Week 21 - Half way point!

This week is half way through the 40 week schedule.

Visually not much is changing but we are progressing towards internal sheeting quite quickly. We had a meeting with the builders Wednesday morning to confirm air conditioning placement. We elected to go with a ducted system for the upstairs open plan living area, and then each bedroom and the downstairs living are getting their own bulkhead unit. A bulkhead unit works just like a standard wall-mounted split system, but is concealed either in the ceiling or in a bulkhead. Effectively it looks like a ducted system but is advantageous because each room can be controlled individually for on/off, timers, temperature and fan speed. It was a considerable cost to move away from ducted but we will make efficiency savings based on how we use the rooms.

Once the air conditioning units were put in, the builders framed the ceilings around them. We lost a bit of ceiling height downstairs because one of the beams was increased by the engineer, so they have ended up at 2.9 metres, which is still half a metre higher than a standard ceiling.

The tongue and groove (VJ) sheeting arrived on-site for the ceilings. We are doing this throughout and it's a major feature. There is still electrical cable to go into the walls and ceilings before the ceiling sheeting goes up, but it won't be long now.

On site last week we picked up that the plans were not sufficiently clear about the stucco columns at the front of the house. We came up with a solution with the builders and I think it works. The blueboard in the last photo will be rough rendered to match the existing stucco columns that weren't able to be saved.

All of the window frames are now installed - there are some leadlight glass panels to go in yet, bit this means that the external cladding can now keep moving and it won't be long before plasterboard goes in.