One sunny day...

More progress on multiple fronts this last week. Much of it now happens behind the scenes (selecting and ordering kitchen appliances, bathroom fixtures, cabinet features, and so on), or under the floor or in walls. But sometimes it's obvious.

The rendering of the internal walls is now done, and drying - you won't be able to see the brick lines once it's dry and painted. And has some magnificent art work, or a large TV, hanging in front of it.



More insulation has been slotted into the ceiling, and the heating panels have new wiring on them. With the roof now completed (except over the stairwell and garage), this will allow the plaster ceilings to go up, or under it all. I'd probably have started with the plaster and let gravity actually help me with the rest, but then again, I'm not qualified.



The posts for the roof deck are in place and waterproofed and the roof is complete. The deck will extend about a meter further to the left of the leftmost posts, and have a nice glass balustrade around it. At the back is the stairwell, waiting for some scaffolding to go around it so it can be enclosed and roofed, and also waiting for the spiral staircase to go into it. All the doors and windows for it are on site at least.



The skylight is now framed, and the north-facing louvred window is in. As a solar chimney it will let controlled amounts of light in, and vent hot air from the house in summer. Obviously it can do that right now, but it's a little too open to the elements for our liking.



The guttering and eaves are nearly finished, with some temporary drainage arrangements, and some temporary scaffolding arrangements.



We're even starting to see some of the joinery arriving with the first cupboards on site, ready to be installed.



And even our first shower is moving ahead rapidly!



Hmmm, maybe not.

All the little things...

For this week's episode, we'll take it as read that it's been wet. However, with the roof mostly done, the inside is dry enough that a lot of inside work can continue. Such as the plaster sheeting...



The electrical work continues, coming back to the switch/fuse box (which we can see the back of here). We're keen to avoid the old approach of everything-big-on-one-circuit which means you have to decide which appliances you want on at the same time. So, we asked for the circuits to be more balanced (ie. more of them, with fewer points on each). Funnily enough, the electricians have decided we need a bigger switch box. Not all the cables are here yet.



The plumbing is mostly under the floor, hard to show except in the wet areas, such as the kitchen sink and back of the ensuite. Here we have the solar hot water (copper), the mains cold water (black poly pipe, like garden irrigation now uses), and the 'black water' (grey pipes), with the rainwater line yet to arrive. Somewhere (else) we'll also have the grey water lines. We didn't know water came in that many colours, or that many pipes.



More wall and ceiling insulation is going in, and there's a pile of underfloor insulation somewhere in the front yard.



The skylight hole now extends through the roof. Of course, it'll get a new roof above it, in case it ever rains again...



The courtyard looks awesome, with the slab now cut on gridlines which gives it the appearance of paving. The colour is a little patchy in places, but it will age over time. Coloured concrete over large areas is very hard to get perfectly uniform. You can also see the roof is now complete on this side as well. There's now only a small fiddly section round the back that isn't done yet.



One of the problems with the wet weather is that we can't fill the trench around the basement until it's all dry. This makes it hard to build scaffolding at ground level, to get up to the eaves. Nothing that can't be solved with a some cantilevered beams and props, some simple clamps, and some simple faith in friction and gravity.

Between the showers... another view and another slab

Ok, perhaps I was overly optimistic about the publishing schedule. Things are starting to focus on smaller and smaller details now, which don't lend themselves to (interesting) photographic journaling. Part of that focus is also due to the regular wet weather, which stops bigger things from happening...

One of the remaining main-level windows finally arrived, providing a really nice view from the back of the house onto the (eventually magnificent) garden. (I'm not sure how to make the garden magnificent, but we can dream... Suggestions welcome!)



The window itself is a beautiful circular design, double glazed, timber framed, which will be a real feature of the house. The outside of the circle will be completely bricked in, so you will only see the circle from inside, and outside, and not the framing.




Oh, and it opens too... but only to a set limit a bit wider than shown, to avoid you hurting yourself.



Inside the plaster sheeting is starting to go up, in places where the rain doesn't get to. Also, the radiant heating system is being reattached before the plaster goes underneath, and the insulation goes above. Makes it easier for the electricians, who then don't have to climb inside the roof space anymore than absolutely necessary. Of course, this is just shifting the monkey work onto the guys installing the insulation..



They have also installed about a kilometer of data cabling (Cat7 for the enthusiasts) to all of the data ports throughout the house, back to the little IT room being built into this odd but really useful corner of the house. That room also has all of the temperature sensors and switching wires for the ceiling heating, and will have the external phone/data line come in there.



Some of the internal brick walls have been rendered now, hiding the less attractive brickwork. The render isn't dry yet (what is?!) so the texture effect won't be so stark. It'll also be painted some colour. To be honest, I can't recall what colours we picked. I'm sure it'll be a pleasant surprise when it happens.



One amazingly sunny morning (actually, a normal Canberra winter's morning), an odd dragon suddenly appeared in our front yard, and stretched itself out...



One of the larger concrete pumping trucks in Canberra (a 5-stage unit!) dropped by to move a small amount of concrete (two large truckloads, 11 cubic metres) from the front yard onto our courtyard slab formwork. You can comfortably walk under its support legs, and it has no trouble parking at any of the nearby neighbours and reaching to our house...



A large team of good helpers then helped to make the slab have the right fall from the house to the edge (a 1% slope, for those still reading).



And the end result is another lovely slab, and as usual it's wet. This will be the last house slab, if you don't count the driveway which will happen some later day. The (dry) colour is 'pollen' which is one of the ninety-seven shades of 'kinda yellowy-offwhite' that most blokes can't tell apart...




This makes it a real courtyard again at last. Keep in mind that our old courtyard vanished into a truck just five months ago, and this one has a new extension alongside it and a rainwater tank (floating, sigh) underneath it.

The house has reached another crucial stage. Both our architect and our builder are now prepared to publicly admit this is their work!



We'll see if those signs stay there...

Other work over the last couple of weeks includes a large amount of guttering and eaves and a lot of plumbing for the various kinds of water running around the house (white, grey, black and rain), plus insulation in some parts of the house. Not particularly compelling pictures though, but if people want them, leave a comment.

Ramping up again

Ok, so we've had some more delays and slow progress. Apart from the weather continuing its best to confound us all (and people who know the area may be interested to know that Lake George has some large puddles of water in it, after 14 years of bone dry), the rainwater tank failing to turn up, and the engineer being too busy... Our builder's personal run of luck continues to run bad; getting mugged for no apparent reason in a country town whose entire police force of 1 had decided to take an extended holiday. This experience is not good for anybody's productivity. Mark's ok, fortunately, but it does make you angry.

Anyway, what's been happening?

The first two coats of waterproofing for the basement have gone on. Interestingly, it's a water-based bitumen, which washes off if it rains before it's dry. As we found out, after the first coat had gone on and we had 40mm of rain on it. After the two painted-on coats there's a plastic wrap that goes over the top, before the whole thing is backfilled with drain pipes, gravel and soil (to normal ground level, which is why it stops where it does).



The top of the stairwell has a couple more sides, showing where the north windows and the east door onto the deck will go.



The house has a new airy feel to it - with a large section of roof being taken off in preparation for the corrugated iron to be put on, and to allow as much as possible of the rain to come in, as it did... (just for one night)



A more natural, planned-for skylight is emerging above the kitchen. This skylight is (will be) actually a solar chimney, extending above the roofline with a ventable north-facing window. Yes, there will be a hole in the roof there, eventually...



The old ceiling and other insulation is being put to good use in the walls, avoiding waste.



and the lounge room door/window is in, holding back the pile of insulation before it's all reused.



What else? Well, at last the rainwater tank has arrived! And it's big.





It looks like it'll barely fit through the garage door - but it did. Well, it had 80mm of clearance above (out of 2.4m), so no problem at all! Then it had to go into the courtyard pit, where it fits between the support piers with a whole 25mm of clearance side-to-side! Given it is 3.2m wide by 2.3m high it's a decent size, and a little awkward to move. I didn't get pictures of it being lowered in, but you can see it in the pit in this webcam shot.



With a bit of effort you can get into the basement (the bit under the extension) and from there into the cellar (where the tank is). It's not in position yet, as the cellar floor needs to be finished off, so there'll be more usable space there rather than the dark mudpit it is now.



The cellar is now a real room rather than just the pit, swimming pool or ice rink that it has been to date. This is because it now has a real roof, with the preparations for the courtyard going ahead at last!



The construction technique is interesting. Rather than building the base, placing support posts and then the beams across, the guys have done it in complete reverse. You can see above the main cross support beams from wall to wall, under which the support beams have been welded, and are dangling in mid-air! A little while later the concrete pads were poured, so the whole thing becomes reasonably rigid...

This allows them to start placing all the bondek (metal formwork) for the courtyard slab above the cellar and its new rainwater tank.



Once it's all in place, you can walk across it, especially if you don't think about the long drop underneath... Having the courtyard "filled in" really changes the dynamic of the extension, it's no longer a massive two story block stretching above a yawning chasm, but becomes a cosy (large) enclosed space surrounded by the house on three sides.





Having these roadblocks out of the way, and getting the roof done allows a lot of the other work to start to accelerate. We should be able to get back onto a more normal publishing schedule...