Just like giant Lego

...but heavy as, well, concrete - and not nearly as colourful.
Blockwork began for the foundations on Monday 18th October and seemed to keep rolling on for weeks.  We designed the house to have a bit of character - what that boils down to from a builder's perspective is corners and levels.  Split levels muck up all your bearings and make it seem like you're doing 3 houses instead of just one.  Corners are just annoying - they take time, slow the flow, stop you getting on a roll and force you to recalibrate constantly.  Eightmangana has 3 levels and corners galore...

Lenny the expert brickie in action.  Nothing this man can't do with bricks and mortar - although for a man who doesn't swear, eightmangana brought him close at times...

View from the "front door" - little yellow mushroom crop growing nicely.

But progress was made and things kept moving along.  Something that resembled a fortress in grey concrete rose slowly from the mud and we started to get an idea of where and how this place was going to sit in the landscape - a little bit higher than we first thought but starting to take shape.

Catapult, anyone?

Main blockwork continued until Friday 29th when we filled up everything done so far with more concrete to reinforce it all.  No pump this time, just wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow emptied bucket by bucket down into the walls.  One of those jobs that feels like it goes on for ever and might never stop - but you just keep going,  encouraged by the concrete truck driver standing by his vehicle saying "Reckon I've got about 10 barrows left..." every barrow-load for 2 hours.

Once again, the boys float to the highest point available - no falls so far!  Future workshop area shown here.

Rain!!

The heavens opened overnight Thursday 14th and Friday 15th October.  As I've written in my little red house-build exercise book "Footings became water slides" and instead of a garage we had a paddling pool (although not one you'd really want to send your kids into...)
The surveyors ventured out to put pins (little concrete nails with pretty coloured plastic tags) into the footings - the most accurate way to let the brickies know where their corners were.  After handing out masks and snorkels, they did as much as they could without using scuba gear and decided to call it a day.  Hard to imagine that this muddy, sloppy, water-logged mess is ever actually going to look like something a bit more grand.  There's something depressing about trying to do any kind of real work, or do it cleanly, when it's muddy.  Rain - OK. Cold - can handle that.  Wind - sends you a bit mad.  But mud can be soul-destroying...

"After 40 days the waters receded, and Noah sent out a dove..."

Footings poured

Tuesday 12th October dawned overcast, drizzly and damp.  Not the best weather for negotiating a 14 tonne excavator around a clay-based block.  Everything at eightmangana gets very slippery, sloppy and sticky when there's moisture around, which isn't great for the building process!
Pour day involved a cast of thousands.  On-site over the course of the day we had Phil, Josh, Steve, Symen, Lenny, Peter, Sam, Heath, Darryl, building inspector, 2xwater-meter guys, a visit by the Wilson family (the small, male members of which promptly got themselves wet and dirty while climbing to the highest and most dangerous spots on the house site...) and Tim (yours truly).  It's one of those 'all-hands-on-deck' kind of days - it's a big job (well, this one was) and just has to get done, so in the end 4 of us worked a 12-hour day and support cast put in some big efforts to get it all finished by about 7.30 that night.  Just imagining the job without a big white and blue concrete pump crane makes me feel a bit nauseous...

Spray-jackets on and don't bother trying to stay clean, boys.  Note a few little yellow mushrooms sprouting...

Trench mesh in the bottom of each footing to tie everything together and make sure it stays where it's meant to.  Personally, I couldn't see it going anywhere fast but I'm not the expert...

Gum-boots mandatory for junior builders visiting eightmangana.

...and they like to find the high spots.  This particular set of 'boxing' (holding back the full weight of quite a bit of concrete piling up behind it) gave way twice as we tried to pour it - shoveling the concrete back in for the third time wasn't much fun!

Surveying

Next stage in the building process was to get the house set out on the block.  Usually a builder builds a set of wooden 'profiles' around the whole house sit and then runs string-lines and plumbs down from them to mark out all the corners of the house so that footings can be dug in all the right places (footings in the wrong places are not good - tend to cause all sorts of serious headaches later on...)

In our case Phil (the Builder) decided to try out surveyors instead, since it was likely that the amount of wood, effort and man-hours needed to put up the profiles on our 3-level house would have been enough to fully construct a small 2-bedroom dwelling on flat ground...  The surveyors load an electronic copy of the house plans into their surveyor-type computer software and generate a set of GPS points for every corner (we had over 60!) and then bring out their cool-looking equipment that calculates angles, distances and compass directions to plot each point on the ground.  Quite amazing to watch and reassuring to hear them saying, "That's pretty much it there - just move 2mm forwards and 3mm to your right."  Gives you a fair bit of confidence that it's going to be where it's meant to be!  6 hours later and they were all marked out, ready to go.

No photos unfortunately of the guys in action - me being me, I just forgot on the day...
That day being Thursday 7th October, in case you were wondering.

Excavation

There's nothing a bloke likes better (well, maybe there is, but not the topic here...) than a big piece of powerful machinery that can pull things apart, rip things down, dig stuff up and generally create [carefully managed and planned] destruction.  Excavation on-site started on 28th and 29th October - Tim forgot to turn the first sod with a gold-bladed shovel for the cameras, so that was left to Mark and his 14 tonne bright-orange excavator.

Basic idea was to cut in the house site at this stage and later create some level areas around the house to match the 3 different levels in the design.  The plan has a garage on the lowest level which pretty much sits back into the bank behind it.  Level 2 is 1400mm higher with the main living plus Dad and Mum's bedroom.  Level 3 is another 1200mm higher and is the kids area with bedrooms, bathroom and a play-room.

Hindsight shows that we'd pretty much put the pegs and lines in about the right spot - not too much dirt had to be moved later on to fit the house in.

Benjamin on 'Doosan' the safety-orange digger

Daniel and Melanie get in on the act as well...

Where we're up to now...

We're obviously not real bloggers or this would have been up a week ago and it would have been video footage.  We'll move on regardless and somehow cover the space in between start date and 'now' (whenever 'now' happens to be when we finally catch up - possibly after we move in at this rate...)
This picture proves that something is happening, and it's at Number 8: