Day 182: It don't come easy

This is probably stating the bleeding obvious, but building a house is not easy.  Even when there are no problems, your builder is genius, all the tradies turn up on time and you are tracking to budget, there are loads of things to think about and do.  Monday morning was the walk through with Bob the Builder and Sparkie Dave to discuss the plan for electricals, including powerpoints, lighting and data cabling.  We seem to be in agreement on most things.  It was funny to watch Dave and Bob talk about things that they have done on other jobs when thinking about resolving issues with ours.  Most discussions ended up with them telling us that they would sort it out.  So far, so good.  It looks like all we have to do here is select the finish on the light switches and powerpoints and find the pendant lights.  I had to head off the to Day Job, so Stos stayed on the talk about plumbing issues with Pete the Plumber.  The result of this discussion was that we need to revisit the list of supplies that we compiled during our afternoon at a local bathroom showroom.  Walk in showers are out, we don't have the room in the second toilet for a small wall basin, the ceiling in the second bathroom is too high for a flush mounted ceiling fitting and Pete and Bob don't need the shower sub bases recommended.  So a lot of red lines will be ruled through the list and we'll have to go back and pick out another shower rose and include the shower channel.  Not the most exciting thing in the world.  On Tuesday I had a half hour call with Bob which ended up in a long list of things for us to do; find out thickness of preferred floor tiles so that the stair man can calculate the rises, start thinking about the finishes for the kitchen and getting this underway, talk to Stos about having refrigerated airconditioning instead of evaporative because the unit for the latter can be seen out of the world's most expensive skylight and agree on some door handles.  The change to the airconditioning unit is disappointing as we had hoped to save money by re-using the unit from the old house, and we prefer evaporative to refrigerated.  But the sealer on the discussion was that the evaoporative unit won't effectively cool the kitchen/living room which is the room most exposed to the west.  It will also ruin the beautiful roofline as the system box will stick out like a sore thumb.  Stos proposed that we go without but I don't want to do this - I know how hot the kitchen in the old house could be and I don't want  to have to retro fit air conditioning  So refrigerated it is.  Yesterday was the day for buying the ducted vacuum cleaning system, picking up tile samples, looking at door furniture and starting to think about carpet. Today we have been cleaning up at the site; sweeping up wood shavings before tackling the humungous weeds in the garden.  Honestly, there are lions and tigers and bears out there.  But the earth is quite damp so once you get the shoulder under the pitchfork, they are coming out relatively easily.  Another couple of solid afternoons work and we will have it under control.

While it doesn't appear that a lot has been happening at the house over the last few weeks, Bob and the crew have been busy.  One thing that we noticed today is the finish on the pole supporting the roof of the rear structure.  This old ironbark telegraph pole has been sanded to a silky finish and sealed so that the natural colour of the wood stands out.  The photo on the left does not do it justice - this section of the pole visible in the kitchen is a beautiful pinky-red colour.  The lower section in the hall underneath has tiger stripes at the top, then fades to grey where the pole had been submerged.  This will really be a striking feature.