Playing Catch-Up: November

Ok... I am a bad, bad blogger.  From what I know of blogging the key to a well followed and good blog is the frequency of posts... on this point I clearly failed. In my defence I can only offer the following:  late last year got busy not least because- in the midst of building a house and running a business and trying to do Christmas some kind of justice in our temporary digs- I got pregnant.  So.. In the interest of completeness I offer the following catch up posts:

November

I last left you promising  a post showing our roof tiles and waiting for our frame inspection.  A previous post explained our philosophy on hiring an independent building inspector so I won't go into it again. 

The report came back with a relatively small list of defects and fixes.  The thing we were most relieved about was there were no mention of any defects with the slab.  The defects were mostly with the frame and after notifying  our site supervisor the carpenters were back on site pretty quickly to  deal with the issues.

Plumbers and heating and cooling guys make an appearance and rough in the air conditioning  and the  plumbing for upstairs and the walls.  The roof is readied for the solar hot water system too. Also the green wrapping so familiar to those of you who, like us, have followed other CG building blogs now covers the external frame.

Green wrapping in preparation fo the Hebel

After that it's not long before we see the Hebel on site.  I had expected big trucks and cranes but in reality the Hebel is light enough for one guy with a small fork lift to take the bundles of Hebel panels of the truck by himself.  It occurs to us as we watch the Hebel being put on that it should probably be thought of a bit like a concrete cladding.  This comes as a surprise realisation to us (who knows why it hasn't occurred to us before) as we watch the guys install four horizontal rails on the lower exterior frame and then bolt in each Hebel panel to the rails.  I suppose if we had really thought about it we would have worked out though Hebel is concrete and therefore hard like brick, the prefabricated nature of the material makes it's installation much more like aluminium cladding.  A small but interesting realisation for us only because until now I haven't really heard it described as cladding at all.

Hebel being installed on the blindside of the house where the hot water service, airconditioning and heating units will be.

Hebel finished on the bottom

From the front of the driveway, you can see the roof trusses ready for installation to the left of the house.