Gyp-rocking along!

Well into the new year now and things have been taking shape steadily on the house over the last two or so weeks since the tradies returned from the Christmas break. The remainder of the eves were installed and the replacement timber beam that we thought had gone walk about over the holidays had returned to site and been installed over the front entry.

All the gyprock has been installed with the exception of a small section of ceiling and cornice to be pulled out and replaced inside a cupboard in the garage as it was out of square. The wet areas have had there first stage in water proofing and we have been informed they will be back to finish off towards the end of the week.

We noticed the carpenter has been on site and installed all the architraves around the doors and windows. We are guessing skirting boards will be next. All the door jams and frames have been squared up and properly secured to the house frames to my relief. Humes doors have also been on site and attached all the doors and we have been told that the garage door will arrive and be install early next week to coincide with the arrival of the kitchen and bathroom vanities.

On another note, the issue we had concerning the bricks has been dealt with at this stage. We were able to meet with the area supervisor and site foreman at the house to outline our concerns on the particular area of the house and they were more than happy to do what ever it took to resolve the problem and put our minds at ease. We appreciate the time given to take our concerns into consideration and have high hopes that the end result will meet our expectations. We will keep you posted.

In all, things are progressing positively and in the right direction and we are more than happy with how things are looking. Small problems and mistakes will no doubt continue to arise, as would happen in any build, but I think the key is the keep on top of them and make those responsible aware of them before the build progresses to a stage where it becomes an even bigger issue to resolve. Hats off to McDonald Jones over the last couple of days, we really appreciated the time taken to meet on site and the odd phone call out of the blue goes a long way too, let me tell you. Thankyou.    

New Year, New House!

Happy New Year everyone! With the Christmas holidays nearly out of the way, I thought was about time to update our blog and let you know where our building progress stands a few weeks on. 

As promised we had the electrical roughed in before Christmas, however we are still waiting for the front eaves and the pillars to be finished. You can see from the images below that the hard wood timber posts were fitted, but fitted with a sizeable gauge in the back of the timber! How anyone in his or her right mind would find this acceptable enough to fit in the first place is beyond me… Having said this, once we notified our PCI of this, who then spoke to our SS we were assured that this bit of hardwood timber would be replaced. True to their word it was… but after a week of sitting in our garage this piece of hardwood timber disappeared along with an excavator bucket load of sand. We were however, able to track the missing sand back to our neighbour’s newly poured slab! From the tracks that were left we could see that their building company had driven the excavator in through the fence to within a 1ft of our house. Unbelievable!

Anyway, we are guessing another replacement will turn up next week so that the pillars and eaves to the front of the house can be finished off. As stated before, the gyprocking will start around the middle of this month. We are looking forward to seeing how the house will look inside, so far all of our attention have been to the outside of the house.

On another note - our bricks got cleaned before Christmas. On the whole we were disappointed with the efforts of the brick cleaners (if they made any effort at all). It is obvious that the cleaning job has been a rushed one and that the pressure with which it has been done, has resulted in us now having a few cracked bricks, numerous chipped bricks and a fair amount of mortar blowout as well. We are in two minds about what to do because we don’t want to have bricks cut out here there and everywhere. We fear there will be an obvious difference between the existing bricks and the replacement bricks, should that be considered a solution. At the same time we are not happy with the current results and that the time was not taken in the first place to ensure a quality finish. Our brickies did a fabulous job on the brickwork of our place and it is so disappointing to see their efforts have been sadly undone. After spending many hours walking through McDonald Jones display homes it is clear that the quality of our brickwork does not match that of the display homes. We will keep you posted on this…