Week 27, day one hundred and thirty-one

Friday, 29 July 2011

Well yes, I've been a bit slack: I'm calling it end-of-build malaise. Not that we're quite at the end yet, but I can see it shining there, off on the horizon...

The Block is looking very housey, as it well should, I suppose. The painters almost finished up inside today, which means we're very close to pulling up all the drop sheets and cleaning the floor off before we seal it. The concrete sanding experiment last week was interesting: the result from a small sander was a kind of speckledy grey-ish look, and when I wet them both (to make them look more like the floor will when given its 'wet-look' sealant) I really did prefer how it looked without sanding, 'aggregate shadow' and all. So for now, that's what we'll do. Maybe in ten years when the kids have dragged skateboards across the entirety we'll rethink.

Lounge room fireplace wall: it's RED, not pink, okay?

A painted house is amazing – what a difference it all makes! As Phil the Painter says, 'we're here to make the builders look good'. I love all the different door colours, and our Fair Bianca Half walls are really yummy, such a lovely warm shade of white. Sam, who was seconded in by Phil to help with this big paint job (and was born in 1988, so keeps us all young and blares Triple J whenever he gets the chance, love it), says it was a challenge – 'not a straight line in the place'! Still a bit of paintwork to be finished off outside next week, but otherwise Phil's little red Postman Pat van will be chugging off to another site soon.

Hallway door

Looking down hallway from our (blue door) bedroom

Fire-engine front door

Rosie's red room to be (when she and Jem can bear to give each other up)

Chinese Leaf laundry slider

Jem outside 'his' blue bedroom door

Fluoro tubes along pelmet, with ply sides still to cover them

Paul the Zen Electrician has also been in and out, installing all the light fittings that have come in (and putting in bayonet fittings where the nifty still-to-be-constructed ply shades are going). We had the most trouble finding something we liked for the wall lamps in our bedroom, which needed integrated switches (ie a switch on the lamp itself). After almost settling several times for something that was cheap but we really didn't like much, we've gone on one of our few splurges of the whole job and ordered some gorgeous Rotaliana Luxy Italian wall lamps from a German website and are anxiously awaiting their arrival. One only hopes that the company in question actually exists and isn't in fact some elaborate Canary Islands front...

Heating boiler and hot water, how modern...

We took delivery of approximately $16-million-worth of brand new whitegoods on Wednesday (stove, rangehood, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer), which was a little bit exciting in a revoltingly consumerist way...certainly a completely new experience for me! Have only unpacked the stove so far (to get it in position so Micah, the stianless steel man, could come and measure up that morning to get started on the bench).

Kitchen carcasses and big boxes

Our lovely model demonstrates the new 700mm Glem freestanding stove...

Richie is tootling away on the kitchen, laundry, bathroom and cabinetry. All the melamine carcasses are in place and he's shaping and sanding the ply cupboard doors back at his workshop. Meanwhile, I've been oiling up some of the cupboard edging pieces with Richie's homebrew furniture oil (a fairly addictive mix of boiled linseed oil, turps, and orange peel oil, possibly with other secret ingredients), as well as the benchtops (one for the kitchen, the other for the lounge room cabinetry). The bench timber is mahogany that Richie sources direct from a farmer in Mudgee, who select fells a tree on his own property and mills it up for sale. I feel a helluva lot better about buying timber this way, and it's not the first time that I've felt grateful that Richie is on this job. He knows so much about wood and how to treat it, so it's lovely to just be around him as he works and learn the piddly amounts that I can.

Oiling station

Laundry carcasses and new whitegoods (at dawn)

Kitchen construction zone

Mahogany bench

Bathroom vanity carcass

And we have a bogger! Hip hip hooray... Also found out yesterday that it could even be used now, though the lack of bog roll in the vicinity makes me hope that nobody gets too serious on it yet. Vanity carcass cupboards are also installed and we await the arrival of the stone bathroom benchtop so basin and taps can be flung into place.

Out-of-focus thermostat...

We now have a thermostat attached to the underfloor heating too, which is a relief given that it was pretty much cranking out full blast for almost two weeks. Everyone was so hot inside this sunny maison that the doors and windows were left open during the day to avoid sweat overload! I feel I deserve an extra carbon tax...

 

Outside concreting complete, if snow bleached...

So it's all coming together, and now I'm starting to move on from house decisions and worries to landscaping nightmares...so much to do, so little talent!!

Week 25, day one hundred and nineteen

Wednesday, 13 July 2011

Been a bit of a week for Blackheath – some incredible winds ripped through last Tuesday and Wednesday and caused a huge amount of damage, with massive trees falling down everywhere (including onto a train with passengers – with no serious injuries, miraculously). The street we first lived on in Blackheath looks like a warzone – these huge pines are down everywhere you look, some with root systems taller than a large adult still exposed, carved up and piled along the kerbs. A few houses were badly hit, including a brand new place built by a family from school not far from here; looks like they'll have to rebuild as the foundations were so damaged by the direct hit of a huge pine. I thank my stars that we deliberately chose a street that had very few of these bloody awful pines – not through any foresight but just because they are so hideously inappropriate to the climate up here in so many ways. Council has always had heritage issues with many of the pines and stopped people from removing ones on street frontages, despite the fact that they are a recognised weed species – maybe now there will be another approach...

Tree meets train – and no one hurt

New house smashed (right next door to our much-loved Romaine St fifties inspiration house, which now has a large tarp covering it...)

Jem's 5th bday in Manly, instead!

The kids and I were in Sydney when the storm hit and had planned to return the next day – Mat called that morning and said 'don't' as there was no power, it was utterly freezing and still blowing a gale, and the town was a mess, with streets everywhere blocked by fallen trees and debris, not to mention the highway closed. Turned out that it took five days for the power to come back on at our place – hard to imagine having to live here in freezing conditions without heat, light and hot water, but many people did. Other wimps (like us) became Sydney refugees in the balmy northern beaches until the power finally came back over the weekend. (I did get to do a lot of homewares shop cruising though – more than I ever hope to do again...) We only had one tree come down on The Block, and it just happened to be the one tree that we'd recently realised we should have asked to remove...is that fate?

From lounge to dining

So after all that excitement, we missed a full week of daily building pop-ins and updates, which I'm sure Warwick and the fellas were pleased about (though I think they had their hands full salvaging their own houses and rustling up generators to get something done). Trent finished the internal brick last Monday with a light bagging, and it looks good – a bit easier now to imagine what it might all look like once painted (which can't happen until the mortar is thoroughly dry). The boys finished bits and pieces off then cleared out all the floor protection that had been in place for the brickies, giving the place a good sweep out – looks like a house! Then Warwick and co. went on holidays this week, leaving Phil and Sam to potter on with painting the internal plasterboard areas and trims.

Loungeroom

Hallway bagged

A couple of days ago James the plumber popped in and got the underfloor hydronic heating working – theory is that a warm house will dry the mortar out faster. Did I say a warm house? Try toasty as, gorgeously snug, utterly cosy, perfect internal climate... I seriously considered camping that first night!! It really is the loveliest heating – no blowing of air, no uneven areas, no cold corners, just totally comfortable. Yippee!

My job (well, one on a very long list) for this week is to work out what we are going to do with the floors as Warwick wants to get onto these next week – do we clean and seal or grind and seal? With different answers re the surface 'spots' and possibilities for grinding coming from everyone I spoke to, I was starting to despair... Then I got lucky and a rep from the company that supplies the concrete colours and sealants happened to be coming through Blackheath yesterday on his way back from Mudgee and said he'd pop in to check out the floor. Turns out the 'leopard spots' that have been obvious on the floor from very early on are what he called 'aggregate shadow' – basically the aggregate in the concrete mix holds onto the water in the mix longest, then can sometimes release it last and cause this effect which is basically a shadow of the aggregate that is sitting lower down. Might be caused by the slab being exposed to a lot of rain soon after being poured, but doesn't seem to be any definitive answer as to why. Also hard to tell how deep they go, so we either learn to love the look (which is quite possible) or experiment with grinders/sanders and see how hard we'd have to work to remove the spots (which of course runs the risk of exposing aggregate as you grind, so need to be prepared for that possibility once you start messing with things). After a bit of ringing around I'm starting experiment number one tomorrow: renting a small handheld concrete 'mower' to see what effect a light sanding has, if any.

Aggregate shadow...anyone, anyone?

To be continued!

Week 23, day one hundred and eleven

Friday, 1 July 2011

Touch wood, but The Block is now approximating something very like a house... The tradies are slowly moving out in order to make way for the fitters (I have no idea if this is the correct term), and not a moment too soon as we now have a date that we need to be out of yet another rental house in Blackheath: 9 August (hi, Anne and Maria!). Yes, we seem to have a rental curse of some kind upon us, but fingers crossed it will all be fiiiiiiiiiinnnneeee... Warwick seems to think it will be, anyway, so I'm going with him. Either that or I'm camping until we're in.

Lounge with fireplace

Trent finished up the internal walls, fireplace and chimney today, and quite an impact the latter makes, even if it is basically for show! We will have a firebox of some description in there when funds allow and a flue running up its innards, and hopefully it will serve some fab thermal mass purpose too. But even if not, it will be a heart of the home... Trent returns Monday to do a light bag over the internal bricks, then he's off – we'll miss you, Trent, and your massive Coca-Cola addiction! He did yell down to me from the roof as he was chimneying that in Germany there is a brickies' tradition that when the chimeny is completed (always last in a job) a flag is stuck in it and then said artistes are presented with a case of beer or the like. He then mentioned that he doesn't drink beer, so maybe a case of Coke will do the trick, 'cos I don't want to mess with tradition...

Reverse of fireplace wall

Versatile lot, brickies

 

Hallway to bedrooms

The boys have been finishing off internal details like trims around ceilings, windows and doorways, as well as hanging doors and installing handles. They've also been doing the formwork for our external concrete terraces and carport, then the concrete for some of those areas was poured today (and the rest next week). Warwick called to check whether the swirly, woodgrain finish he'd trowelled the concrete into was okay and I dashed up to look. I hated to do it to him, given the effort he'd already put in, but I had to admit that I'm a bit of a 'flat' and unfancy girl. So he started reworking his swirls then Ivan pops out of the house...and mentions that I might want to rethink that, as the flat concrete in his garage is a veritable deathtrap when it gets a bit of water about it, and what about the kids and the postman? Sigh. So under pressure I went for safety over aesthetics, against my better judgement... Hoping the swirls won't annoy me for the rest of my life.

Entry formwork

Carport formwork

Entry slab

Safety swirls up close...

 

Shower shelf

Stephane has been in and out of the bathroom and laundry over the last week, and now all tiles are laid and half are grouted, mostly just the bathroom floor mosaics left to grout. Was a tiny bit nervous about my floor mosaics when I saw them – I think I love them, it's just that my expensive 'bling' tile colour (what I thought was a white mother-of-pearl shiny thing) turned out a lot pinker than I ever imagined... The white wall tiles I love, though, so I'm hoping once we're all grouted in that I'll forget I ever chose anything else. I think they'll make me smile, if nothing else.

Bathroom floor and front of bath

Richie is ordering materials for the kitchen, laundry, built-ins, shelving units, window seat and various other bits and pieces – it'll be an expensive endeavour to get it all done (not all was included in our quote) but I feel lucky and relieved to have him working on it all as he seems completely capable, skilled and confident about it all. Plus he promises 9 August will be no problem!

So it's all snowballing now: I fear this next month is going to fly by, and there's still so many little details to organise. Off to Sydney tomorrow to stay with my sis for a night or two and for the kids to run wild with their cousins while I trawl a few last shops and suppliers. Most decisions are basically in place, but lighting is really the last big challenge. I happened across some ebay bargains last weekend, though (well, I hope they turn out to be bargains when I finally see them in the flesh on Monday!) – I see the words 'Danish designer lighting' and I just can't resist...