Roof is ON!

The roofers must have finished the work on Saturday and we have some pictures to show you. The roofing material is Colorbond corrugated metal, with the colour "Woodland Gray". Under the Australian sun, the council requires that we put in good insulation under the roof so that went on first, and then the colorbond material. They even installed our two colour-matched whirly birds (to let hot air out from the roof space under colorbond).

We are happy with the colour of our roof, it came out exactly as the colour swatches we got in the catalog so we are pleased with that.

Front of the house. Garage is hidden by that ugly tree.

Front view from an angle.

Back of the house. The big concrete is our future swimming pool. The roofers left the roof of the alfresco area undone, so we are assuming that they will come back after the weatherboard cladding goes on for our upstairs back wall.

Front door and porch area.

Roof progress

The workers were supposed to finish the roofing today, but because of the gail force wind that we have had today, they had to come back again tomorrow (which will be Saturday) to finish the job.

Roof is going up, FINALLY!

Workers are up on the roof today starting to put up the support wood frame for our roof to go on top of. Finally, there is something happening at the house site. It has been a very long wait.

Met with electrician on site #3

I was asked to come on site again to confirm the positioning and height of our front foyer wall lighting, and this time saw a lot of cables criss-crossing in wall and ceiling cavities throughout the house already. The frames for switchplates are installed on the wall, as well as frames for powerpoint faceplates, and I could almost visualise the inside of our new house and how we would place our furniture.

Frustrated about the delay

All we can say is that the house build has been delayed quite significantly by the builder and we are very very frustrated at this point in time. And that is the understatement of the month.

Currently the framework for the house is done, the roof frame is done, plumbing (gas, water, sewage) is in, electricians are working on roughing in the cables. We are waiting on the roof to come on, so that everything else can move forward. Apparently there have been some disputes between the roofing subcontractor and our builder, and the roofer is refusing to do any work for our builder. We are told that our builder is looking for a new roofing subcontractor to do the job. As far as we know, there are two other houses being built by our builder in our area that are also affected by this.

Mr Sasanqua has been in contact directly with the general manager of our builder, and been trying to push our build forward. The worst part of this whole fiasco is that the site supervisor and GM of the building company don't return calls or emails. Mr Sasanqua needs to call them and leave messages multiple times over many days to get any response at all. They must be trying to avoid us but this is not how things should be done. We are a paying customer, and prompt, accurate, and honest communication will solve and prevent a lot of our frustration and annoyance that we have been feeling. We need to know what is happening (or not happening), and we need to know why.

Mr Sasanqua has spoken to a solicitor (who happens to be his uncle) about the delay in our build but at this point (the contracted building construction period is not up yet) we have no leg to stand on if we consider taking any legal action. We do have in our contract an allocated monetary amount per day that we can claim when/if the build goes over the construction period stipulated in our contract, but the amount is hardly enough to cover our rent. We are now just kicking ourselves for not having negotiated harder on the amount.

Mr Sasanqua will also be contributing to the blog. Unfortunately we have lost a mobile phone that had all the photos that were taken of the house since February so we don't have any photos of concrete pouring to frame up stages.

Still waiting on roof installation*4 - 8 weeks!!!

Met with electrician on site #2

I met with a couple of workers for our electrician to go over finer details of the placements of switches, power points, data cables, etc.

Still waiting on roof installation*3 - 6 weeks!

Met electrician on site to go over electrical plan

We had an on-site meeting with the electrician who is subcontracting for our builder. They can also install light fixtures and connect up data cables after hand over from the builder (we didn't have that included in the contract with builder as they will charge a premium for that), so I have asked them to give us a quote on those bits that are not included in the contract with our builder. If the same electrician can do the wiring and the connection/fitting of lighting and data cables it would save us the hassle of hiring and explaining things twice. 

We have decided to go with LED down lights all throughout the house. The initial cost will be more than with regular down lights but we had to have our front foyer down lights in energy efficient light fitting for BASIX compliance anyway, so we thought we might as well go the whole hog and have LED down lights throughout the house. The light cast by LED and regular down lights are different visually, so we didn't want part of the house to have different look to the other parts. 

We will also have fairly extensive data cable network throughout the house for TV, Foxtel, video/audio files stored on NAS devices, as well as phone and internet which will all be connected up to a Hub that we will place under the staircase in the centre of the house. To that end we have four data cables each going into our lounge room, kids' playroom, home theatre, and master bedroom. The minor bedrooms (kids' and guests') will have two Cat6 data cables going in to each room. We are planning to have a video feed coming from the security camera placed at the front of the house to go through the hub and be accessible to each room (just so we can see who is out at the front of the house without having us actually walk up to the front window).

Click to view larger image of electrical plan.

Still waiting on colorbond roof installation*2

Still waiting on colorbond roof installation

Brickwork appears to be finally completed

Wall and roof frame up

Home slab in

Excavation and piering completed

Excavation for house still going

It's also been affected by all the rain we have been getting, in this "rainiest summer in 50 years".

Rock excavation

After the long Christmas and New Years break, the excavator machine came in and started to dig quite a bit of sandstone out of the ground to match the pitch and slope of the site to the house design. As the main part of our old house was build right on top of sandstone foundation, the rock excavation is expected to take a good few days even with the huge driller, digger, and huge circular saw.

Rock excavation cost is separate to our build tender, but it was within our expectation so there was not too much of a big surprise.

The huge circular saw to cut through the rocks (round thing at top of photo).

Concrete pool shell completed

Our pool people built framework out of wood panels and some sort of foam to pour the concrete into. After the concrete was poured they took the frame away so now we have grey, rectangle hole with some edging around it plus a vertical section at the far side for the waterfall feature wall. Mr Sasanqua had to go to the site everyday for the first 10 days to water the concrete so that it won't dry too quickly and crack.

Pool excavation done and formwork started

Swimming pool excavation is done, and we had to hire fencing to secure the pool site (it's a requirement). It's about $80 per month for hire, and we need to have this in place until we finish our pool and install our frameless glass fence. 

Pool Excavation

A digger for our pool came in to dig the huge hole in the ground.
We have hired a separate pool company to do our pool, and they are project managed by our landscape people. Doing the pool at the same time as our new house is stretching our budget a bit, but we rationalised that if we don't do the pool now and leave it after the house is built, there will be quite a bit of extra cost associated with the difficult access to the pool site in the future. If we really can't stretch our budget to have our dream luxury pool finished by the time our house is done, we will just leave the hole in the ground as it is and work on it later as our finances allow.

Anyway, we have a huge hole in our back yard!