Here are the photos of our house being built, at long last.
This is quite early in the process after the site was 'scraped' and leveled off. If you can see the steel rods sticking up out of the ground, they are for the placement of the pipes for the plumbing.
This one is of the concrete slab after it was poured. You may remember that I wrote about having some trees removed before we could begin building. Well, they caused us some problems during the site preparation for the slab. As the builders were excavating for the footings (deeper parts of the slab for stabilisation) they kept on pulling out large root systems. Our builder was concerned and waited a few days to get another opinion on the design of the slab. The original design was drafted by the company that our builder is affiliated with and they had classified and designed the slab incorrectly, ignoring a recommendation from the company who performed the soil test to determine the type of slab that had to be built. Due to the delays that all of this caused, including some pretty wet weather, our builder got the tradesmen to complete the slab on a Saturday, unheard of in the Australian building industry. This was a big surprise for us, and
we had no idea that this was happening, so no photos of the actual process. There was also a significant increase in the cost of the slab, our builder apologised to us for this, but we totally understood that if the base wasn't right, how could we expect the rest of the house to be right.
Next up is the frame. This is taken from the front. The big beam across the front is a roof support and the entry to our garage.
And this frame shot is from the back of the house. The mound on the right hand side of the photo is what is left of the trees that were taken down. We asked the 'tree men' to mulch some of the trees so that we could use it for our garden.
The house is being 'wrapped' in a type of insulation and the windows are in.
And here is the roof and the completion of the brick work. The brick layers were amazing. Only two of them, always on site early, 6:30 am, and would work until around 3:00. We would go there during their lunch break to see how everything was going and they would always be laughing and joking with one another, great to see. An acquaintance of ours said that they were the best 'brickies' around.
This is of the gyprock (walls) after it had been hung. The black pipe curling over is the water pipe to our kitchen taps (faucets). There will be an island bench here with the rest of the kitchen to the right and rear of this photo.
Looking into our rumpus room from the alfresco area. The area in the photo above is to right in this photo. These two rooms are accessed by two large sliding doors. We would have liked to have had the pillar in the middle taken out, but that would have involved changing the whole structure of the roof and would have escalated the cost considerably. Seeing what happened with the slab it was a good thing that we didn't.
I am sorry that these have taken so long. There has been much more work done on the house since these photos have been taken, so I will have to take some more at some stage and put some on here.
Next in store are some photos from the stitching retreat, and a stitchy update, and a (drum roll please) finish.
