Thomo & Marina Build a Wembley 35: Construction Update - Week 10

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...