Water Tank arrives & Top Floor Framing Begins

The water tank arrived last week. It's a 10,000 Litre tank that's going to sit under the deck that surrounds the swimming pool. We're going to hook it up to supply water for flushing the toilets, for the washing machine and for topping up the swimming pool in summer. You can see it down in the corner of the 2nd photo below. It came from Clark Tanks and was made here in Victoria.

Also, Tom the carpenter is back from Queensland, and he's been busy with the upper floor. He worked all day Saturday and made some good progress on the upper frame.

Color Schemes

Claudette and I are headed back to Seattle for another month. There's a list of things we need to get ready for the builder before we go. First up is selecting render (stucco) and roofing colors as these might be started while we are in Seattle, so we need to submit color selections. Also up are a lot of detailed questions around gutters and drainage that I've been working through with the builder.

This is the main color palette for the exterior

Primary Roofing Color: Colorbond Surfmist

Primary Wall Color: Dulux Limed White

Accent Roofing Color:  Colorbond Monument

Accent Wall Color: Dulux Namadji

Brick Piers for the Decks / Alfresco

The brick layers are back at work again, and have bricked up the piers that will hold up the deck around the swimming pool, as well as the out door dining area. These piers will be core filled with concrete

Posistruts for Top Floor

The floor joists in the form of posistruts arrived late last week and the carpenter has been working on getting them all installed. All the joists and lumber comes from a local building supply store (Lamcal). The subfloor will go on next.

More steel reinforcement arrives

More steel beams are being mounted on top of the main floor. This will help hold up the upper floor, provide some wind bracing and help reinforce all those big empty spaces that we have. The downside of all this steel is that it will make it hard to run AC ducts.

They are renting a small crane that arrives on the back of a truck. The crane has tracks on it so that it can get down the steep part of the hill. Once the steel is bolted in place, they will weld it all together.

Swimming Pool Concrete

4 truck loads of concrete, 7 people working without rest for 5 hours straight - and now I have a swimming pool shell.

The pool work is being done by Cantwell Pools here in Melbourne - they do about 70 pools a year here.

See below for pictures from the site today

framing progress

More steel showed up today. The long steel I-beam below is 13.6m long (over 40'), the truck that brought it was so long they couldn't safely get it down our street until well after dark when there was no traffic coming through. More progress has been made on the framing. If all goes well we'll have the framing on this level finished up this week.