Windows

Well it was a busy week. My building supervisor is starting to annoy me already. I'm not going to say who my builder is until we've actually finished, but I will say that the company name rhymes with Conehead and they are a major South Australian builder that is affiliated with chapters in each state (each with a different name).

We are having double-glazed windows. These are surprisingly rare in Australia and thus really expensive. Ours are uPVC from Certainteed, costing about A$16k. We also looked at CozyHome, but their pricing policy seems to be geared towards architects (who presumably want to specify the style and size but don't care how much it costs) rather than a consumer, who wants to be able to determine what is the best value. Anyway, the builder preferred that I arrange the windows which means they get to have nothing more to do with them. I took Thursday off to help the truck driver unload the windows (they came from Melbourne) because my supervisor assured me that nobody else would be at the site, because the frame would be completed on Wednesday.

As it happened the carpenters were there all day Thursday and Friday. I guess it wasn't as close to finished as the supervisor had thought. It turns out it was probably just as well the carpenters were still there as it looks like they made some last minute adjustments to the window openings to accommodate the actual windows. Note the packing on the bottom and right -- that wasn't there yesterday! This is ironic as the window people went to a lot of effort to make sure the builder understood what size openings were required. Luckily the carpenters worked fast enough to allow the windows to be installed on Friday as I arranged -- on the supervisor's instructions!

However, since the carpenters were running behind I wasn't able to check all the door and window openings before the windows were installed, so this happened (see right). There are two things wrong with this picture.

1. The fixed window is sitting on the wall plate not the floor so is not at the same height as the sliding doors.
2. There is a (unnecessary) post between the fixed window and the sliding doors. In fact two post because there's another fixed window on the other side.

The post is unnecessary since the huge lintel you can see spans all the way across the entire opening (including the fixed windows). So hopefully the carpenters can rearrange this on Monday (oh yes, they're still not quite finished), putting the fixed windows at ground level and right next to the sliding doors, with the posts on the edges of the opening.

...

It's funny how you take a day off to do one thing and end up doing something else. I planned to do network cabley sort of stuff for the rest of the day on Thursday, but since there was a gang of carpenters shooting nail guns on the roof I thought it best not to. The window bloke suggested I might want to paint the window frames, since these will be sitting in the weather from now until the roof goes on. So that explains why at 7:30 pm I was in the dark wearing a head-torch, painting a part of a window frame that nobody would ever see once the house was finished. At the time I thought, "This is something my mother would do.. and very few others."