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…