Whenever I falllll...at your soffit...You let your tears rain down on meeeee.

Popped up to the build to drop off our shower shelves for the tiler to recess into the walls.  Kerrin and Joe were nailing up the soffits.  I never appreciated soffits on houses before till now and I think they are marvelous!  The plumber has put all the pipes and gas lines in and the electrical wires have all been run throughout.  We will meet with Nathan the sparky on Wednesday to ensure all the data, phone and plugs etc are all in the right spots.  We are also seeing the guy who is wiring the alarm so that will be sorted too.

So Wednesday will be a busy day with Windows and doors being installed too!  So excited as we have a good excuse to be up there for a good chunk of the day!  I have to make our "popping up" and "dropped by" up there casual like it was like making a coffee or putting the washing on.  As we are always "dropping by"  we have to make it sound like breathing and not stalking our house....

Here comes the rain again

Yesterday just took the cake as far as weather went.  Rain is an understatement as the wind, rain and darkness all day was just such a contrast to the last 5 days weather - hot, sunny and gorgeous.  Today is not as heavy but still raining.

Wednesday we met with the Electrician who is incidentally called Nathan too.  Really nice guy and helpful with getting our lighting and all the other cables sorted on a shoestring budget.  Not sure what it will be called when we go over it Boot lace?  Corset ribbon?  Well anyhoo he will help Nath (my one) to get the speaker wires in the right place.  We are going over our original lighting plan we were going with but it is better to go a few more than not enough.  Easily done though as we don't know it all as far as the general rule of thumb with how much we need and best location etc.

After we dropped the girls off yesterday we went up again for a meeting with Joe to go over points of the build I had emailed him just so we can find out the quote costs for all the over spend bits and pieces.  Just so we can keep a running tally of what will cost what and then cut off any fat if we need to.  Although we are as I said in another post just going to get the necessary lights and get nice rice paper shades till we can afford better ones and to be honest the ones out there at the moment are not that great.  Then we will curtain the bedrooms and the lounge and will wait we are in the house to decide if we need the additional curtains for either privacy or thermal properties.  Better to get the bones of the house right then dress make the house later.

Nath had assured me I would not need my gumboots up at the site because we would be under our nice roof which will be fabulous and dry.  Unfortunately when the rain buddies up with the wind it drove the rain through every bit of floor and we had massive puddles on our slab.  Joe went out and bought tarps to cover the lounge window and front door areas which stopped anymore getting in and will get plywood to partition off the garage door so it will be better protected from all this darned rain.

So other than the Plumber finishing off the gas and water plumbing and the Sparky starting the wiring not much has happened.  We have decided on the new Riviera grey brick from Midland Bricks and as it is one that has a black speckle in it and isn't classed as A grade we will save 12c a brick.  Which equates to the same price as the Nougat slurry brick from Austral.  So we are quite happy with that.

The next step is the soffit linings to go up and then next week on Wednesday the windows and doors go in!!! Exciting!!!  The bricks will arrive on Friday for the bricklayers to start on the following Monday.   We asked Joe to get him to do a small display of natural mortar and one with darker mortar too as that will suit the brick better too.

When we have some kind of change to how the house looks I will add more photos as pics of pipes ain't that riveting.

New brickie piccie

This is the Midland Brick - Riviera Grey to compare to the Austral Brick - Nougat which I posted a pic in one of my first posts on this blog.  It is a smoother finish and slight roughing of the edges which is intentional and it is colour consistent throughout the brick.  It may be a slurry faced brick but it looks like a true brick to us.  We have seen it on 3 houses today and thankfully one of those is one street over from our house so that will be a convenient place to check and obsess on our new brick choice.  It does look brownish grey in real life but look good on all 3 homes.  What do we think folks?

All and all you're just another brick in the wall

Well yet again up to visit the house to get a few of the plumbers questions answered and change where our mixer for the bath was going.  We had initially had it on the back wall and after I looked at the specs of the bath and the plinth around the bath we would have been trying to lean 1050mm over the bath to turn the tap on!  So it has now been placed on the wall at one end on the bath. 

In regards to the title of this post.  We may be changing our brick we are using on the house.  Slightly annoyed is the most PC term I can use on this blog as the Austral Nougat in a single height we had decided on may have to change.  The Austral depot here in Tauranga had known of us using the brick on our house months ago and when our builder got them to confirm the number of bricks 3 weeks ago he was assured they had enough bricks for our build. 

Then at the 11th hour Joe got an email to explain that although the depot has enough of our selected brick they were from different batches and that there is a colour difference between them but they deemed it acceptable as bricks in the same batch will vary somewhat too.  I am again annoyed to learn this today as I had investigated the bricks with them and was told to come down to view what they had in stock closer to the time when the house is underway.  We did that a few weeks ago and asked to see what they had in stock and the guy there diddled around and tried to give us a sample pack of 3 bricks and we got bored standing around waiting for the boss to get off the phone to speak about the bricks and the mortar.  The other guy almost ignored our request to be shown the bricks and couldn't offer us a solution to doing a mortar colour check to see which one we wanted to go with. Which is why he said to wait for the boss to get off the phone.  It felt like he didn't want us to look at the bricks as we now know he would have has to tell us they were separate batches.

Anyhoo Joe rang his usual brick supplier and he was up at the site in 5 minutes to offer his help and shot back to the depot and got 2 other types of his product for us to view.  We will see what it is like in the daylight but I am happy with one of the samples he has dropped off.  So all wasn't a utter train smash and I was surprisingly unfazed by it all especially as it is the most major material choice to be made on the house.  So depending on things we may tell Austral to insert rectangular clay objects in their posterior to be not so PC and also G rated about it.

Non e non zig roof battons

Now that is just a disgusting use of an old 80's hit with the blatant misspelling of what German I did use...Nath will be rolling eyes and tutting as he was a little army brat that spent a few years in Germany.  Anyhoooo....

Roof is all but done the boys will be back to do the pointing as I think they are letting things dry out first.  The aluminium battons are up in the ceiling ready for the gib board now and today we went up and met the Plumber and he went through all the bits and pieces of piping we are having and have that all sorted.  Now he and the young fulla with him should have done some of the pipe work for the plumbing and gas.
We were a little surprised that we never knew until now that a conventional BBQ that usually runs off a gas bottle LPG cannot be screwed into the gas taps we are having plumbed to the outside of the patio area.  Something we had never come across although we thought we were a bit thick thinking we were just gonna chuck the BBQ line into the natural gas tap.  With a conversion kit we should be fine he said so as long as it doesn't cost a small fortune we will go get one ready for Summer! 

Have a few pics of roof again and it will need a good wash as all the footprints and concrete dust makes it look all murky black/grey colour.  I won't be wishing for rain to clean it though...not just yet anyway.  The guttering is nearly finished too but we left before Joe got up there today so who knows what else got done.

I swear it is soooo hard to keep away from the site as it is fascinating to see how it all goes in and how much each stage changes the perception of how big things are and how they give a closer impression to how things will look.  Hope Joe doesn't think we are up there for spot inspections and doesn't get too annoyed but hey it is our house and we feel like it is like our baby and love to watch it grow up.

Roof is nearly done!!!

We went up this morning as previously said to find not one but two teams of roofers in production line mode taking tiles off the pallets and loading them on the conveyer machine placing each small pile to be whizzed up to the roof.  Once the tiles got up to the top, the bloke taking them off was chucking each pile of tile down the roof line to the next guy and then the next guy etc till all the tiles were neatly stacked on top.  Was rather fascinating to watch I must say!

Lucky we did decide to go up as we were wondering if they were gonna lay the tiles staggered  as per the brochure or on top of each other or so the joins and crease in the center of the each tile formed straight lines from the top of the roof to the gutter.  Although they had laid a small section at the back straight they did another section of roof staggered so we could decide how we wanted them to look.  The big boss of the Company came up to help deliberate as it is a new profile on the NZ market and we are the first in the Bay to build with it.  He assured us it was fine to lay it either way but he preferred the straight look as did I.  We ended up going getting them to lay them straight after much deliberation and I am glad we did.  The section of staggered look very busy and almost was trying to look like it was trying to look like all the crap metal tile profiles on the market.  No offense to metal tile owners as we were going to go that way ourselves but we are in a high wind zone and were told it would be too noisy and as they are metal over time they will corrode and look a bit poo and would be hard to care for maintenance wise.

Well once we let the boss know how the boys were to lay the roof we went away and got on with the day.  While Miss 2 was asleep, our big 4 year old and I set out  to order the curtains for their new bedrooms.  Nice plain Dusky pink ones which were a deleted line and I got them to reduce them down a further 50%!  Love to do that as they didn't have the shorter ones I wanted and the floor length ones were $40 more but I got 2 sets of drapes for the price of one...good stuff!

I'll pop a few pictures of the unfinished roof on as I was on orders to go take pics on the way back then collect dinner on the way home.  The light was fading so it is hard to see the full detail of the tiles but they look fantastic.  The weather is absolutely atrocious tonight and although they predict no rain and less S/W gales tomorrow I can't see it being anything but another shocking day out there.

Battens up, paper on and 1 row laid.

We are keeping up the obsessive possessive behaviour and went up to the section yesterday....twice.  We popped up on the way to Placemakers ...ok ok I know it is in the complete opposite direction but we were technically out driving somewhere. 

The roofers were on smoko or lunch or whatever.  The paper was all on with the battens fixed.  As one of the blokes got out a sandwich press and plugged it into the mains power on the street I am guessing they were in for a fine feast so took my photos and we left.

Have chosen the interior handles which were in the same range as the ones Joe had in his spec but are more stylish and in the same shaping as our taps we have picked.  So we have the Schlage Regent range and have chosen the Leonardo lever handle.  Also grabbed a few samples of curtains for the girls room and some for possible lounge ones too.  Will buy the girls bedroom ones as they are simple dusty rose thermal ready mades that look nice and won't age as they grow.  Will try to put them on hold till I can reconfirm the window sizes.

We left and headed home via the section again...yes yes we know we have a problem and it was initially Nath's idea but I made him feel better by joining in the OCD and reminding him to go up again to see how far they got with the roof.  Well obviously they were delighted with the 1 row of tiles laid around the whole house and decided they had better go celebrate.  So despite the sun shining they had packed up and gone by 3pm!  With the rubbish weather I thought they would be going all speedy Gonzales to get it done.  Now it is about 9am Tuesday and Nath has just surfaced from bed saying "are we sure they are going to lay the next row of tiles right.... maybe we should pop up to check again"....psycho !!!!

Kitchen Layout

To give you some idea of how the kitchen will look here are the plan elevations and 3D views.
Clear as mud??!!