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.