'Block' now 'house'

Our builder Jason said yesterday, "I'll meet you at your house", and it really hit home (excuse the pun) that we no longer just have a 'block'.  It's finally a 'house'!

One thing we are loving is the design.  Credit for this must go to our designer, Mark Thoroughgood from Bridgefield Building Company.  There are some things we weren't sure about at the time he did his initial sketches, and other things we didn't even realise he'd done until now.  It all makes complete sense now!  The way he has positioned certain rooms and put things where he has, we have to say, is very clever.  We love it.

Here are some photos from earlier in the week.  Those brickies work so quickly, it's hard to keep up.  More to come in a few days...

 Front view, showing master bedroom window and where front door and portico will be.
 

 Front view of the offices.

 Looking out from master bedroom window.

 

Kitchen, showing access to Laundry behind.

 

Pantry in the background.

 Dining area windows.

Entertainment room.

Where the outdoor kitchen will be.

 Part of Muzza's workshop / storeroom, in what will be the garage.

Half of the outdoor toilet.

Thanks Kay for suggesting we have one!  Muz in particular, is rapt in the idea!  :)

Brick by brick

... all 23,000 of them!

After poring over our one-dimensional plans and fiddling about with tape measures for so long, we are just so rapt to finally see walls going up and the design idea we had (more than two years ago) become real.

We have been past to check out the progress every day, because we are so anxious to see how each room looks and if it's what we thought it would be like. Even though the brickies are only a little way into it, we are pleased to say that everything seems to look exactly as we imagined. It's amazing. And a big relief!

Here's some shots of how things have progressed, from the first brick - laid on Tuesday - to now.

  

"Hey Ryan, are you ready for me to turn this thing on?!"

Where the front door will be.

   

Looking towards the house from the backyard (Tuesday, then Saturday).

 

 

Part of the garage.

 

  

         Entertainment room                                                  Laundry and bathroom

 

 

          Kids' bedrooms                                                      Front office window

 

Looking from the driveway towards the offices (Tuesday, then Saturday).

 
Ryan standing between his and Rami's room.

Site inspection team give it the ok.

Happy!

 

Bring on the bricks

The saga of the dreaded brick wall is now officially over, with Muz getting a helping hand from a very generous and hardworking Wags.  They finished off the plastic lining and backfilling to the wall on the weekend and our wall brickie (Vern) has now filled in the last section ('after' photo still to come).

Here's what the finished backfilled wall looks like on neighbour David's side...

 

Yay, now we can focus on the house!  The window and door frames were delivered last week and the brickies have marked everything out - see below.  They started the brick work today, so we'll post some photos of that soon!

Slab is down

Before we mention the slab though, it's important to acknowledge the awful work Muz spent the weekend doing to waterproof the brick wall on neighbour David's side.

Here's his finished work, which shows the tiny gap (of just six inches) he had to work in to apply thick sticky bitumen paint to the wall.  He ended up being covered in it - bugger, should've got a photo of that!

Next project is to apply plastic and do the backfill, which thankfully won't be as messy.

 

We are SO excited to say that the slab went down yesterday.  We threw a few coins in for good luck.  It looks huge, but we're sure we'll end up using every square inch.

There are quite a few shots here, but it is a big milestone, so took a few!

Starting with the street view...

 

 

 

 

 

And here's some vision...

  

This is the end result - photos taken today.

Finally, a fence for Dave!

Our poor rear neighbour David has been so patient with us, waiting for his back wall to be redone after we ripped his fence down to put our pool in.  It's taken much longer than we thought to get to this point, so we are very grateful to have had such an understanding and genuinely lovely man as our affected neighbour.

And, as of today, we have wall!

Muz experienced a day in the life of a brickie (well, sort of) to help our bricklayer Vern do the footings for the wall.  It's 23 metres in length, so it was a big effort!  Here he is showing off his handy work after several hours of digging, barrowing and pouring. 

 

And here's the AFTER shot taken today.  Vern and his team are about 80% finished here.

 

The wall has piers and face brick on the other side (neighbour Dave's side), as we will eventually be rendering our side and he won't be, so his side looks lovely - hopefully he's happy and it was worth the wait!

The other exciting development is that the set-out for the slab has been done and the plumbing work etc all layed.  Here are some shots showing how it's looking with the footings dug out.  Because of a sewer line that happens to run close to the back of the house (lucky us!), we also have concrete piling going in.

The slab is now only a day or two away!

 

Pool is poured

The pool has been concreted and we're pretty happy with how it's looking...

Because of rain at the time of the concreting, the foot ledge wasn't able to be done and so will need to be added separately.  This will run along the length of the pool on left-hand side in the shot below.

After the concrete was left to cure for a week or so, the neighbour's side was backfilled and pencil-compacted.  The other side (adjacent to where the alfresco will go) has been left, as per our builder's request, for him to do as part of the site works.  That should happen this week, then the house slab can go down!

And our poor neighbour, David, will finally get his long-awaited brickwall - we owe him a carton!