World's biggest raingauge

After a lovely wet week, which helps the concrete to cure nice and slowly, we end up with our indoor pool after all. So, a 65 sq.m. basement, with 140mm of water in it, from a catchment of around 200 sq.m means we had about 50mm of rain at home - which agrees with the Bureau of Met.



From another perspective, that's just over 9000 liters. Our big new rainwater tank (yet to arrive) would have been half-filled by that... Just as construction can break the drought, we expect our rainwater tank to bring it back again. Anyway, no harm done, it's all pumped out again, and it'll eventually be fully waterproofed over the next little while.

The bricklayers have been busy again. Several windows and doors are now gone, and another one has been moved.



Even more impressive, the new rooms in the extension are emerging. These will have huge glass frontage to the north, so should be lovely, warm and sunny in the winter - and being on a slab with internal brick and plenty of insulation, lots of thermal mass to keep them that way.



Not quite at full height yet, and awaiting a back (south) wall with a door onto the garden and some windows.



And Mt Everest? Still growing... Though getting in and out of the house itself is a lot easier now.

Another week, another slab

A big week at the ol' homestead...

The floor protection came up from the basement, revealing a very nice slab underneath. Our design of jailcell-chic is coming along well.

Mt Everest continues to grow in the front yard. Funnily the builders are now complaining about a lack of space... We expect the rubbish to go in the next week or so, more deliveries are expected and they have to go somewhere!

The slab preparations now include electrical conduits (grey tubes), plumbing wastes (large grey tubes), the in-slab heating coils (blue wires), the formwork for the bathroom (top right hand corner), and some yellow outlines that indicate where rooms, walls and cupboards will end up (so that the conduits, coils and other features don't end up in the wrong place).

Notice below the little coil of wire leaning off to the left (next to his foot)? That's the thermostat wire for the in-slab heating. It's in the wrong place, since that's a big doorway/glass wall. Notice the black tube coming out of the sky? That's the concrete about to flow onto the deck and over the wiring. Fortunately the wiring guy showed up quickly and moved it, while the concrete was being poured around him. Nice detail: he also moved some of the wiring in the bathroom so that there was heating right in front of the toilet seat...

So where's that tube coming from?A rather large pump truck... (and apparently the previous truck was bigger. No idea how that fitted, there's not much spare space with this one).




We didn't quite take up the whole road, and it only took an hour for it all to be poured. Watching these guys work leaves you very impressed; it's an art form shoving twenty tons of concrete around and levelling it all by hand - to better than 2mm at any point across the whole surface (60 sq.m or so)

Following the pour, they spent the rest of the day (till well after sunset) brushing and polishing the slab. Much of it by hand. If you have any OH&S nervousness, look away now. Just ignore the fact that he's tip-toe balanced on a three-inch wide strip of timber and foam and working the concrete by hand, while his heels are dangling out across a ten foot/three meter drop...

A shell becomes a room

You lose a little and gain a lot... Our house has become even more open plan with the great outdoors, with the external walls from the kids rooms now totally gone, allowing you to leap into the basement from a great height.



But then they've core-filled the walls with cement (see the little slots down the bottom of the wall are now full), put in the big cross beams for the walls above, and laid steel across all of it for the main extension slab. The little white tubes are conduits for electrical wiring.



A slab floor, four walls and a roof add up to a room. Our basement is now a real space!

Looking towards the stairwell


and looking towards the window (or "loading slot") ...

The big beams are underneath the walls for the kids bedrooms. We may put in a false ceiling later to hide them and any of the other under-slab stuff - keep in mind we have a very high ceiling here (almost 3m). It's seriously exciting to have our first new room from the renovations, even if getting into it is a little bit of slide and stumble down the (invariably muddy) dirt ramp - for now.

Basement Ahoy!

A good week of progress sees a basement emerging in full from the ground. It now has the requisite number of walls at full height, with a door opening (into the future cellar/rainwater tank space underneath the courtyard)



and a window at just above normal ground level, for inserting larger items (like billiard tables)



and a door(way) into the stairwell space, which looks rather narrow, but we're told it'll all fit.



and the stairwell itself peeping out from under the house. That corner of the old house will be cut away to fit the cool spiral staircase.



The basement looks rather stark and tall when seen from the excavation side. From the garden side (below) you can see how it sits quite deeply into the landscape, and the natural ground level will come up a little higher yet on this side, hiding it further (and those plumbing trenches). Notice also the lack of old external walls on this corner of the house now! They've started to remove those to prepare for the next concrete slab, which actually extends the house at its normal level.


Some other "small" jobs that have happened: More of the roof has been corrugated,



Mark, the builder, wasn't going to wait for us to decide about the details of the ensuite and walk-in-robe, and took them out...



and some more preparations for the lounge room floor slab. The slab comes around the corner a little to give us a space for (potentially) a nice central fireplace.

Walls end...

Take one empty slab, drill some small holes every 18inches and glue in starter rods, and stick down some open-sided bricks...



Then add several pallets of bricks,





and a bunch of hard-working brick layers (on a Saturday no less)



and you end up with..... most of a wall!



(same view as the first pic above)

We're expecting the next delivery of bricks will allow them to finish off the walls all the way round, and all the way to the top as needed to hold up the old part of the house. Or things are going to look odd.



It's hard to get a sense of scale for the basement; depending on the weather and what's lying around it feels somewhere between quite small and quite huge. We'll have to wait and see how a billiard table looks in there... Yes, we've gone and looked at some.