and our indoor water feature, with beautiful reflections on a more typical sunny day... Not quite what we had in mind.
This is the third time we've had a month's average rainfall in just a couple of days.
If that alone doesn't get in the way of construction, having wonderful frosty mornings turns all that water to ice. The condensation on the roof can form some beautiful large crystals (click on the picture for the full resolution photo).
Those same frosty conditions in town lead to serious snow and ice in the mountains. Mark, our builder, returning from a few days away in the mountains got to experience some of that ice a little too closely.
He was in the sedan, slowly crawling up the road in tough conditions, when the grip just disappeared, and he and Mick, another builder colleague, just rolled off the road and down the steep hillside, landing on top of a ute that had crashed there just ten hours earlier. All of them were lucky the logs were there, because the slope is over 45 degrees, and it's several hundred meters down that slope with not much else to stop you.
The risk of literally losing your builder in the middle of a project is not something people tend to plan for.
All of these are of course not conducive to high productivity on site... But, all things do pass, and eventually things get back on track.
Our garage now has a front wall, awaiting the loft above, and a full back wall.
The garage back wall is part of the formwork for the courtyard slab, and both that and the other edge wall are now in place. The slab needs support pillars and decking panels to be set in, the pillars go in when the rainwater tank goes in, and the rainwater tank goes in when (a) it arrives, and (b) it stops raining long enough. We do expect the rainwater tank to kickstart the drought again.
Two major things that have happened at last is that the glass doors/windows have arrived, and the roof over the extension has been (mostly) installed. The windows on these rooms are in fact all doors and open up to 50-100% of their width, leading out onto that courtyard slab once that arrives.
How late this will all be finished, remains to be seen. Mark, our builder, thinks he can recover a large part of the delays. Of course we wish him all the best with that, and are just grateful he's still with us!
