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......