Off the ground

Ten minutes into our meeting there was a knock on the door: the brickie had arrived. He hadn't shown up yesterday due to an ill child: not much you can do when faced with a brickie kiddie sickie.

Anyway, he got busy with it, and this evening we have the side wall, both layers and the cavity insulation in between, at shoulder height.


Progress has also been made on the other walls, though I'm a little concerned at the two courses to the left of the picture which look like they'll be blocking the patio door.

The two layers of blockwork are held together with steel ties like this:


And so today a side passage was born:


As I thought, it's a little wider than the drawings -- 1075mm at the back instead of 1008, but we couldn't have made the extension any wider and still kept the passage a metre wide.

Here you can see at the front where the insulation fits in:


Now that it's taking shape, the front TV room feels very small to me, but then it exists more-or-less by default and there would have been no point sacrificing valuable kitchen space for it.

The meeting this morning was fairly uneventful. The project manager is still chasing a plumber, his preferred candidate having passed the job offer to his brother who is now looking at it. The builders have been asked to continue their search as well. Since plumbing work is due to begin in 4-5 weeks, they'd want to hurry up with this.

Afterwards there was something of a door-related farce when the builders' site manager refused to place an order for the doors until he had a model number, except the joinery doesn't do model numbers. So Dara called them, told them what we wanted, arranged to make up a reference number for the job, and passed this on to the builders for them to order it. All very strange.

So that's where things sit today. The foreman reckoned that we will make up for lost time with the blockwork if the weather stays good. Since there's a whole three weeks allocated just to get the ground floor done, I'd say the saving should be somewhere in the region of two weeks saved, but with the weather you just never know.