adjust the allowances for the F7 up to MGP10 based on the ratio of E values.

AS1684.2N1N2 F7 Supplement allows 1400mm spans for single spans and 1700 continuous spans for 450mm spaced joists supporting load bearing walls.  This was consistent with what was on site.

Similarly the bearers seemed to spaced adequately given a bit of an increase from what can be seen in the table below.  So all looks good.

It's funny using such prescriptive codes compared to what I normally use but everything is looking good.