Thursday, June 12, 2014

Woke up and everyone was dead!

Two weeks ago I woke up to find that everyone except us were dead. By 'everyone except us' I meant the tradies, and by 'dead' I meant noticeably absent from the house...

Some facts:

It has been TWO WEEKS since any trades were on site - excluding the trades we organised (balustrades and driveway) and excluding the site supervisor who was cleaning up on Monday. 

We are more than THREE MONTHS past contract. That is three months over on a 12 month build contract. It has been more than 15 months since we commenced building.

Each month that ticks over is now costing us THOUSANDS per month in additional mortgages and furniture storage fees. 

There are still things to be rectified that are outstanding. We flagged many of these issues with the builder MONTHS ago. 

We were obviously naive in thinking that there would be a hive of activity trying to get us to completion as they are so far over contract. The way things are looking we are lucky if we get to move in by August. 

We are both OVER IT. 




Monday, June 9, 2014

Glass balustrade and driveway

Our glass balustrades have been installed upstairs. Downstairs we have the balustrade and glass pool fencing gate. The rest of the pool fencing will be installed once the spa is in place and the decking continued around the spa.

Upstairs balustrade
glass balustrade

glass balustrade

Downstairs pool gate 
glass balustrade

The rest of the balustrade downstairs 
glass balustrade

The driveway turned out perfectly. The guys did an awesome job and the curves of the driveway are subtle. A great exposed aggregate mix too. The company is called 1300driveways and I would recommend them in a heartbeat. If you phone them make sure you request for Chris to do your job. They have other concreters (which are probably just as good) but Chris did our job and he was brilliant to deal with.
exposed aggregate driveway

exposed aggregate driveway

exposed aggregate driveway

exposed aggregate driveway

Today we started securing merbau to the galvanised steel posts under the alfresco/upper deck. In this picture we have clamps temporarily holding the timber in place.
glass balustrade

Since. My last blog update we also finally had the drainage run at the front of the garage and front of the house. We also had our downpipes connected. This has made a huge difference to the amount of water entering the subfloor area, and to be honest, I'm not sure why it took them so long to do this. 

Agi to the front of the house

Agi to the front of the garage 

The concreter (actually, the same guy who did our driveway) is also doing the infill slab for the storeroom. As he is doing that next week we have also asked him to lay the slab for our spa at the same time. This means that the spa slab should be down by 20th June. How exciting!

The caulkers are coming tomorrow to caulk around the tiles, showers, basins etc. I think this will make such a difference and really tidy things up. 

The next two weeks should be a hive of activity with things getting finished outside and inside the house.