Rounding the last bend

It does feel as if we're getting really close to the finish line now! The heat is on because this weekend we've got a lot of people coming to see us AND my parents-in-law are due to stay with us (in the big house) for a week. Anyway, Warren's pulled out all the stops and in the last week we've had the Satler Brothers painting the interior like mad, the electricians putting in the ceiling lights and fans and power points, the bathroom people plumbing in the toilets and showers and basins, the kitchen people starting to put in the pantry units, and the fireplace has been started. I have hopes that by close of play tomorrow we'll have lighting, water, functional bathrooms and half a kitchen and - possibly - a useable firebox albeit without an actual wall around it. You'll see what I mean eventually when I can show you some photos but today it was a bit featureless and covered in tarp, so to keep you amused I can instead show you the following photos:





















This is the main living area, painted and with the ceiling lights and fans in place. Some of the windows are still covered in thin plastic sheeting ready for the paint sprayer





















A first look at the pantry! The photo is looking towards the cool room (where you can see the sections of the triple-skin flue waiting for the firebox to be assembled). The black stone benchtops aren't in yet, obviously, but the large sink and the dishwasher will be under the window to the left, while all the appliances will be out on the benchtop above the banks of drawers to the right





















The floor-to-ceiling cupboards on the left are larder cupboards - for food storage





















They have pull-out drawers so no more reaching to the back of the shelves!





















This is a view into the family bathroom, still shrouded in plastic but today the corner shower went in, and it looks really nice






















Two views of our en-suite bathroom from the master bedroom. At last we get to see what the vanity unit looks like: rather than purchasing a complete unit we bought a solid wooden sideboard, designed for a dining room, and put two basins on the top - and I think it works well. Even the plumbers thought it looks good!

ding dong merrily on high

We're getting there!
















We went up to the block yesterday to get a run-through of the solar electricity system, which is now connected and fully functional! AND... Michael signed off on the Biolytix sewage system as well. Apparently we have to "innoculate" the system for a couple of weeks before the installers come back with the worms and microbes, which is a posh way of saying that we need to use the toilet properly for a while to give them some food! Darling daughter had the honour of being the first innoculator (although I don't suppose in years to come she'll thank me for announcing that!). I had a moment of panic when there didn't seem to be any water in the toilet, but of course it was the first time it had been used and water had to travel along the pipes from the tank. Phew.

The above photo is of what will be my studio, complete with dearest husband standing in front of the new sink unit (very nice). My printing bench will be next to it shortly, serving as a temporary storage/food prep area until we move into the main house.






















Now that we have a working solar system we also have ceiling fans and lights! The recessed lights are 21W LED lights that look a lot like halogen down lights but aren't... much more energy efficient and 'green', and 3 times the price, but never mind. Because of the relatively high ceilings we're not expecting them to light up the place in a dazzling sort of way, and in any case we prefer task-oriented lighting so I have 2 vertical fluorescent tubes above my printing bench and plenty of plugs for lamps, which I will have to convert to using LED bulbs.





















This shows the small bathroom in its glory. We've chosen amazingly cheap dark grey floor tiles and flat white matte wall tiles. The vanity unit was cheap(ish) but smart (drawer unit is on the floor in the front of the first photo), and the fittings were on sale, as were all the ceiling fans! The ceiling fans are all reversible so that we can draw down warm air from the ceilings in the winter, and they were reduced in price by over $100 so we bought all 10 that we need for the house, thereby saving ourselves over a $1,000 dollars!

The savings in the ceiling fans and the floor tiles will - hopefully - accommodate the extra we're going to be spending in some other areas such as wine storage. We went up the other day to meet someone about the cool room, and he turned out to be a brilliant source of pragmatic advice and creative ideas. Now we don't need a huge cool room and were planning to place it diagonally in a square space so that we could fill the rest with wine storage, but our friendly refrigeration specialist (I'll call him Martin but I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember his name. Oops!) suggested making the cool room square, to fill the space, because it will reduce costs and maximise materials by avoiding cutting into the standard-sized sheets of wall/insulation that they use. However, he's shown us a way of using one side of the cool room as a partitioned wine cellar and - here's the fun part! - cutting access into the front of it i.e. from the dining room side of the wall, with snazzy glass doors so that it looks like a swanky commercial wine storage display. Wow! What a great idea, and I could see darling husband's eyes light up at the thought. Additionally, darling husband came up with the equally jazzy idea of using a coiled copper pipe running vertically through the cool room from the exterior water tanks to cool the water on the way through and dispensing it via a dedicated 'drinking water tap' on the pantry side of the wall, above the sink, and thus making great use of the available refrigeration to get cool drinking water and obviating the need for a fancy zip tap.

The only downer is that the kitchen people who gingerly made their way up the muddy track (we'd had a LOT of rain again) to the house still can't see what I'm getting at about the central kitchen storage/island units and so I still don't have anyone lined up to build them, and that could be a bit of a problem.

Plaster of Progress

MORE progress... We went up there on Sunday morning, once I'd collected dearest husband from the airport, and to our astonishment we found two utes up there, with one person fixing cladding panels on the rear wall of the office/studio where we'd had to move a window, and another inside doing the waterproof membrane in the bathroom! Talk about dedication to the cause; fantastic!

























Inside the office/studio the walls have now been plastered. I think the different colours indicate joins between panels and the location of the P50 (?) shadow moulding around the doors and windows. I don't like architraves or cornicing (except in historic buildings) which is why we're having the P50 moulding instead around the doors and windows and a "square set" finish around the tops of the walls. In here we're also having a skirting board as a sort of test run because I hate the damned things... the problem is a) it's cheaper to have a skirting board because it means that the plastering around the bottom of each wall doesn't have to be so accurate and b) a skirting board protects a potentially delicate lower edge to the wall from things like over-enthusiastic vacuuming. I don't care as much about the office/studio as I will care about the interior of the main house so we're trying it out, with the proviso that if I really object to it, we could instead put a piece of hardwood around the bottom of the walls with a P50 shadow moulding above it, which would mean a flush finish and a shadow line but no protruding skirting board. Why not do this in the office/studio? Because it costs a lot more!





















The main house now has a roof which changes how it feels standing inside at the moment. You get a real sense of the internal dimensions of the rooms now, and it's just great. In the photo you can see the stacks of foam that will form the rear walls of the house: it's self-insulated, if you see what I mean, and so thermally efficient and reasonably priced. The foam pieces are glued together and then covered with a special external render (and we haven't chosen the colour yet). Against the frame you can just see the windows which have also arrived. While the main effort is definitely in getting the office/studio finished there is also a push to get the exterior of the house finished before Christmas. None of the internal partitioning or plastering will be done, but hopefully the walls, cladding, windows and front door will go in so that it is at 'lock up' stage by Christmas.

One of the advantages of working like this is that we'll be able to trial some things in the office/studio before committing ourselves in the main house. For example we have just chosen some floor and wall tiles for the office/studio bathroom, as well as the tapware and bathroom fittings. If we like them we'll use them throughout the main house as well. I'm also about to choose the paint colour for my studio and we'll have the chance to live with it and see it in different lights before using it anywhere else.

What else? Well finally, after doing a lot of jumping up and down last week, it seems as if we are making some progress with the mortgage. Put it this way, mentioning the word ombudsman seems to have had an effect! Suddenly we have letters and extra forms to be filled in and promises of immediate action. Fingers crossed that money could appear in people's bank accounts by the end of this week... meanwhile we've stumped up some more of our own cash to get things going with the sewerage people, and the first actual solar panels have gone up on the roof of the shed. It's very exciting!

Friday 13th November - progress report!

I always consider a Friday 13th date to be good luck instead of bad luck, as my divorce was finalised on a Friday 13th! Anyway, dearest husband and I went up to the block on Friday, before his departure for LA yesterday lunchtime, to see what was what and we were very impressed.

The panorama isn't done with fancy software but I think it gives an idea of how the house is going to sit in the landscape, which is the part of the building process I find difficult to imagine without the reality sitting in front of me. What you can't see (because I didn't take any photos this time) is how the studio blends in with its surroundings from a distance, which makes me feel good about how the house isn't going to stand out horribly either. Yes, it will be shiny and new, but it won't be brutal, and in fact you won't be able to see much of it until you're on the driveway. I like that.






















The roof trusses are obviously on, and this makes the overhangs apparent now. We don't need a huge overhang because the sun won't be shining directly into the windows, but it will give us a bit of protection against the rain. There are long slim louvered windows that sit high under the eaves and they'll stay open in a storm without the rain coming in (unless we have horizontal rain, which isn't unheard of around here... in which case I'll be closing them up tight!).






















M's data cabling is in...


















And while we were there the plasterers were just beginning to board up the insides ready to start plastering! We've been down to Bunnings to get paint charts and now need to make up our minds what the insides are going to look like. While we were at it, we also chose floor and wall tiles for the studio's bathroom. In some ways I think the studio is going to be a case study for the main house: we'll get a chance to view our choices in real rooms with the light shifting during the day. I wonder if we'll change our minds for the main house? If we like the bathroom tiles we've selected we'd like to use them throughout... I guess we'll wait and see.