Everthing getting better day by day!

We now have a garage door on!  It finishes off the front nicely and we are glad we went for the Dominator Milano in Black wood-grain.  We were thinking of going all fancy pants and getting the smooth finish Milano but they show every single imperfection and that just looks tragic on a brand spanking door.  It would have matched our aluminum front door but as it is still the same horizontal lines and black it looks great anyway.  The plasterers are going good guns and Joe is getting the architraves and skirting ready for when they are done.  The bobcat will be in this week to spread the dirt out and get ready for concreting the back.  Poor Nath succumbed to the virus and went down like a ton of turds about 5 days ago and after all he did to look after me and the girls...that is gratitude for you hahaha.  He is on the mend so will be lucky enough to get back to work soon oh yay!

I met the tiler John today and hopefully will get on his good side to ensure a good tiling job.  One wrong word said could mean crooked tiles or sloppy grout.  So here are a few more pics of the outside and stuff from yesterdays pics.

Dreadfully dreadful

We had to.... according to Nath go up to the house and ummm....it took him a while to think of a plausible excuse but he finally said he wanted to spray all the weeds that are pretending to be grass.  As there was such horrendous weather yesterday and the sky look quite clear we packed the car full of food, toys and sick kids and sick me.  So while Nath got his gear on to Roundup all the mound of dirt and green areas the girls and I stayed inside. Just as I was just on the way out to get a better car to roll on the floor I heard "Maaarrrmmmmm!!!"  Our big girl had stuck her fingers in the freshly gib stopped door frame, and leaned in it too.  I had to go tell the guys what happened and she felt stink and I did too.  So we ended up heading out of the house so the boys would have no more cock ups to fix.  We went for a drive and the girls just around the Lakes and found another swing set to play on for 1/2 hour while Dad finished spraying.  Well as it hit the 1/2 hour mark it started to drizzle.  Off to pick Dad up and then off home.  As we pulled up at home it really chucked it down with rain so it may have been a complete waste of time with the weed killing spree...but hopefully it may have started to do something before the downpour.  Joe will be spreading some of the big pile of dirt next week around the outside of the house and also getting some fine gravel to start to lay a base for the paths and patio areas...cool.  We will be up to spray yet again so the grass seed going down at the end won't be a complete waste of time.

Lined up

Crikey I am so impressed with the house!!  The house is totally gibbed and it looks amazing.  I'm not one for using all that texting abbreviations.  But OMG it is fantastic to see the house looking like a house inside.  Even the guys doing the gib and our builder said usually the house appears smaller once the gib goes up, but our house actually looks bigger!   Well I am too hopped up on painkillers to type any sense so I'll just add in the photos for you all to have a look.

Digging in the dirt.

For the first time I missed out on a visit to the build.  I am too sick to make it out of the house so Nath took the girls up to check out the progress.  The bulk of the gib has been put up and they have dug all the trenches for the drains.  We are totally loving how everything is turning out and Joe is really loving lots of stuff we did for the design of the build too.   We are going to be terribly lost when the painter goes in to paint as he won't let anyone in for the 4 weeks Joe allows to prevent any dust shooting in and ruining the paint job.  And if the neighbours house is anything to go by we won't even be able to look in the windows as the windows will be masked out and blocked out.  That will be an interesting time to try and contain ourselves.  These are some pics from over the weekend and the ones of the drains being dug from today.  Nothing riveting but it is all exciting to us.

ohhhh sooo cooozzzyyyy!

A few pics of the inside of the house as it is getting insulated and the next day the gibbing on the ceiling.  Last look of seeing through walls before the interior walls so on....sad but nice.

All bricked up!!

The house is officially had all bricks laid!!  They finished off the last column yesterday morning and all the other odd bricks for the sills.  The wool insulation for the ceiling and walls is in and they started to gib up too!  It is looking and feeling very cosy and warm inside now.  The kitchen is being installation date has been moved again to the 5th of July.  But now other than subbies not doing things in time we will be now on track as all major works are inside and protected from the elements.

The columns out the back under the portico remained the same.  As the brick laying boss was just so unhelpful and didn't explain options at all he failed to say that the columns as they are were the only option unless we dug the footings out again and redid them which incurs a amendment to the permit which means more money and holdups with the permit going back to council.  Plus it would require the engineer to redo the equations which is again wasted money and time.  At the end of the day we would have not achieved a thinner longer column as for the bond of the bricks we had to have them 2 wide because of the bricks being 70's series.  The columns I had seen were 90's series brick on an aussie blog were 1 1/2 wide. 

They do look loads better now they are up and finished.  It did annoy me that they just went in and did it without asking the suckers who are paying for it!  Once it had been explained by Joe and a calmer brickie I was happier to just suck it up and let them finish the job.

Well without ado here are the finished bricks...albeit the mortar and bricks are still wet in places and look patchy and need to have a wash down in a few weeks.  Ohhh and check out the down pipes going in!

Can't read my ...can't read my...no you can't read my poker face! NOT!

"Mummy are you sad?"  Is what our girls said to me when we got home today from our visit to the build....  more like annoyed and freaking out!!!  I hide it well most of the time but today was too hard to disguise.

The bricks look great, except in one area...the columns!  It is not the bricks but the dimensions of the columns.  As per last weeks conversation with Joe about them we wanted to ensure they were very rectangular and not a slightly squashed square.  He told us that they will be laid last so we can look at it later to see the dimensions.  But with the weather closing in on Thursday afternoon they must have decided to do the columns rather than start the end of the house as it is more protected from the elements and would be better to get that done in a oneer next week.  This is a guess as to what happened as I am thinking like a builder now.  Pity the builder didn't think like me before he gave the go ahead with the column dimensions....uuuuuuurrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

The columns I wanted would be a 1 1/2 wide by 3 /12 deep brick so to elongate the columns and make them sleeker and not fat and square.  They have done over half of one column in a 2 x 3 brick column which to me looks wrong...very wrong.....so very wrong I have a headache and my heart is pounding and I am being driven crazy with the way they look.  I hope like hell they can do it how I want it or man will this Mummy be very unhappy indeed.  It is ruling my entire day and that tells me I can't compromise and just leave them as they are.  Infact to even type "leave them as they are" sends my stomach into upheaval and my eye starts twitching.

The bricks on the house so far looks really good and is till drying as we have had some wicked rain over the last 2 days!  The neighbour had his subbies doing work on Friday and it was chucking down and the whole area was a muddy, boggy swimming pool.  Unfortunately one of his guys had his van up the drive and as they had laid the drains all the way down the length of the drive earlier on that week the part of the drive that was filled in sunk a foot or two and so did the van while trying to back out of the drive.  Nathan went up early hours this morning and the van was firmly entrenched in the ....um trench!

Check out pics of the completed brickwork and one of the muddy hole from whence the van was removed.