Back from Holidays

It was a morning very akin to Christmas today! My last (only) conversation with our Site Supervisor suggested that work would finish up before Christmas and then start up on the 12th of January. With that in mind, we went to bed last night wondering what may happen the next day.

Getting up this morning and gazing out the bedroom window as I have been doing every morning since the site was cut, I saw three men in High Vis workwear and a ute parked on the site. The plumbers/drainers were on site - it was going to be a big Day 1 for 2015!

All day showers threatened to halt work. In fact the Gold Coast copped flooding last night and yet we didn't have a drop. Today, many showers went past us (very close) but unfortunately, the luck ran out at about 3:45pm! With all due credit, the plumbers stayed on the longest, working through the storm, however eventually they called it quits and left.

So after Day 6, we had:

• Drainage (sewerage & grey water - stormwater still to come) installed, approved by council and backfilled.
• A new property pole to run electricity directly to the new house. (Apparently you are only allowed one access point for electricity, we are losing the connection to our existing house. As such we have had to run cable from the new house to our existing house - at our expense - $5k - and dig a trench 600mm deep between houses which worked out about 50 metres - thankfully for $300 I could hire a dingo and get the job done relatively cheap as quotes were coming in from $1500+. In short there's $5300 that we hadn't budgeted for!      
• Conduit was connected (no wire yet) and runs from the new property pole.
• Some debris at the back of the cut site was removed and pulled to one side as promised by the SS.
• Rubble pits were marked out ready to be dug out tomorrow.

One drama popped up today and it makes me wonder what would have happened if I wasn't on site. One of the plumbers called out to my on the verandah to confirm that a dodgy piece of poly pipe (which was uncovered during the excavation works and was running water so we put a tap on it to stop the flow) was the hook up point to the new house. I said no and was told that they cannot run from the street as there was no allowance for this and that a connection needed to be found within 12 metres of the house. A quick look through our contract and then a call to Metricon quickly revealed that the plumber was wrong (thankfully). I went out and explained this information to the plumber and then we roughly marked out where the trench from the meter box would have to go.

 The boy on his toy!

 First sight out the window!

 The first cut of the soil

 Almost finished the backfilling - hurry the rain is coming!

 The conduit for the trenches!

 Every day seems to end in puddles!

 So many pipes!

Our new property pole!