CONstruction

The excavator has gone (for now), the pile of dirt and rubbish in the front yard is a lot smaller, and suddenly things start to look like they are being added, not taken away. Not yet anyway, but at least there's formwork for the basement slab appearing...




The slab extends underneath the house to provide a base for the stairwell for the three levels we'll have - basement, house level, and the roof deck. The slab is thicker at the edges to provide the foundations for the external walls.



If you squint you can imagine yourself (below) at the bottom of the stairs looking into the basement. It's hard to get a sense of scale, but the basement is 10m long, 6m wide. Roughly. We've had some great suggestions for what to do with the basement, including some profitable agriculture (or given earlier rains, an indoor pool), but we expect we'll use it for more fun things.



Another sign of progress, "stuff" is being delivered, like roofing (at least a small fraction of it). We're removing all the old concrete rooftiles, which probably isn't a sensible roof material in most of Australia, and replacing it with corrugated iron. That also makes the roof a lot lighter (one eighth of the original weight!), so it allows more of the internal walls to be removed. Interesting engineering detail - the concrete tiles sit down by gravity (and the occassional nail). The corrugated iron roof has to be tied down so the house holds the roof down...



There also appear to be some squatters making themselves comfortable - the (still functioning) toilet remains the only walled room in the house, with new toilet paper and air freshener appearing at intervals, a gas bottle appeared last week and now there's a barbecue and a microwave.



Since they also brought ladders, tools and wheelbarrows we expect these squatters will do some renovation work on the side, so we're ok with that. But if bedding and a TV show up, questions will be asked!