Construction Update - Week 12 - Cornices

There has not been a lot of visible action on site this week.  The cornices have been installed, and as you can see, we chose boring "Cove" cornices throughout.

I also did some measuring while I was poking around on site.  We are not having any shelving installed in the laundry, walk-in pantry or walk-in robes.  So now that the plastering is complete, I wanted to get some final measurements so we can start planning this.

I discovered that both the walk-in pantry and walk-in robe upstairs are about 10mm off square, which we will need to take into account when we fit the cupboards and shelving.

I also measured the depth of the cavity for the fridge in the kitchen, as this is seems quite shallow.

Here are the weekly pics!



Cornices!

Fridge Cavity



Shower in upstairs ensuite

From the Front

 

From the Front

 

From the Rear

 

From the Rear

Construction Update - Week 11 - Lock Up!

Well, after being very close to reaching lock-up last weekend, I can now confirm that we have finally reached the lock-up milestone.  How do I know?  Well it wasn't because we got a call from the site supervisor, or a call from our coordinator at the Porter Davis office.  No, we simply got the bill.  Note to Porter Davis - having some class is the cost of a phone call.

 

Never mind.  As I have said before, I am not unhappy with the work being done by Porter Davis on the construction itself.  But boy could their head office folks use some basic customer service training.

 

However, I stuck my head into the house today and discovered that plastering has already been completed!  I took a whole heap of photos, because the place is finally getting the feel of being a house.  Here are a few of them.

 

 

From the Front - the white lining boards underneath the eaves have been fitted



From the Front

From the Rear

From the Rear

Main Bathroom Upstairs - The shower base is installed and the inset shower shelf is now plastered in

In addition to my regular still photos, I also tried taking a number of panorama shots, to better show the layout.  Each of the photos below spans an arc of about 90 degrees, so there is a little warping visible.  This is warping of the perspective, not the walls  :-)



From rear of house in the 'Dining Area', looking back into the Living Room (to the left) and the Kitchen (to the right).



From rear of house in the 'Living Room', looking into the Rumpus Room (to the left) and the Kitchen and Dining Room (to the right).

From the corner of the Kitchen, looking back to the Dining Room (to the left) and the Living Room (to the right).

From the corner of the Rumpus Room, looking out into the hallway through one opening (to the left) and also through our second opening into the Living Room and rear of the house (to the right).



Upstairs Master Bedroom



Upstairs Living Area



One of the two rear bedrooms



The second of the two rear bedrooms

The third upstairs bedroom, with the opening to the walk-in wardrobe (to the right)

 

Construction Update - Week 10 - Lock-Up is soooo close

After another busy week of bricklaying, the second story brickwork is nearly complete.  The garage walls are underway, with the northern wall (forming the property boundary) already completed.  One of the two leafs of the front door is hung, the laundry door is hung and the interior door to the garage is also hung.  The leaves only the installation of the rear bi-fold doors to complete all the external doors.

Now that I think about it, I am not sure how I am going to snoop about updating this blog once the lock-up milestone has been reached, but I am sure I can figure something out.

Highlights of this week have included a call from my neighbour - we was concerned that the bricklayers had left mortar residue on his paving and his walls and windows.  He sent through some photos and it was pretty clear that the brickies had not been cleaning up as they go.  I spoke to our site supervisor about this and he said he would get it sorted straight away.

I also took a look around the upstairs to check that the items that our independent building inspector had identified at the completion of the framing stage had been fixed - there were a couple of noggins that needed replacement and a couple of studs that needed strengthening or replacing.  As far as I can tell, this work has been done, so I remain reasonably please with the progress and service provided by Porter Davis.

Finally, I spoke to ours site supervisor about sound dampening on the pipe that carries the waste water from the upstairs ensuite.  A bit of background might help explain this.  By complete co-incidence, a colleague at my office has also recently built a Porter Davis Wembley 35.  He mentioned to me that one of the (minor) annoying things that he has discovered since moving in is that if someone is having a shower in the upstairs ensuite while he is watching TV in the rumpus room, he can sometimes hear the water dropping down the pipe in the wall cavity.  Our site supervisor said he had never of that as an issue.

When I asked him if I could go on-site to wrap some wadding around the pipe to dampen the sound, he said (quite correctly) "No".  When I asked if he would need to remove it if some wadding "just happened to appear" around the pipe, he said no, providing it did not interfere with the plastering.

I have no idea if the issue is real or not, but I figure that there is no harm taking the opportunity to do something about it - it will not be possible in a few weeks time when the plaster is up.

Here are the latest photos...

From the Front

 

From the Front

From the Rear

From the Rear

The shower bases are installed

The piping for the heating system is also installed

Backstory - House Demolition

Ok, a bit more of the back-story here - this time about our house demolition process

As our new house is a knock-down/rebuild, one of the obvious things we needed to do before construction began was knock down the house that was there.

Finding a demolition company was not too hard.  Porter Davis gave us the number of one and we had a friend who could recommend another.  We also just looked up accouple of others on the Interweb. What was interesting was the difference in the quoting approach.  Some just drove past and had a bit if a look around.   Some wanted to go through the interior, which required coordination with the tenants.

In the end, we did not go with the cheapest quote.  We went with the guy who made us feel like he knew what he was doing.

For what it is worth, here are a few bits of random advice.

Keep Photographic Records of Everything - Take Before and After photos of everything, including fences (they can easily get damaged in the process), the property, your neighbour's property, the footpath and crossovers.
 

Get your asset protection sorted - Asset protection is your problem,  not the demolition company's. We were unable to organize a demolition company to handle the asset protection permit with the local council.   This means that any damage to footpaths and crossovers was our problem and we would have to sort out repairs ourselves.

In our case, when we went to close off the asset protection permit and get our $1500 bond back, the council issued with an instruction to replace 8 of the footpath panels. We quickly used photographic records to demonstrate that most of the damage was pre-existing.  But then, thinking about it further, it seemed a bit dumb and a wasteful to repair the footpath just a few weeks before the house construction began, with a very real liklihood of further damage to the footpath and crossover.

So we spoke to Porter Davis and ended up agreeing that we would retain the asset protection permit throughout the build period.  In return, Porter Davis were able to reduce our site costs by about $1400.  Nice.

 

Keep Your Paperwork - Don't forget to get a copy of the demolition paperwork from the company.  The demo compamy will typically get the relevant demolition permits (yes you need to have one) from  the local Council.  Before the job is done and paid for, make sure you gave a copy of the paperwork in your hands, just in case.

Here are a few pictures from the demolition process.
 

The original house



What the demolition guy brought in to do the job

 

The Site At the End of Week One

The site at the end of week Two

 

Construction Update - Week 9 - Brickwork

So, I am back again after a week working overseas and I am finally catching up with everything, including progress on the house.  These pictures were taken last Friday (I am writing this the following Thursday), but show progress at the end of Week 9 of construction of our Wembley 35.

 

As you can see, the lower storey brickwork is all but done.  One of the things that is now visible is the "off white" mortar we chose as an option for our house's brickwork.  We wanted this to create a more classical appearance for the house's façade.  Maybe not to everyone's taste, but we like it.

 

Our site supervisor believes that we will be at lock-up at the end of next week - will wait and see.

 

From the front
 

From the Front
 

From the Rear
 

From the Rear
 

Front Entrance

Anyone Out There?

Hi,
 

Sorry, but I don't really have an update this week because I have been travelling overseas, so I have not had the opportunity to go and visit the site.
 

My wife had a call from the site supervisor, who let us know that he envisages we will be at lock-up within two weeks, which suggests to me that brickwork is well underway.
 

I would love to find out if anyone is following this blog.... leave a comment or message if you are.  I'm not fishing for comments here, but one of the things about running a blog is you never know if anyone is actually reading what you put up, or if you are just shouting in an empty room (so to speak).
 

I am visiting the site next Friday, so I will give an update of progress next weekend.