Construction Update - Week 21 - A little Progress and More Back and Forth

Not a lot of visible progress this week, but we have had a lot of discussions with Porter Davis on some of the issues we highlighted previously.  Here are the updates...

Fixing the Front Façade

I am happy to report that work began this week to fix the front façade.  As posted previously, the framing for the window in the walk-in-robe next to the master bedroom was wrong.  Kudos I guess to Porter Davis for just getting on and fixing this.



View of repairs underway from the inside

But the Powder-Room drama continues...

I have posted the background to the Powder-Room drama in previous posts, but basically, the background is that Porter Davis have realised very late in the process that they have roughed-in the wrong plumbing for the taps / mixer in the downstairs powder room.  We have now had numerous discussions with both our site supervisor and our head-office coordinator on this.

Last Friday we thought we had basically reached a compromise which was that we were ok with the wall-mounted taps provided that we got to select (within price reasonableness) the fittings and PD would add some handrails to our staircase.

It was a lovely woman at the Reece plumbing centre who has thrown a spanner in that plan.  While helping my wife pick alternative tap-ware, she noticed our basin selection.  We have selected a more upmarket basin for the Powder Room, and it is one of those broad shallow designs.  The woman at Reece asked how high the mixer would be mounted above the basin and my wife confirmed it to be 25cm.  She said that there is no way anyone should mount a mixer that high above a basin like that - it is just going to splash water everywhere.



Powder Room - Now with Mirror

Ahh, yes, the old swanky-shallow-modern-basin-splashing-water-all-over-your-groin-as-you-try-to-wash-your-hands problem.  I have encountered this in hotels and bars across the world.

Anyway, we took this back to Porter Davis and basically said - "no deal".  To his credit, our co-ordinator has acknowledged that we (my wife specifically) have done what we can to fix this, and that this is a "design problem" (his words).  As at the end of this week, we have not heard back from PD to finalise what is going to happen, but the last we had heard was that our site supervisor was heading back to the site to see if a bench-mounted mixer could still be installed.

I guess we will have to wait until next week to find out what is going to happen, but interestingly, the mirror has now been installed in the powder room.  So that is probably going to limit options.




I managed to spend a little bit of time at the site today (without the kids), so was able to take stock of where everything is at and identify a few more mistakes and a number of things that still need to be fixed.  I will post a few highlights over the next couple of days, but to start with, I discovered some challenges with our laundry door.


The Framing for the Laundry Door is Bigger than the Doorframe
As you can see from the pictures, the door and door-frame for the Laundry door are smaller than the gap they sit in.  The gap is quite a bit taller and a bit wider than the frame. I expect that some sort of in-fill will need to be done here to fix this.




There is about a 10mm gap
between the door frame and the brickwork

And the gap above is, well, huge...

Laundry Door is not Hung Correctly
The rebate for the top hinge of the Laundry door needs to be made bigger, as the hinge is not sitting flush.  The net impact of this is a gap at the (see picture) and the door rubbing when it opens and closes.



And here are a couple of the standard progress pics I post every week



From the Front

From the Front - if you look carefully you can see the repairs to the front facade

From the Rear



From the Rear