All good things...

Wow!! What a day! Last 'real' day of long service leave (where have those 51/2 months gone?) and it was a big one.  This is one of the few posts so far that I've decided to write as they happen instead of playing catch-up in hindsight after-the-fact - and as a result there probably won't even be any photos just yet... the day was so full-on that I left the camera behind and Phil had to pick it up for me, so it's not here to down-load.
Got to the house early this morning to get a good start and found the insulation guys already at it, frantically (well, more like efficiently and with the kind of flowing rhythm that indicated they'd done it thousands of times before - but that doesn't sound as cool and frenzied as 'frantically'...)  working away to keep ahead of the plasterers, who turned up before 8am ready to get started themselves.  So 4 or 5 plasterers joined 3 or 4 insulators who were joined by me then Josh and then Phil, followed by Pete the electrician (briefly) and then later on the roofing guys to do a last couple of things to make everything water-tight enough to keep the plaster dry, which was going up at a rapid rate.
The first hour or so just seemed to blur... crazy!  Insulation guys here, plasterers there, Phil checking bits we hadn't quite done yet, Josh dispatched on little projects to keep ahead of everyone... and I had a list of little things to do that wouldn't matter if you bought a house but you'd kick yourself if you didn't when you were on site for the build.  And all impossible to do once the plaster went up.  Adding to the chaos was the fact that the plasterers started with a big pile of off-cuts from some other job which meant 6 blokes going in 6 different directions whacking up plaster in random fashion - looked like anywhere they saw a piece of wall.  Which created in me one of those senses of minor panic and adrenaline rush in case one of my little jobs got covered over, never to be done and always to be regretted...  In case you wondered (and may sometime build your own house), this is my list of little jobs:
1. Put solid wood 'noggins' behind plaster to hold any future speaker brackets or shelves in the lounge
2. Check that I'd done the same in the bathroom for a 2nd set of towel rails above the first (yes, I had)
3. Put solid wood 'studs' up the side of our shower area to fix glass and hinges to
4. Wire some speaker cable through the ceiling space from the spot where the sound system will be to the spot where the speakers will be
5. Move our overhead shower location by 150mm
6. Put noggins in our entry to attach some coat hooks to later
All small jobs, but the kind of thing that can make a difference later on (anyone ever struggled with the range and not-so-easy installation of things that apparently are meant to 'fix' into plaster-board but end up either wrecking the plaster, not fixing anything securely at all or just frustrating you completely when they drop a toggle into the wall space and become useless... ah, the joy of knowing there's a solid piece of 90x35mm pine sitting right where you want it behind the plaster that you can screw into :-) ?  or wanting to put your speakers somewhere different to your sound system but debating whether the speaker wire trailing over the floor or tacked over door frames is worth the better sound quality?)


And that was the rest of the day, at one point feeling like you had nothing to do and then spotting plasterers heading for a certain spot and thinking of something that suddenly became urgent, making a frenzied set of measurements, cuts, nailings and fixings, breathing a sigh of relief and moving on to the next thing.  Lunch-time was driving around to get bamboo floor samples and to the paint shop to try stains so we could match one and get the front door frame stained and varnished before it went up.  I did some framing, some wrapping, some solar hot water installing, some cable running, some cleaning and some trouble-shooting...
Then it was 3 o-clock and I had to pick up the boys from school - last day of long service leave and last full day of building all done...
That's it.

Wrapping it up

This is the stage when something really looks like it's happening!  The roof's on and then you cover all the walls and suddenly you're cocooned inside and can really feel what the house is going to be like and the outside gets filled in and looks much more like a house...
Usually a house gets wrapped in sisalation - 'silver paper' which is blue on one side and reflective silver on the other.  For our climate you put it silver side in so that any heat inside the house gets reflected back in and keeps the house warmer.  In a hot climate, you'd put it the other way around to reflect extra heat outwards and keep it out of the house.
For us the wrapping is far more interesting and fun...  We decided to wrap up our place in giant sheets of space-age bubble wrap which is also silver on one side and a very cool-looking bronze on the other (the bronze is pretty much the same as silver but it's less reflective, so doesn't completely blind the bricklayers when they work on the outside of the house - or fry them to a crisp...)

Ah - so it does look like I thought it would! Wrapping gives the whole structure a real shape. Still pretty easy to break in though - just need a nice sharp knife...

Not an easy job to do on your own or if there's any wind - giant sheets of bubble wrap act like a great sail or paragliding 'chute unless you can get 'em under control and pin 'em down with the very cool air-powered staple gun Josh has in his hand.

Front entry - wrapped up and windows in. Not the easiest place to get into just at the moment - might have to look at that before we move in...

Suddenly the house has 'walls' and once the windows started going in, everything really started to look like it should.

Was great to have an extra worker for a couple of days in the form of Joel - all the way from the UK and staying with us as a family with his family for 2 and a half weeks. Here he is wielding the staple gun with great enthusiasm! Josh's chisel in the foreground.