Oh dear I've lost track

So with everyhting else going on I have completely lost track of where I am with this blog. Ick and slap on the wrist. However we have still been taking photos, usually each weekend when Super dad has a chance to climb the magical ladder to the land of renovation chaos.

So here are the photos from the last two (or it could be three, although I'm pretty sure its two) weeks.

You can see the rooms taking shape, but only if you've seen the plan. This is the en suite bathroom through the wall from the nursery.

Where the en suite bathroom joins the old roof.

The wall insulation has arrived.

The replacement tiles arrived. They are red so now we have a patch work. We'll have to add repainting to the roof to our going-over-budget list.

The roof is still not complete but we discovered yesterday that they cannot officially complete and seal the roof until the engineer has signed off on the structure.

The empty space in the floor is for the staircase.

The 'noggins' which make the floor super stable.

The frames for the window are going in. These however are the wrong size...hmmm.

Frame for window in CG's bedroom.

Slowly, slowly, slowly ..... stop

Work has been moving along very, very slowly. We still have big gaps in our roof because they have not found roof tiles yet and I'm pretty sure they have not been looking. Every time it rains I fear the worst and every ceiling that can be damaged has been damaged to varying degrees (replace the rooms whole ceiling to touch ups only).

On Wednesday the rain came in and ran down our passage walls. That was the last straw for me, I was fully determined to get up on Thursday morning and give the manager a piece of my mind. However on Thursday morning said manager woke up on the wrong side of the bed and called his workmen at 8:30 (once they had already changed and started work) and told them he was closing down our site. What!!

So after calling my husband who then called said manager and they had a 'conversation' which ended with the guys staying on site and doing just about nothing all day. Why would he decide to shut down our site? Well the answers were vague but you can be sure it had to do with pettiness and money that we had already agreed (the week before) to pay the next day.

Here's the short version of what we are pretty sure happened:
1. In the middle of February they raised an invoice for the structure (implying that they had met this milestone and wanted to be paid). In the course of the next day our son broke his leg.
2.  We agreed to pay in the next two weeks which is when the bank had promised our new bond would be ready to draw from.
3. Half way through the week our kitchen ceiling is damaged by the deluge and Super dad goes into the roof to control the flow of water. When he's there he discovers that huge parts of the A frames and roof timbers have not been finished.  He contacts the manager and says we won't be paying for the structure until its completed. All of a sudden the structure miraculously starts getting finished.
4. The next week we meet the manager to choose windows and he calls Super dad pedantic for not paying and saying the structure is not yet complete.....'look how much other work we've done' he says. 'Yes,' Super dad says 'but I'm only going to pay for the framework when the framework is done'.
5. They agree that seeing as it is mostly done we will pay over half and then the rest the next week Friday as the bank has also been stringing us along and we will only have the money then.
6. The manager wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and decides he wants to be paid. So he pulls his guys off site even though he has agreed with the fact that we will pay him the next day. Very mature and professional.

So Super dad reminds him of the agreement and all of a sudden the builders are not leaving the site and everything is hunky dory again. So very strange and irritating. When Super dad phoned the next day (after we had paid) to clear the air everything was sunshine and rainbows again and the excuse for trying to 'shut our site down' ...... they were waiting for their supplier who did not have stock of a larger size of timber beam which they apparently needed before they could continue.

Wow I really wish builder/contractors were a little more honest and mature. So in the end they did not work on Friday or Monday while they waited for the delivery of the new materials.

One great thing that did happen was that they moved the geyser up into its new position and the plumber, Jeff, is a fantastic guy. He listened to all my concerns about the water pressure and agreed to put the geyser into the new roof rather than simply move it along inside the existing roof. He also agreed to put the geyser over the children's loo rather than over a bedroom as I pointed out that if it ever burst I did not want it to ruin the bedrooms. After moving the geyser our pitiful shower (which has been terrible since we moved in) got even worse and so we called Jeff back in the hopes he could figure out how to fix it. He did!! He was the first plumber to look at the shower and suggest that the hot tap might be broken rather than suggesting there was some massive problem with the pressure or pipes. So on Saturday he arrived and changed the shower arm, head and taps and now the hot water pressure is wonderful. We were so excited we had a shower that very evening. Best R300 we ever spent.

View towards where the main bedroom and the en suite bathroom will be.

Triangular hole is the remaining old roof over the lounge. This hole will be behind the en suite bathroom and the nursery walls.

View towards Curious Georges new room (where the existing roof is still waiting to be removed).

View towards the main bedroom and the landing. I think the stairs are going to come up very close to where the geyser is in this photo.

Plastic and tiles still cover the roof which is why it still leaks sometimes.

This valley is where it leaked on Wednesday.

View from the top of the new roof. Wow.

The roof tiles are finally going on

This week they started moving the roof tiles from the old roof to the new roof. I was so excited. Finally we won't have to worry when it rains. Of course this is not the case though because we have run out of tiles already. With all the breakages that have happened when they removed the tiles from the old roof there are no where near enough tiles to cover the new roof.

So now we have to wait for the contactor to find some matching tiles at a demolition yard. Excitement deflated.......

So now they are cutting out the old roof again. At least the inside is starting to look like a real space now. You can even start to get a sense that it might actaully be livable at some point in the very distant future.

Yay the tiles are finally being moved to the new roof.

Out with the old broken tiles. Of course the dump site is right in front of out front door.

Starting to look like a real space now.

Next stop floor beams and noggins (litgtle pieces which create stability in the floor).

The last two weeks - an overview

On Wednesday 15 February our 20 mnths old son fell in the garden and broke his leg. If you're interested in more details please take a look The Peas Pod, Our toddler has a broken leg post. So we've been out of commission for 2 weeks between the hospital stay and getting some for of routine going back at home. So in the interests of keeping this blog moving I've decided to just give a quick overview of what I've not had time to write about.

1. They said they had finished the frame and so started on the outer cladding. Now our house looks like a big white box.
2. It buckets down with rain and they have not put up the tarp properly and the water pours through our kitchen and bathroom ceilings. The kitchen ceiling is completely ruined. Stephen goes tow to toe with the contractor to replace the ceiling and wins.
3. They invoice us for the framework but during his night time water proofing exercises Stephen discovers large gaps in the roof framework. So another round with the contractor and no payment for them until they finish.
4. They suddenly begin work on the roof structure again.
5. They start cutting the rafter out where the old roof was.
6. The pile of rubble in our garden grows.

During this time we have also been in negotiations with the electrician over what work needs to be done and the fact that he is trying to over charge us.

The cladding begins.

Our nice white box.

The damage done to our kitchen ceiling.

Buckets collecting 60 years of dirt and water in our bathroom

The old roof structure.

Just look how much dust that ThinkPink has collected over the years.

The new, incomplete roof structure.

The old roof inside the new structure.

The day they started throwing rubble out of the roof.

Day 15, 16 and 17 - work grinds to a halt

The builders have not able to do any work at all because they were waiting for materials. We waited most of Friday and then I called their boss to find out what was happening. It seems that their truck had an accident on its way to deliver the Nutec boards (for the outside walls). Some of their guys even landed up in hospital. I have to admit that the cynic in me (who has been burnt by many a builders excuses) thought that that sounded convenient. However on Tuesday when the foreman arrived to deliver some more material I saw his neck brace and bandages on his head. Apparently the trucks wheel broke off while they were driving to site. Shame on me for throwing every builder in with the bad ones.


So nothing at all has happened the last three days. I have to say that I have enjoyed the silence and the extra long sleeps that Curious George has had. Also my husband arrived home on Sunday evening, from his two weeks overseas, as sick as a dog. He enjoyed the silence as well.

He did however climb up into the roof to see what progress was being made (that's manly curiosity for you) and took some photos.

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Day 13 and 14

They have continued to work on the floor beams and bolstering the rafters but you can't really see anything new.

Day 12

Nothing to report today. I didn't even take photos because you can't see anything. They say they are still working on the floor beams but were right at the back inside the roof the whole day. I hardly even saw them.

Can't wait for my husband to get home to he can climb in there and tell be what is going on and take some photos of what it looks like.