Our New House Build

OMG, WTF?

2008-12-15T20:59:00.006+10:30

Did I mention we're building a pool? Oh, well I have been a bit slack. Perhaps more accurately, everything's been going really well up until now. Well, not any more. First the fence people came and put a fence post in the middle of five pipes to the pool. It's absolutely amazing that they had to cut all five of them. By far the easiest thing for everybody involved would have been for them to dig away beside the pipes a little and push the post in between. But that would have taken them a little bit of effort, so instead they cut through them all.

Today the plumber came and reconnected the pipes. And this is how he did it.

That's an electrical conduit going through the middle. I'm surprised they didn't have to cut it too. I suppose they were afraid of it. Notice in particular that two of the pipes now sit above the level that the pavers will go to. And this is right where the gate is. Anyway, the plumber is coming back tomorrow to try again.

Stormwater Engineering

2008-12-14T21:06:00.003+10:30

Ok, blog-watchers (I know you're out there), I have an engineering problem for you. In the picture is a 90 mm stormwater diverting switch. It is basically a T-junction with a rotating baffle which can completely (or partially) block off one of the attached pipes. I have it set up so that it can block off the outlet to the street, forcing all of the stormwater to go into my water tanks. When the tanks are full all of the rain that is collected must go through the tanks and out the overflow, from whence it goes into a soak under the back lawn. This actually works, by the way. There is now a clearly visible snake pattern of longer, lusher grass, following the ag pipe exactly.

Anyway, the switch is definitely not working. It might work if you only put nice clean rain water through it, but when it encounters slightly dirty rain water it seizes up like a rusty trap. I can get it to shift around by tapping the top sideways gently with a hammer, but this damages the PVC and is clearly not going to work for long.

So, the engineering problem is this: how can I attach something to this device to get the additional leverage I need, without breaking the lid, which is only about 2 mm thick? And preferably with a removeable handle, because this diverter is sitting in the ground and would normally be about 50 mm below a cover.

See what you can come up with, blogsters.

Q. How many electricians does it take to change a meterbox?

2008-08-15T21:50:00.004+09:30

Hmm, August now. Since my last post it has actually rained quite a bit. Tanks are full (and overflowing in the wrong places), but it hasn't been raining so much that my soak is insufficient. In other words, I still haven't had to discharge any stormwater to the street!

But, to get back to the point of today's topic, I have a bit to say to bring you up to date with the state of my underfloor heating. Disclaimer: this may sound like a lot of complaining, but as I've said several times I think the main point of my blog is to remind myself (and anyone else contemplating building) about all the bad things that happened. So just sit back and enjoy the fact that it hasn't happened to you.

One of the requirements for the underfloor heating is to have 3-phase, off-peak power. I conveyed this information to my builder early on, or rather I tried to convey it, but through a series of unfortunate incidents they did not get the message that I needed a larger meterbox (because it needs to hold 3 meters and a lot more circuit breakers) before the brickwork was complete. And they did not manage to tell the electrician that it needed to be upgraded before the electricity was connected.

So a couple of months ago the electrician finally turned up to try to fit a bigger meterbox. To say that this was a debacle is an understatement. Prior to this there had been several false starts. He had first scheduled this event to occur a month or so prior, but by the time it came around he had forgotten about it! So ETSA turned up to change over the meters and there was no electrician. He rescheduled a few weeks later and this time ETSA failed to turn up. Or so it seemed. Actually, ETSA had changed their procedure in the intervening time so that they now expected the electrician to disconnect power from the site at the pole and they would come by to fit the new meter and reconnect the power. But the electrician didn't know this so at first he thought it was another false start.

But eventually the power went off (8:30 am) and he got going -- I believe he actually disconnected everything in the old box before he realised that, while the new box was taller and would accommodate 3 meters, it would not accommodate any more breakers. In addition, as this board had the breakers at the bottom instead of the top like the old one, it would mean extending the wires for all of the circuits in order to reach the new breaker positions. After some discussions with the electrician for the underfloor heating he decided that with a bit of jiggery-pokery they could probably fit the additional breakers into the original board! So he put it all back together (12 pm) and left it up to ETSA to come and supply the new meters and reconnect the power.

After much hand-wringing on my part, ETSA eventually came back (5:30 pm). But they pointed out that there was no room to fit any more meters, and they do not have a single meter that supplies three phases of off-peak power. In addition, when trying to reconnect the power ETSA's electrician discovered that the other electrician had broken the fuse holder, so he needed to call the maintenance section to fix that before he could reconnect the power -- a job he would have to come back for! Time: 8:30 pm

So after being without electricity for 12 hours we were finally back at square one, and no closer to having underfloor heating.

A. It takes three electricians, 12 hours. And afterwards you've still got the same meterbox.

Lost: one blogger

2008-03-10T21:20:00.010+10:30

Ah yes, well. You see it's like this. We actually moved in on 30th January, and it's taken until now to get the internet... Okay, it took about four weeks to get the phone connected, and the internet was working as soon as the phone was. It's just taken me two weeks to get around to updating my blog.

Anyway, enough excuses. Let me give you the quick update of what we've been up to so I can get on with everyday complaining.

Hired the 'Kanga' trench digger and earth mover to dig stormwater trenches and move some soil around. It was good fun, but hard to get to do what you want. I got nowhere near as much done as I'd hoped, partly because it is so big there are lots of places you can't take it.

A couple of weeks later I hired the smaller 'Dickens' trencher. This is less manoeuvrable, in the sense that it has no steering, and only drives itself backwards. But it is smaller, which means you can get it into tighter spots. As you can see we managed to get it right down the fence, even past the airconditioner and the water tank. There's no way I could have operated it without a second person to help reposition it though. Also the trenches it digs aren't quite as wide or as deep so we needed to dig every trench twice, sometimes three times. Even so, I managed to get
more done with this than with the bigger machine.

Here's Rewind Snr, with a tortuous trench in which we (well, mostly he) laid 100mm irrigation pipe. This is a subsurface soak to absorb runoff from the paved house surrounds and also overflow from the tanks. If it ever rains enough again such that this won't hold any more water, I can divert the tank overflow to the street. But I don't think I'll be needing that for a while.

When my tanks finally arrive I'll show off my elaborate (did you say insane?) plumbing in more detail. It is funny that I told Mrs Rewind I could get all this plumbing done in one weekend, if I hire a machine and get a few mates to help. She was of course right, and it has so far taken several weeks. Lucky it doesn't rain anymore.

Well not quite in...

2008-01-13T23:27:00.000+10:30

Okay I'll admit I've been a bit slack, but I have been on holiday. And I've been back at work for a week. Okay, pretty slack. Here's the latest update. The tiles and carpet are in. We've painted a 'feature' wall in each of the kids bedrooms. None of the outstanding jobs have been done since handover, and a few new issues have become apparent: laundry sink not emptying, laundry door not closing, roller door reopening, kitchen mix tap needs anchoring and the fridge doesn't fit. Huh? Yes the fridge, which was bought through Coneheads, does not fit under the overhead cupboard. I am meeting Mr Sandwich tomorrow morning to try to resolve all of our 'issues'.

I actually haven't taken that many photos. This one shows the recently-completed and prior to being mopped three times, floor tiles. We still haven't got the stormwater plumbing done. I'm going to try to do that next weekend, and we're planning to move in the weekend after. Still heaps of packing to do.

And we are in!

2007-12-22T13:46:00.000+10:30

Against all reasonable expectations we have handed over the rest of the cash and the builder has handed over the keys. It's not quite finished -- rather it is at 'practical completion'. This reminds me that software usually spends most of its life at the 95% finished stage. Anyway, we have decided to give Coneheads the benefit of the doubt (that they will in fact come back to complete the few outstanding matters) and handover. The biggest single thing that is not complete is the meter box upgrade. They will have to disconnect the meter, remove the old meter box and put in the new meters. That's about $700 worth, according to the variation they sent me. Maybe I shouldn't have paid them the full amount, but then they probably wouldn't have settled. Only time will tell if we made the right decision there.

As you can see the arched moulding above the bay window has been done now -- but not painted. It was due to be painted yesterday but, unbelievably for Adelaide at this time of year, it bucketed with rain yesterday (turning the parched soil into sticky mud) so they delayed painting. Last night we got takeaway Pizza and had a sleepover in the new house while Mrs Rewind and I tried to clean up a bit more (swept and mopped and wiped out cupboards). The kids were excited and didn't sleep very well, it rained on and off all night, and we all got muddy shoes and cold feet. It was a lot like camping.

The shower screens are in, robes are in (hate the colour -- bad choice there), and kitchen appliances are in and the bench fixed up, a bit.

One thing I wanted to do was make a list of the 'variations' that Coneheads have charged us for, the most recent of which was $1556 for "additional cost incurred by our electrical contractor. Specialised machinery and equipment was required to bore under concrete stormwater drain in order to access the power pole connection". They discovered a 1m x 1m stormwater drain buried just beneath the footpath and running the length of the street that they needed to dig under. They also happened to dig to the wrong pole the first time, and I wonder if that's what they are really charging me for.
I'll post the entire list of variations later.

Next Friday

2007-12-15T22:08:00.000+10:30

That's what Mr Sandwich says now. That's more realistic than Tuesday. It's still ambitious, but it is possible. I thought I'd better do another update anyway or else the house will be finished and I'll have nothing left to talk about (yeah right).

This is the painted, rendered front of the house. Since I took this photo they have done the ridge capping over the bay window. There is supposed to be an arched moulding above the windows, but apparently they made it the wrong size so that is going to fixed up.

They have put in the kitchen benchtops, and (since this photo) patched the gyprock behind, but both of these still have problems. The joins in the bench are dodgy (broken/not straight) and need fixing, and in one place the gyprock is not flat either -- must have a screw head or something behind it.

The bathrooms are looking pretty good, now they have been painted, so I thought I would show a picture of one of them -- this is the ensuite.

I am running around trying to get tiles and carpet installed so we can start moving in by January. Looking promising so far. I guess I just didn't believe Mr Sandwich would have got it done so fast.

This is the list of everything that still needs to be done (or that I have issues with) before handover:

meterbox replaced
watertank installed
spa pump installed
garage doors
arched mouldings
shower screens
garage fluoros
R3.5 in ceiling
Kitchen bench joins fixed straight
Hot water + controller
Covers for posts between sliding doors (and gap above)
Laundry security door
BI wardrobes
Towel rails + bog roll holders
Beading on glazed door
Water meter moved
Kitchen gyprock flat
Vanity mirrors

I dare say some more issues will arise, but Mr Sandwich plans to address all of these next week.

The end is nigh...

2007-12-10T22:57:00.001+10:30

Certain people have reminded me that I haven't updated the blog for a while. A few things have happened since the last update, and not all of them good. The meter box is finally going to be sorted out -- at least I've arranged to pay for it to be fixed, which means it will happen. They have rendered the front of the house now. This picture shows it partly rendered.

They have also finished the tiling, but with one teensy problem... the kitchen walls were meant to be 100 mm white tiles, laid diagonally. Instead they were laid square. Oops. That means they've had to cut out part of the blueboard which will need to be patched before they can retile. The picture below shows half of it removed. It was still like this last time I saw it, so I'm not sure when they're going to fix it. Presumably before the benchtops go in?

If you open this picture up you can also see the comedy that has been wrought by the electrician on the kitchen ceiling. There are meant to be three downlights under the overhead cupboards. He has seen these drawn on the plan and decided to cutout holes for them in the ceiling! Genius. He also cut out the holes for four of the lights in the family room in the wrong place, even though I have dimensioned them. And since they're going to have to patch all of them I've decided to reposition the two lights that should be in the kitchen ceiling, since they were decidedly off-centre. So in all there are nine holes out of eleven cut in this room that need to be patched.

They have also put up the picture rail. I made a mistake there -- I should have specified their height by measuring ours in our current house. Instead we just marked it on the wall and it isn't quite high enough. The problem is when it passes over a window or doorway -- it just looks too close. This is especially noticeable above the sliding doors in the family room (not pictured). I finally realised why on the weekend -- it is actually 30mm lower back there. It looks particularly bad because it isn't parallel to the architrave over the long expanse of door and window. Anyway, they are going to move the picture rail up 30mm in this room on Thursday.

In the meantime they have been painting. They will probably be finished painting before Thursday, but they will need to come back after the picture rail has been shifted and a few other things (like patching all the holes in the ceiling).

I try not to be too negative, but...

2007-11-29T21:55:00.000+10:30

Part of the purpose of this blog is provide a warning to people (like myself) who might be considering building, about some of the things that can go wrong. I've talked about the underfloor heating I am putting in. One of the requirements for this was to have off-peak power. We had allowed for 3-phase power, but off-peak wasn't something we originally planned for so it needed to be a variation. In addition, because the local electricity board don't provide a meter that can simultaneously provide 3-phase and off-peak, we would need to have three separate meters installed. This means we needed a larger meter box, which means a variation to be done before the brickwork was completed.

That's okay, I got in early. I let the selection consultant know what we would need and asked her to get back to me with a quote. I have had some trouble with email not getting through to her so a week later I phoned and sent it again. This time I faxed it as well. Then I phoned to make sure she got my email: yes, she got it, it shouldn't be a big problem, wouldn't even need to be a variation. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it... and it was. It turns out the email she had received was another of mine in which I said that Eden's electrician would have to do some pre-wiring. So a month later I look at the meter box and think, "That looks a big small..."

Oh dear, I discover the problem -- she never got my email. Okay, I try to remain calm and try to find out how we can fix this problem. Obviously the meter box will have to be replaced with a larger one, but it's not too big a deal since the gyprock isn't up yet. I once again send a detailed email and fax it to her, then phone to make sure she has got it. Two weeks later, after reminding her a few times, she finally gets back to me this afternoon. Yes, she says, they can fix it. It will cost about $450. Okay, that's not too bad, I think.

"So that's to put in the new meter box?"

"That's to put in an extra circuit and run the wires from the heating coils back to the meterbox."

"No, that's what Eden's electrician is doing, I need you to fix the meter box."

"Oh, that's not what Mr Sandwich got a quote for..."

Of all the useless balljuggling... Why? Why did I send an email? Did anybody read it? Why get Mr Sandwich to get a quote when he has no idea what is required? I can't believe they spent two weeks getting a quote for completely the wrong thing.

After a few minutes she gets back to me. "They say it will be cheaper to get your other electrician to do it, he can just put in another board."

I'm pretty sure no other board is going to fix anything. They need a bigger meter box and they need the electricity authority to install three meters. I have serious doubts even now that they know what is required. Must phone them again tomorrow ... and try to stay calm...

Fix those bulkheads

2007-11-27T19:54:00.000+10:30

Well Mr Sandwich said he would fix the bulkheads and look, the very next day they have been adjusted so they now follow the cupboards much better. Impressive.

Also the electrician has been back and put in most of the light switches and power points.

And they have started tiling. Yesterday I met the tilers and they did the screeding. Today they put down the porch tiles and the floor tiles in the bathrooms. Check out the Smartile grate.

Cupboards up

2007-11-26T10:05:00.000+10:30

Now the overbench cupboards are up in the kitchen it's looking more like a kitchen. They've put these bulkheads above the cabinets though which:

don't line up very well with the cabinets, so they'll have to fix that up, and
DON'T give the impression that the cupboards go all the way to the ceiling (like the sales consultant said they would -- she even saw our cupboards and said, yes, it will be just like this). Ho hum.

And now, the underfloor heating story continues. So now I've talked about in-slab heating and in-screed heating, but there is a third kind of heating cable I needed to install. This is because the vanity and toilet parts of the three-way bathroom were not set down, so can't be screeded (or they would be too high). So in this area we need a much thinner cable at closer spacing which the tiles are laid directly over the top of. Here you can see I've started laying out the cable. The floor needs to be very clean so the tape will stick. We use spray adhesive on the floor to help the tape stick too.

Once all the cable is laid and taped in place we put a fibreglass mesh over the top and glue it down to protect the cable (and stop it moving) during tiling. Here you can see it ready to be glued down, before I stuffed the electrical connections into a hole in the wall of the bathroom next door.

Carcasses and cabinets

2007-11-21T23:08:00.001+10:30

Well the second fix carpentry is well underway. We have doors hung and door furniture -- we are now locked up. Check out that lime green. Yesterday they delivered the cabinet carcasses and today they fitted most of them and most of the window and door architraves. It is really looking like a house.

A room full of cabinets.

Put it all together and what have you got? A kitchen... sort of.

How can you tell that you are a perfectionist?

They have put in the vanities now (still no screed -- they keep walking on the heating cables and breaking the cable ties; I should check that the cable resistance is still correct) and you can see my marking was slightly wrong. I forgot about the kick box.
So I rewired this part. Check it out.

Wiring the floor

2007-11-19T21:48:00.000+10:30

I have to backtrack a bit now. Those who know me well know I can talk about thermal mass and energy efficiency at length, but I'm not going to go much into that just now. Let me summarise my position here: I am interested in good design and energy efficiency and I am happy to invest my time and effort doing some modelling to investigate worthwhile options, but unfortunately (since I am not a millionaire) I am largely limited to implementing ideas that are cost effective and can pay for themselves in a reasonable time.

I originally wanted to put hydronic heating through the slab -- ie. pipes through which water is pumped -- and the primary reason was to enable access to the huge thermal mass tied up in the slab and footings, in a kind of semi-passive cooling system. Unfortunately this turns out not to be cost effective, and that's primarily because of the huge amount of pipe (they use plastic plumbing pipe) that is required. In addition the engineers want the slab to be an inch thicker, and use thicker reinforcing mesh.

So, in a not-particularly-clear segway, I decided instead to put resistive heating (ie. electric heating elements) in the slab. The reason I decided to do this is because it costs about 30% what hydronic would cost. Of course it only does heating, which isn't the main reason I wanted hydronic, but since you can run the heating off-peak it still seemed like an attractive option. And I can save half by installing it myself. And by 'myself' I mean, I can get my friends to help me :-). It's a good thing they did too because I never would have managed to do it in one weekend by myself.

There are a few simple rules to follow when laying electric floor heating. The most important one is DON'T CROSS THE WIRES. I got great instructions from Eden Comfort Conditioning about how to install the wires. They advise to generally try to run the cables parallel with the top bars of the mesh, use plenty of cable ties, don't go under walls (might end up with a dynabolt through it), and when you get near the end of the roll, unroll it to see how you're going. (This is even more important for the in-screed heating -- see later.) That's because each heating cable is made to order and can't be cut. It has a 'cold tail' which joins onto the heating element, and the entire heating element must be embedded in concrete.

I also prepositioned some plastic conduits for digital temperature sensors. Long-time readers will be familiar with the pain I've since been through to make sure (belatedly) that I can actually push the sensors into the pipes as far as I need to (the longest one is 8m). You can see the plastic conduits under the mesh here. They all come up in one central location (in what will be a cupboard) so I can connect them to a digital controller.

I decided to heat our large open-plan living area (kitchen, meals, family), the hallway and bathrooms. The hallway because it runs the length of the house and I figure it will help to keep the whole house warm. For reasons I don't completely understand Eden Comfort usually put higher power output in the wet areas. They were very helpful so I really didn't want to argue too much, but I really would have preferred to put all the heating cables in the slab because then they would all be done and out of the way now. And I wouldn't have to learn how to install cables in-screed as well, which is what Steve and I have just done last weekend (I think I must owe Steve a whole house of help by now).

You see the wet areas are normally set-down a little during the main pour to allow the plumber to get the slope to the drain just right by pouring a screed before tiling. So in-screed means we attach a light mesh to the slab and then attach the heating cable, much like as we did to the mesh in the slab, but this time at 100 mm centres (vs. 200 mm centres in the slab). It's much easier to see the kind of patterns you end up with. The blue part is a waterproofing paint where the shower cubicle will be. I have marked out the vanity and toilet and you can see we have not heated in those areas. You might notice it gets a bit wiggly in the shower cubicle. That's what happens when you get near the end and find you have an extra metre or so to use up. This was the second bathroom and we had already learned our lesson. We had to redo the first one because I got to the end and had another 2 m to use in a much smaller room than this one. You can see what I mean when you see how wiggly this is!

They're doing WHAT now?

2007-11-10T15:46:00.000+10:30

Oh boy, not sure how to start this one. First you need some background: we are having in-slab heating, the resistive kind. ie. a heating element embedded in the slab which is heated (off-peak) to release heat during the day.

I'll go into it more soon, when the rest of the cables are installed. You see part of it was installed in the slab, but in the bathrooms it goes on top of the slab, under the screed. Anyway, these heating cables need to be wired back to a control panel on the meter board. As this heating system is being provided by a separate company (not through the builder) they need to put this wiring in, independent of Coneheads' electrician. This other company want to do their wiring after Coneheads, so that... well I don't really know why.

So the electrician was there last Thursday. I phoned Eden Comfort on Monday (okay I should have phoned on Friday but I didn't think about it) but Chris said all his electricians were at Kangaroo Island until Thursday, and were all playing golf the following Monday. At this point the supervisor, I'll call him Mr Sandwich, was planning to get the Gyprockers (is that a word?) in on Wednesday but I told him what was happening and he said we could delay them, although on Tuesday he said he could only delay them until Friday. Luckily Chris had managed to schedule the prewiring for Friday, so that was going to work out okay. I decided to take Friday off to put in some more sisalation -- I should be able to cover most of the roof with one more roll.

Thursday afternoon I went over to finish off the speaker wire, because I was worried there were a few too many things I needed to do before the guys got much gyprock up. This is what I found when I got there. There was insulation up in all the walls, and half the gyprock was up, including half the ceilings. Both the garage and alfresco (the two main areas I still wanted to put sisalation in, because there won't be any other insulation there) had the gyprock up. I went to work on Friday.

I was so pissed off. I phoned Chris's electrician first thing in the morning and the first thing he said was that he had another job to get done today and mine would have to wait until Saturday! I laughed. I phoned Mr Sandwich too to ask him why they had already started when he told me they wouldn't start until Friday. He said, "What, have they already started?" I wonder if 'Supervisor' is a euphemism which really means 'Customer Liason'. I asked him to make sure they did not cover any more wires. Anyway, the electrician managed to get there in the morning to see what he could do, but by the time he got there all the gyprock was up. Brilliant.

Electrical

2007-11-05T21:20:00.001+10:30

The electrician has been and done the first-fix electrical. Mostly what he has done looks good, there are just a couple of switches that look like they are going to be in the way (note for next time: you really should dimension everything, including heights for power points and windows). The only thing he's done which really irritated me is he has nailed down some of the structafloor catwalks I had cut. Now I had deliberately left these loose so I could move them, and because I didn't want people putting their stuff on them. So what has he done? He hasn't just nailed them down, he has run electrical cable down their length and nailed it on with clips. Git.

Oh boy am I running out of time. I have finished one roll of sisalation and started the next one, and I have rolled out 100 m of speaker wire and bought another one. As always I wonder if this (especially the sisalation) is really worth the effort, but you can feel the effect even on a cold day when the sun warms the steel roof for a few minutes. Behind the foil covering the radiated heat is much less.

Oh, by the way, many people are confused about which way the reflective side should face. The funny (and confusing) thing is that it really doesn't matter as long as there is an air gap next to the reflective side (100mm is plenty). The reason for this is that a highly-reflective surface has low emissivity, so one way around it reflects heat up and the other way around it resists radiating heat down, ultimately reaching a higher surface temperature until it radiates the same amount of heat upwards. It would presumably work twice as well if it was reflective on both sides, so it's a bit of a shame that it's usually painted on one side. Incidentally, the reason there needs to be an air gap next to the reflective side is because otherwise thermal conduction will ensure it is at the same temperature as the material it is in contact with.

I'm taking the day off tomorrow to do some more, and meeting the supervisor later so I can ask when it might be finished. He has the tendency to tell me what he thinks I want to hear, when what I really want is a realistic estimate.

Up the roof

2007-10-29T20:53:00.000+10:30

The brickwork is all but finished now. The brickie has only got above the back windows to go.

I bought some structafloor to put up in the ceiling so I would have a platform to work on when I'm putting up the sisalation. First I tried to put the whole boards up. They're 3600 x 900 mm (ie. 4 x 1 yd) and they weigh a tonne. I tried to lift them up into the ceiling by myself, but that was impossible. I wish I had taken a photo so you could see it. Instead I cut a few 300 mm wide planks to use as catwalk and I cut a wider 600 mm plank into two work platforms.

Anyway, my mate Dave came around and gave me a hand putting up some more sisalation. Now I've used most of one roll. I'll probably need another two or three rolls to do the whole roof, but at least it's starting to look like I've made some progress.

Where have I been?

2007-10-25T22:16:00.000+09:30

Ah well, had a bit of a holiday. The house is still chugging along though -- it doesn't need me there to hold its hand. I've got some new photos though so you can see the progress (in case anyone is still reading -- thanks John). The brickie has started bricking up the front bay. He has also done the piers for the alfresco at the rear, and at least some of the window sills. There's probably only two or three days work left for him now.

They have put steel posts in between the sliding doors and fixed windows at the rear. At first I thought they had replaced the timber posts with steel ones, but the timber posts are still there on the inside. They have put this post here and welded it in place (check out the scorch marks on the window flange) into a shoe which is dyna-bolted to the slab. This is a good thing really, as I was a bit concerned that there was not much strength in this part of the wall -- in particular there was probably nothing attaching it to the slab! I'm still a bit concerned about how exactly they are going to conceal this post and cover the gap between the windows.

Finally, for those who are interested, this is what my grey water outlets look like now, after bricking around. Might need a bit of polyfiller around the pipe to keep the insects out.

This and that

2007-10-15T22:54:00.000+09:30

On the weekend I finished the network cabling, including threading one cable through the conduit I had installed. I used fencing wire as a feeder which I then taped CAT6 to so I could pull it back through the conduit. Thinking about putting in some speaker wires for surround sound -- how many channels does surround sound have these days?

I also finished taping clear plastic over the windows to protect from mortar and render. That took a lot of time. Don't know if it was a waste of time or not.

Finally, I bought a roll of foil builder's wrap to try to put under the roof. I know it would have been easier to put this on before the roof, but that would have made roofing impossible. It really needs to be put on by the roofers, but Coneheads wanted $2000 to do that. Anyway, I managed to get one 3m piece up on the inside and now I know how NOT to do it -- it's bloody hard work. I could really do with some sort of platform up there to stand on. Thinking about buying some MDF sheeting to cut up and lay down as a moveable catwalk.

Nuff said.

Bricks and mortar

2007-10-10T20:06:00.000+09:30

The brickwork is progressing. Not exactly fast, but it's getting there. I took the day off to do some cabling and saw that there was only one brickie working. I guess that's why it's so slow. Looks good though. Today the steel arrived to brick over the window openings. I have started taping clear plastic film over the windows to protect them from grit and mortar and at the front, render.

And they have finally lowered my fixed windows in the glass wall, although they couldn't move the posts. Apparently they are required to support the span. You see even though the lintel is wide enough to span all the windows it is not strong enough to span all the windows. It would need to be much thicker to span the extra 1800. In addition the posts give additional transverse (ie. in/out) strength. The window installer reckons the entire section would have had to be built into one frame. I'm still not sure what the outside of the posts will look like. I presume they wont be sticking on brickettes.

Also this week I put one inch PVC pipes through the walls in the laundry and bathroom for grey water. Hopefully by doing it this way the brickie and tiler will just work around them. I'll have to work out a way to attach the washing machine outlet to this pipe in the laundry. In the bathroom I plan to use a pump. You can get a 12V, battery powered, submersible pump which you just sit in the bath to drain the water. On the outside I will have a permanently attached watering system, either independent or with a no-return valve in between. A simpler suggestion was just to drain into buried slotted pipe under the garden, but I don't like the idea of roots getting into them. It's too late to put one in the ensuite, but Mrs Rewind didn't want one there anyway.

And finally, as I mentioned above, I have done some network cabling. I was there when the security cabler was there and he convinced me to just lay the CAT6 cable and forget the conduit, since it would make three times the work. As a result I have now installed most of the network cables.

What a difference a roof makes...

2007-10-02T22:51:00.000+09:30

I don't think I've mentioned yet that the bricks and roof sheets were delivered last week. I was vaguely promised (although I'm learning not to expect that to mean anything) that they would start roofing and bricking last week. To be fair, they did start bricking. They did three courses on one side of the garage, then I think they saw the long weekend coming and went home to watch football instead.

Not to worry. Today they really did start the bricking and roofing. In fact the roof is finished, in just one day! This isn't a great photo, but you can perhaps see the dubious colour choices. Hopefully it will look better once the front is rendered. They haven't done an awful lot of bricking yet -- about half the garage wall. At this rate it will take two months, but I think they'll probably speed up now.

I didn't get too much done on the weekend, but I have done some window rearranging, and placement of a few strategic extra noggins to support curtain rods later -- I did learn something last time we built!

This is a small fixed window in the walk-in-robe. It's supposed to be above the 'shelf', but the height wasn't shown on the final plan, and I didn't notice it was wrong until it already had a window in it. So 'Rewind' did a little bit of rewindowing. It's a bit of an insult to carpentry, but the camera hides a multitude of sins. And gyprock will hide them even better.

I asked the window man to come and fit the window again because I was worried I would break it, and he took pity on me.

We are going to be away for a few days, so when we come back maybe the bricks will be done. And then it's probably time I installed the rest of those conduits, or whatever I'm doing there.

Plumbing

2007-09-26T23:08:00.000+09:30

Well the plumber has come and done the first-fix plumbing, including gas pipework, but that's not what I want to talk about.

I'm talking about the polypipe conduits I want to use for network cabling. I installed one 13 mm pipe as a test to see how easy it would be to push CAT6 cable up it once it is installed. Answer: very bloody hard. I can get CAT6 up about 2 m, and CAT5 about 3 m (due to being slightly thinner). Once you get this much cable in the cumulative friction means the cable just bends in your hands as you try to jam more in.

Okay, so I decided to do some more tests at home. I have had lots of suggestions so I now needed to know if any of them would work. Lots of people have said I need to put a string in there to pull the cable through -- but how do you get a string in, especially if your pipe is already mounted in the wall and ceiling. John suggested fishing line and I wondered if I could use a pump at one end to suck the line through, if you attached it to a suitable ball of fluff. Here I am with my test rig. I used a tiny ball of scrunched up paper towel (no strings attached first) and it worked a treat. Pump, pump, Fump!

Next I tried attaching the fishing line. This worked at first, but the nylon tends to get tangled easily and eventually the drag within the pipe seemed to overcome the suction. But by putting the polypipe directly over the pump inlet (avoiding the use of a restricting nozzle) I managed to get enough suction to pull the nylon line through. Hooray!

Then the simple job of pulling a stronger piece of string through... turned out to be not so simple. Just the friction of the nylon line inside 15 m of pipe was too much to overcome -- it just stretched. But once I straightened out the pipe a bit, so that the line wasn't in contact with the entire length of the pipe, I did managed to pull the string through. Nevertheless, at this point I was thinking that this is a hell of a lot of effort and I will probably just fix the CAT6 cable in directly.

Anyway, a greater concern is how am I going to insert the cables with thermometers into the identical pipe conduits I have already put in the slab -- I can't even get to the other end of these. Instead I need a better way to push the cable in up to 8 m (I had planned to use CAT5 cable for this since it happens to be cheap, and I thought it would be easy to push down the pipe). I wondered about using fencing wire, since I have some, and I thought it might be rigid yet flexible enough to push down a bendy pipe, pulling 8 m of cable behind it. But John happened to have handy something called a 'drain snake'. This is a very long, flexible strip of flat steel about 3 mm wide, but less than 1 mm thick, so it easily bends in one direction, but is strong enough to push through blockages in kitchen drains. It has a funny-looking 'snout' on the end you push into the drain so it can clear a blockage, and also to help it navigate corners.

Anyway, I tried this in the installed conduit and it works -- you can push this thing all the way into the 13 mm conduit. However it is only 8 m long; not long enough to reach to the other end of the conduit I have already installed in the walls + ceiling, and this is by no means the longest run I have to do. 8 m is long enough to reach the end of the thermometer conduits under the slab though. So I returned home for some more testing.

The plan is to use the drain snake to pull the CAT5 cable into the conduit, by attaching the end of the CAT5 cable to the end of the drain snake and pushing them into the pipe together. But I need to be able to remove the drain snake afterwards without pulling the cable out with it, so I can't use the end of the drain snake with the snout on it. Instead I needed some way to attach the other end to the CAT5 cable which would be strong enough to pull 8 m of cable through the pipe, but be easy to disengage by pulling on the drain snake. I made a new snout for the drain snake out of a plastic pen lid, but I attached the lid firmly with duct tape to the CAT5 cable. The drain snake itself was not attached to the lid, it is simply inserted into the lid, next to the cable. This way it can push very hard, but be easily pulled out.

Incredibly this worked. I had to file down the sides of the lid a bit to make it fit better, and I also used another of John's suggestions: talcum powder in the pipe to reduce the friction. With all these steps implemented I managed to successfully insert 8 m of CAT5 cable and remove the drain snake from a 13 mm polypipe that meandered around a few gentle corners.

The main way this test differs from what I have to do in practice is that the cable will have two or three transistor-sized digital thermometers attached at precise locations along it's length. I hope if I wrap each of these 'knuckles' with Teflon tape it won't make too much difference. But John has another suggestion: use telephone cable instead of network cable. That should reduce the friction significantly, and these digital thermometers only need two wires for up to 64 thermometers so it should be fine.

Windows

2007-09-22T22:19:00.000+09:30

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.

The fixed window is sitting on the wall plate not the floor so is not at the same height as the sliding doors.
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."

The framing begins

2007-09-16T19:44:00.001+09:30

Slightly late, but what's another week and a half between friends. The timber has arriven and the frame is starting to go up. Above, a big pile of timber and below, starting to be turned into house.
On day three the roof trusses started going up.

Today I bought 100 m of polypipe to use as network cable conduit. This was my friend Steve's idea. Rather than run 100 m of network cable throughout the house which will inevitably be obsolete within a few years, run a flexible conduit in a star configuration which you can then put Cat5, Cat6, optical fibre or Qubit channel -- whatever you want. This would have been an even better idea if Steve had thought of it before I bought all my network cable -- I could have just bought as much as I actually need, when I need it. But I guess that's small fry. Less than half of the networking cost so far has been the cable itself, although it was certainly the biggest single cost.

This is the breakdown so far:

$120 for 80 m CAT6 cable from Jaycar
$12.50 for 10 stud brackets from Ebayer Sysintonline
$20 for crimp tool, punch down tool, network tester and wire stripper from Ebayer Soho_utopia
$30 for 100 m of 13 mm polypipe conduit from Bunnings
$8 for 100 cable ties with nail holes for anchoring conduit from Bunnings
$40 for 10 CAT6 jacks from Ebayer Eascable
$30 for 2 x 4 port faceplates with shutters, plus 8 CAT5 jacks I don't really need (not my best deal) from Ebayer Easycable

Network cabling

2007-08-28T22:37:00.000+09:30

The slab is curing nicely... I suppose.

I am preparing to do the network cabling. I might as well use Cat6 because doesn't cost much more than Cat5e, but Fibre is still too expensive (and so are the LAN cards). Yes I wonder if it's worth the effort, or if it will be overtaken by wireless in the next few years, but it's much easier to put it in now than to put it in later if I change my mind. So I got nearly 100m of Cat6 from Jaycar for $120 then I spent a day searching on Ebay for Cat6 jacks and RJ45 faceplates with shutters (to maybe keep the crayons out).

I bet you didn't know RJ45 jacks came in Cat5 and Cat6 flavours -- I didn't. The theory is that since Cat6 cable has thicker wires the termination in the plug should be engineered to match. I reckon the Cat5 ones would probably work just fine, but I thought I should at least try to get the matching connectors. Oh but you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find faceplates to accept keystone jacks here in Oz for a decent price. Anyway, I certainly wasted a lot of time looking. Tonight I spent some more time looking for mounting brackets to nail to the studs. I'm sure it's worth it.

They should deliver the timber this week and start framing I think.

Not quite in the beginning...

2007-08-16T20:42:00.001+09:30

Welcome fellow traveller. If you are reading this you have no doubt got lost, or otherwise redirected in your relentless search for pr0n. But since you're here you might as well look at the pictures just in case eh? You never know your luck.

So what's this all about. Well, after we built the last time we said we'd never build again... uncomfortable silence... yep, and I also wished we'd kept a record of the process (and the pain) we went through so others might learn from our experience. Now that we are building again I wish I had that record so that I could learn from our previous experiences. Who knows, maybe we even would have stuck with our resolve never to build again. I won't bore you with our justifications for building again, but let me just say that I've always thought building a house was somewhat like having a baby: after a while you forget how painful it was and you say, "It wasn't that bad was it?" By the way, we have two kids too.

Well I don't know about you but I'm getting bored so lets look at some pictures.

I don't really have any good pictures of the old house -- getting rid of it was really our focus -- but you can see part of it here. An old brick house, built circa 1950 with no redeeming features.

At the back of the old house looking at the townhouses being built next door. They're occupied now.

One super shed. In fact this was the best thing the place had going for it. Pity we couldn't keep it.
A big pile of rubbish. Unfortunately it stayed like this for about three months.
Finally managed to get George back to clean the site.
George gave the kids a ride on his bulldozer. They really loved it.
Another long delay before, finally action: the footings have been excavated.
All loaded up with reinforcing mesh and rods ready for the pour.
And finally, a brand new wet slab.