Sink Choice

Last Friday I received a phone call from our cabinet maker.  Unfortunately the sink that we had chose was unavailable.

This is the Abey King.
I asked the cabinet maker what other sinks were available and he suggested Oliveri.

This is the Oliveri Manhattan which is even bigger than the above.

This is the Oliveri Sonnetto which is smaller than the King.

I thought I would see what the looked like in the kitchen:

Even though the Manhattan takes up so much room we ended up going with this one as it comes with a whole lot of accessories that allow you to virtually cover the sink and regain the bench space.  The cabinets are now being made.

Plaster Cleared away

At least one thing seemed to have happened yesterday.  I walked past the house in the evening and managed to just walk to the front door through some very slippery mud to notice that the massive pile of plaster offcuts has been cleared away.  That was all that seems to have happened yesterday though.

Shower Water Proofing

We stopped by on Saturday and found that the only thing that had happened on Thursday and Friday was water proofing of the showers in the ensuite and bathroom.  Also as this was the first time we had seen the place in natural light and not with a torch we noticed that the wet areas had a blueish plaster on them which seemed to be suitable for wet areas.

I spent a bit of Thursday with the electricians trying to sort out getting underground power.  Apparently we'll need to organise this with the local supplier first and then our electrician will sort things out afterwards.  I was very pleased with the customer service of the electricians.  The owner of the firm called me and got the guy who was working on the house to call me, they gave me their contact details and explained it all very well.  I mentioned that I couldn't see a second outlet where the kitchen splashback was going to go and they said that they will sort it out.

Fingers crossed lots will happen this week.

Repairs have been done

The cut bracing and the cut stud have been repaired.  Romeo have come through.

 

Above is the repaired bracing, they had to take off the entire panel of plasterboard and they have swapped the powerpoint bracket to the next stud.

 

This image shows a new cross element below the stud that now completes the load path from the truss bearing on the load bearing wall to the studs either side and then down to the ground.  Unfortunately a lot of the soundproof insulation got moved around in doing this, we managed to get a few back in place.

Almost al of the plastering has been put in place, all but the wall with the new bracing the wall between the linen cupboard and the return air vent.  The alfresco ceiling and the garage also need to be done.

Plastered, well almost

Stopped by this evening and this is what I saw:

All of the ceiling has been plastered and quite a few walls.  It looks like some of our soundproofing insulation may have got in the way as there were a few knocked around, but the important walls all looked good.

Plaster's arrived and Wall Insulation

Great progress today.

Plaster was delivered, and man there is a lot of it.

The insulation has gone in the walls

Electrical appears to have been finished.

There are a few things that I will need to query tomorrow.  There was a section of wall that hadn't been wrapped between the walk in pantry and the brickwork that went up to the garage rear door.  Now with the insulation in place we thought that maybe they had done this, however no this is not the case.  Also there is still some wrap missing on areas of the wall that are quite high.  I saw a post about this on homeone that indicates that the wrap may not have been installed because they need scaffolding to get up to it.  Hopefully this is the case and this can be sorted when they put the scaffolding in to do the rest of the bricking.

Also they have added an ugly box and a little hook at the top of the gable over the master bed room. I had no idea what this was until we had a closer look.  It appears to be for our power line to the pole on the street.  Of course being an old developed suburb this is the way the power gets to the houses however no where in our documentation was this discussed.  Also our specification includes details of underground power cabling.  I will certainly ask the question as to why this was not placed on any of drawings and why we are not getting underground power.

Soundscreen and Electrical Review

Well it was a long day today.

Our aim was to start early as we weren't too sure how long it would take us to put in the Sound Insulation in the boys rooms.  So we went via Bunnings to pick up some extra supplies including some little picks for the boys (I have started them on digging our my cellar, hopefully in about a year I will have some interesting updates on this.)

Installing the insulation was no the easiest of tasks and the instruction your get are pretty useless.  I'll develop a more detailed howto on this later so that people can get a good idea of what can go right and wrong, because I think we experienced everything in the long day that was installing.

Here's some pictures of the finished product. This is the youngest's wardrobe between his room and the main living room.

This is wall between the yougest's room and the bathroom

This was the hardest wall between the youngest's room and our ensuite.  On the right is the back of our shower that a whole lot of different sized gaps with lots of pipework, which all make it difficult.

This is ensuite shower outlet, they will put a bit of tile in the middle of this and tile around the rest of it. I think this will look really nice, just so long as it actually drains.

The electricians don't really seem to be able to understand the necessity of structural aspects of the frame.  Here they have cut right through a brace to put the outlet for our TV.  They had the great idea of mounting an outlet high so that it could be hidden behind the TV, however these TV's are so huge that I think they could have moved the bracket a little bit to avoid the bracing.  This is going in an email....

This is the return air in the living room which I knew would cause a problem with the framing because they needed to cut out the lower bit of the stud, which they have now done.  Unfortunately this has now left a load bearing stud hanging from a truss not holding up a truss...... 

Electricians and Climate Control

Electricians are in again today and Climate Control people are there too.  I drove past last night and could only look through windows to see wires all through our bedroom and lots of other places.  There were wall plates around and also the ducted vacuuming seemed to have been put in as I could see a conduit with wires inside it in the garage.

We'll get access to the house on Sunday to put our bats in so I'll have a good go through the house to see if electrical is all good.  I might also put some more noggins in some places to mount things.

Here's what our electrical plan looks like:

Electricians on site

Her indoors went past this morning and the electricians are there, hopefully roughing in.  Things are moving again whoohoo.

Email from Construction Manager and The Door was Open

I thought that I had better make sure that everything was done in the house before the plaster was put in so I sent our contact at Romeo Homes an email.  I almost immediately got an email back from her boss saying that everything was done.  Another thing I asked for was something from the building surveyor stating that the frame had been reviewed.  This seemed a little harder, however they will look into it for me.

Also on the way home tonight we stopped by to see if anything had been done, luckily one of the doors was open so we had to go in.

We have a water supply for our evaporative cooling and our smell pipe (I think this is the technical term) has been vented to outside.

I don't think I noticed this timber before.  This extra stuff appears to be for the bulkheads and drop panels in the front entrance.

SS called today

I got a call out of the blue today from our Site Supervisor. He has let us know that they will be doing the plastering next week. Therefore we'll need to spend the weekend putting our sound proof insulation. This means that over the next few days they'll have to fill in the gables do the electricals and the outer wall insulation.


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Been a while

Sorry about the lack of updates.   Unfortunately not too much has been happening so I haven't had too much to say.  I went around on Sunday and saw the following:

They've added a temporary front doo, so we are now unfortunately locked out, I still don't count this as lock up though.  Above the bedroom window is a big opening, if we get strong wind a rain plenty of water will come in, so I want those filled in before anything is done inside.

This is a pile of al of the stuff that has been swept out from inside.  It's a good place to dump it as I don't like the way the water is building up here.  If you look to the bottom left of the photo that is my really good engineering fix on the drainage.  That is a flexible down pipe that I have weighed down with some bricks to try to help get the water level down.  It appears to be working as the water is about a brick and half lower than usual.

Here is the other temporary door that is stopping us from getting in.  There is also a fresh pile of cement mortar which I think has been used to bed in the bath and boys shower base.

The blueboard to the left is to fill in the gaps I mentioned aboce and the bits of timber neatly placed under the wrap must be for all of the nice features at the front.

It's still a bit of a mud puddle on the side but I think my drainage is starting to work.

There are still a few gaps above the wrap around the house that need to be fixed up before the bricking is done.

We now have to look at everything through windows.  Here you can see the sliding door cavity in the laundry.

Here's some of the laundry plumbing

This is looking from the Alfresco window toward the WIP on the left and the kitchen bench pipework.

Bath / Shower Base and Shingles

Her indoors went past the block on Tuesday and noticed that the bath had been delivered along with a shower base for the boys bathroom and some timber to fill in our gables including some shingle looking things.

We went past again last night and I had wonder through the house with a torch.  I thought that the bath and the shower base were supposed to be in the lounge room and when I didn't see them there I immediately thought that they had been stolen (I am looking on homeone too much see threads on this sort of thing).  Looking further through the house maybe the builder has read the same thing as the bath is now secured in the boys toilet and the shower base has a plank across it nailed into the bathroom.