Day 34 - Wow

I continue to be amazed at the speed the bricks are laid. I think probably about a third of the house is done now. Some of the walls are up to full height, we now have bedroom 4 complete, bedroom 3 half done, games room done, ensuite half done and walk in robes started. They aren't all up to full height, but high enough to feel like a room.
The slab has been cleanly separated now and has lots of re-inforcement bars in place, I imagine it will be poured tomorrow.
Ash suggested that one of the reasons it's going up so quickly is because RedInk don't get any money from us until the walls are done(Plate height). That sounds like a reasonable assumption to me and not one that I hold against RedInk, I'd do the same thing.
Anyway, onto the pictures...


The sun is in a rather unfortunate position at 5.15pm in regards to taking photos of the front of our house, I've adjusted it so you can actually see something, but the colours are a bit funny. As you can see, we have bricks all the way up and over the window, not to mention a front door frame!


You can see the edge of the concrete is nice and clean now with some nice thick reinforcement bars stuck in it to hold onto the new part of the slab.


This is taken from the master bedroom at the front of the house looking at our ensuite and walk in robes.


This is standing in the lounge room looking into the games room, sized to fit our pool table with optimum space for pool cue movement(I hope).


This is from the back yard looking at bedrooms 3 and 4, you can see the internal wall between bed4 and the games room goes all the way up, I'm not sure what the 4 courses of single course bricks are for, but our friends Mark and Rachael's house has the same thing, I'll have to look into it.


Our meter box! I don't know why that's exciting, but for some reason it is.


That's it for today, at this rate the bricks will be finished before the end of next week so I'll probably have an update just about every day due to things changing so rapidly. Stay tuned!

Day 33 - Fast

They really don't muck around once they get going. We drove past the block yesterday and saw they were working, went down this afternoon to see the progress and were quite impressed. They've done about half of the external walls, about half of the internal bricks for those walls and even started on one of the internal walls itself. Not to mention that the damaged corner has been removed now save for a few remnants. Here are some pics with a bit further detail:


They've placed some scaffolding around the front corner of the house, I assume in preparation for laying the bricks above head height. Also, you can't really tell in this photo too easily, but the big pile of dirt out the front is gone.


You can see here that they've now done the whole back wall and half of the right hand side one up to head height.


The internal bricks are done on this side, and you can just see the strapping coming up over the top in between the two layers of bricks. This strapping will be tied to the roof to help keep it on :)


Our first internal wall! This is our ensuite and toilet.


It's true what they say about everything looking bigger once the walls go up. We're really getting an idea of the size of our back yard, it seemed a bit small before, but it seems quite reasonable now there are walls. The boundary of our block is where the limestone wall on the far side steps up.


This is the right hand side of the house from the rear. Once the slab went down we thought there would be room for a thin path and a narrow strip of garden, but it's quite a spacious passage now.


We saw a bobcat at the block on Saturday and judging by the track marks I'd say it was used to lift and remove the section of the slab that is now missing.


And here is the missing section, up side down. I suppose this is going to be the rubbish pile now.


We also went for a walk down to the lake. The grass is starting to fill in and it's starting to look quite nice.

That's it for today, I've updated the picture in the side bar, don't forget you can click it for a larger version. I won't be surprised if the new part of the slab is poured tomorrow so we should have another update then.