brick work

 Chris went around the house today with a fine tooth comb and noticed our bricks are not straight at all! and now that he's noticed one, thats all he can see when he looks at the wall of bricks around the house.

He is meeting with the SS about general things around the house on monday but also want to bring this up to him. Chris is pretty disappointed right now about it as we paid the $$$$ for Daniel Robertson bricks.

Here are some photos.

nit-picking...

Seeing it is going to be our house and paying a lot of monies, we expect things done right. Period.

So at this fixing stage, the builders are "fixing" things internally in the home, for example, doing all the cabinets, painting, lights, light switches, door handles etc.

Because there are lot of details during this stage, we've decided to create a shared spreadsheet between the builder, SS and ourselves.  **There's a good tip for new home builders ** 

This spreadsheet has been helpful as our Administrator,  SS and ourselves can keep track of things much easier. We also bring it a long at our catch up meetings to go through each individual thing my man wants them to bring their attention to.

I guess, at the end of the day, we're nit-picking... but for the right reasons of course. This just means we're serious and want a damn good job on the home.

I mean, we've mentioned a lot of things to the Administrator and SS and we expected certain things to be fixed and looked at and investigated. Some stuff can go back to 1 - 2 months ago. Sometimes these request  just dont get fixed. And the result of that is either more damages (i.e. like the hail damage on the roof bcos of a title missing on the roof) or further delays.

Back to the things we nit-picked today.

1. Clearly there's a gap between plaster and window skirts...

2. Um, who made that hole?

3. Joints are cracking..

4. Looks like someone nailed it the skirt, pulled it off and tore some plaster board with it.

5 And the saga continues with the bathroom. If you look closely, you'll see that the whole area needs to be re-plastered - there's too much water damage.

And we'll continue to add to this list....

those mistakes...

Those mistakes I mentioned earlier in my post - well one issue has sorta been rectified. The brick over the entrance door that got pushed in after the acid wash has been put back into place.

The fix job looks ok...But we'll talk to the SS some more. 

and the doors all went up, stunning!

And all the doors went up today. They all look terrific - gotta pat ourselves on the back for making good decisions. Although, when I stare a bit long enough, I start to think "maybe I over did it with all these french doors??". We'll see....I believe once that they are all stained, they will look fantastic. Stay tuned for more....

This is the entrance. Remember, it will be stained a dark merbau. 

Looking at the front door, standing infront of the bi-fold (back) doors. It's very illuminating :)

Here's the theatre room doors.

Here's the study room.

Too much french doors do you think??

And here's the laundry door. That's a lot of light coming through that door.

portes, mes portes

my doors, my doors, my awesome doors!! 

They are beautiful.

Apparently there was a back log on the french doors. 

I think they need to get stained (in a Merbau finish) before they are put on the walls.

These are the front doors. They'll also go into the study and theater.

And this is my laundry door. There's no window in there, so this door will provide all the sunshine required.

so fresh and so clean!

Our bricks got a wash on Wednesday. An acid wash (I believe).

They look so pristine.

Here's the before....

And After.... 

  

And then, crash.....

There's always the stuff ups. Here's to more delays...

You can see the little cracks of mortar that has been taken off during the wash. 

And ohhh ooooo... the bricks have gone in....

Shower's black

So the showers in both bathrooms are black. It looks like some tar (?)... 

Its basically made the whole area water proof.

 At the floor level, they've put a puddle of water to ensure its water proof - which it is thank goodness!

There's a yellow and purple balloon in the middle of the shower. 

It stops the layer of water going down the drain holes.

boooom

And it sorta goes on a down ward spiral from here.

See, now that the plaster is in the final stages, the genius Plumber had to come in and ruin it all. 

It was last week on Thursday that left me aghast! 

Boom - and theres a fat hole in the roof. I dont know how it got there, but whoever it was wasnt watching their step. Chris and I can only guess its the plumber cos no one else has been on site.

What we saw on Thursday was poor craftsmanship. Basically the pipes were tested and connected. But the way in which they were connected was a shocker. Like a kid ripped through walls recklessly, bricks busted to get to the pipes, and most alarmingly, a pipe that was tested for water and left leaking over night!

Here is what we saw on Saturday morning...

I knew there had to be a reason why there would be a damp floor and wall. The pipe from the roof was leaking water overnight that the plaster board soaked in most of the moisture and tinkled down the walls.

You can see the yellow stains here - its the water seeping through.

Now we're left with another gash to another wall and insulation left wet. * Shakes head, tsk tsk tsk**

So Chris met with the SS early today. Words from the SS, "yea, water and plaster dont exactly mix"... So the whole bathroom walls, hall way are going to get repaired. We insisted on them getting the affected areas out and new plaster walls repaired in. Oh, and the garage roof is also going to get fixed. After the hail storms on Christmas day, a puddle of water also seeped through that area.

Cabinets & Eaves are up

 And here's what the cabinets look like installed. Dont they look good...well, they'll look smashing once the whole room is complete I reckon! 

And the previous week, Chris and I didnt notice this, but they had actually installed majority of our Eavessssss... They obviously need a bit of paint work but its all in a day's work!

They also put in our lovely gutter's this week - boy we chose good colours!! 

our drawers arrived today

And with sheer joy and excitement, a little jump here and there, Chris and I are ecstatic to see the drawers in our hallway. They look pretty good to me.

This was Chris' face as he walked through the hallway...

'Phwoarrrrrr, farr out!'

The white one below is our overhead kitchen cupboard.  

These are our laundry cupboards. 

 Everyone ladie's dream....pot drawers!! Two Sets of them too- arent we so lucky!

wee weeeeee, my skirts are up ^_^

Not my actual skirt silly. The skirts for the wall, of course!

 

And we got a delivery of more material on Monday (i think it was).

 

And with the plasterer's magic touch, the walls are looking prettier by the day. A quick sanding should finish the job in these spots that are circled. We think that since he's put up the actual plaster walls, its now been his third trip of just sanding smooth the edges........not too long to go now. 

The skirting boy's toys..hehehehe

lock it in Eddie, we've chosen our floors .

after much deliberation, and i mean, much much much much deliberation, we've chosen the floors for our house.

• We had always set our minds on having 100% merbau or sydney blue gum or spotted gum timber floors. 

• After intense research we thought we could go with bamboo as it was a cost effective option. 

• Then after that we thought about engineered timber laminate floors - which is a hard wood with a small piece of the real wood on top. 

• That option too was a little too pricey. Then, we investigated the laminate floors - a picture of the real wood design placed on a plank of hard wood - this was much cheaper and it looked soo goood and i was much cheaper too. 

• This put a spanner in the works as the real wood and laminate are on such opposite ends in terms of material. And boy, laminate is gotten so good in the span of 6 months since we first started looking into them. I mean the scanned image of the wood is sooooo realistic, it could, i dare say, pass as the real thing.

So off we went getting quotes from our big carpet companies. After many many many many trips, we decided to go with Harvey Normal's special deal - with Wood Trends in the Merbau finish.

The one we chose is the dark colour in the middle, in the picture below.

We also decided with carpets in the bedrooms, theater and study.  This decision was huge and gave us a huge headache as it was a whole new material we had to research. But low-and-behold, the winners was: Smartstrand IQ150 Twist Carpet Flooring by Mohawk.

This stuff is environmentally green - as it made out of synthetic fibres containing (37%) a polymer derived from corn sugars. It's made in the States and we were really impressed with this advertisement for it:

VIDEO:  SmartStrand Zoo Challenge: The Carpet Wins!

And here are the colours we've gone with. A natural colour in the bedrooms...

And the chocolate colour for the theater and study.