And so it begins...

Footings down on the 21st right, Slab down on the 22nd.

Not a chance.

The boundary that I share with my (lovely) neighbours has a fence along part of it, and a brick wall (their garage) along a bit more of it. My house is going to have to boundary walls on the same boundary, overlapping the garage wall already there and about 10 metres of fencing.

Now because, to me, this seemed like it may be a problem I rang up and asked what was going to happen to the fence while the footings, slab and brick wall were being laid and the built wall was being built. I replay I got back was "You will probably have to remove them for about a month.

I turns out that if I had not rung up and asked about this what basically would have happened was that the crew would have gone out to lay the footings and either removed the fence themselves or delayed the footings until someone else (ie me) removed the fence first). Don't these people believe in prior planning and preparation? Obviously not.

So I went round to the new neighbours last night, spoke to them about it and they said that
a) Its not a boundary fence, it has been placed 3 cm inside the boundary (they did this to make it easier for us when we build, we didn't ask them to, they did it of their own bat)
b) The dog they have (large thing!) means the fence stays
and I added point C..
c) if they can build the house, lay the footings and lay the slab at the point where the brick wall is (they obivously cannot remove the neighbours garage!) then why do they need to remove the fencing?

So I rang up the builder this morning and said that the neighbours, in no way, give their permission to allow anyone to remove or dismantle the fencing, and I could see no reason why they should.

The end result is that the builder is going to get the block surveyed again to determine where excately the fencing is (my word of it being inside the boundary is not good enough), which is going to take 4-5 days, delaying the footings and slab by at least a week.

and so it begins, the delays, the hold ups, the problems..


Can any one out there tell me why the fence why the fence is in the way, but the brick wall is not?
mood: depressed.

The road is paved...

Well, we have just been informed that we are scheduled in for the footings of our block to be laid on the 21st of Feb, with the slab to be poured the next day onthe 22nd.

Exciting, but I can't help hold a touch of cynicism in being willing to bet that it won't happen on time.

Here's hoping I'm wrong!

All quiet on the Western Front

With nothing happening on the block until Friday at the earliest I thought I would post a few link to site that I find useful, you may of course make of them what you will...

1) www.spurl.net
I have used the bookmarking (favourites) feature of any web browser since I started using this. Basically it lets you store all of youe bookmarks (you are allowed to import your current lists from most popular browsers) online and that means you can access them where ever you are. Now I can bookmark a page I find at work and when I get home I can access the bookmarked link just like if I was at work. Brilliant!

2) http://http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA031384/software/Joe_en.html
For anyone who uses the Opera web browser, and loves the Right-Click + scroll wheel way of navigating through multiple open tabs and sorely missed the ability to do the same with the ALT-TAB functionality of window, well now you can :-)

which leads me to
3) www.opera.com
The best web browser in the world.

Take care and I hope I have more happy house building news to report soon!

Builders work funny hours!

The retaining wall was meant to be done last Friday (10th of Feb), but as we drove past on the way home full of excitement and anticipation, guess what.. No wall.

Well, no big deal, the earthworks were also meant to be done on a Friday (sidetrack: what is it with this builder - Ventura Homes - always scheduling for Fridays?! The slab is tentatively scheduled for a Friday too), anyway as I was saying, no big deal because the earthworks were scheduled for a Friday but were done on a Saturday. So on Saturday morning at around 10am we popped round on our way out and still no wall, maybe they start after lunch...

At 7:30pm on Saturday we walked around to our block (did I mention that it was just around the corner from where we are living?) and still no wall. We both doubted that they would be working at night and never even gave a thought to them working on a Sunday so we resigned ourselves to the fact that as of that Saturday our house was beginning to fall behind schedule.

We went into town on Sunday for a quick shop and a lunch and decided on a whim to pass the block on the way home and well bugger me the wall was done! The builders had been and built it on a Sunday. Quite amazing. So once again by Monday the house was back on schedule and I think I am beginning to see why everything is scheduled for a Friday... or am I being too cynically here?


And now for something completely different, a rant.
Its about these bloody cartoons some dimwit in a Danish newspaper drew. For a start they are not funny, and at best they are crude, but bloody hell what a mountain some people are making out of this pathetic little molehill. Burnings, riots, "westerners should be beheaded" posters, its just frigging unbelievable. I can understand (just) some people being upset, angry, put out etc about these crude drawings (really to call them cartoons implies some level of thought or effort went into them and that is giving them to much praise), but to react the way that these people have reacted is just as pathetic as the drawings themselves.

Peace, love and tolerance...... HA.

Imagine what would have happened if Monty Python produced a movie called "The Life of Mohammad" !! (Cant recall any Bishops storming the BBC studios and burning it when Life of Brian was released, they weren't pleased but they did act civilised about it, mostly)

A call went out here in Australia by a leading Muslim cleric to the effect that Australian schools should teach Islam along side Christianity in class. Yeah.. right.. I'll support that idea as soon as the Middle East starts teaching Christianity in their schools.

And there is my problem. All of these people of different nationalities choose (for the most part) to come and live in Australia and then demand that Australia changes to their way of life. And worse then that for the most part we give in. We don't celebrate Christmas any more, just a feastive holiday, in case it offends someone. Well what about offending me by denying me my rights to celebrate my religion and the main religion of my country? Oh that's right, I'm only a white Australian, my opinions don't matter unless I'm a minority.

Imagine if I went to live in any middle eastern country and demanded that they not celebrate their central religious holidays because it offended me? I'm sure that would go down very well.

And just saying out loud "Islam offends me" (and it doesn't) in Australia would brand me as racism, insensitive and various other labels, but it is perfectly ok for a Muslim to state that the celebrating of Christmas on a national scale offends him...

I don't care whether you are white, black, pink, green, blue or any other colour under the sun, and I don't care who or what you worship, I will treat you with peace, love and tolerance and the world would be a far better place if I was treated the same way in return and more importantly if certain people or groups of people were not so goddamned insensitive when it comes to their religion and basically go around looking for an excuse to cause trouble in the name of who ever they worship.

I challenge anybody to show me a religion that preaches it is ok to riot, to commit murder and to kill. Anyone, ANYONE, who uses religion as an excuse to kill, terrorise and subjugate any other person is a hypocrite, a coward and a git no matter what their religion, from the Christians involved in the crusades to Islamic fundamentalists in the current day.

A lot of people in this world need to grow up and stop acting so childish.

Day Four and Counting (or The SoakWell Saga)

Yesterday I took the day off work, I was in as good as a condition as an apple leaving the juicing factory. Still I dragged my self out of the house to meet the slab engineer on site since I have a few queries about the block.

The biggest concern I had was that our block level is about 20-30cm higher then our neighbours and since I have bout 9 metres of zero lot wall (i.e. wall right on the property boundary) I was a little concerned over the stability of the soil under the slab at that point.

The Slab Engineer assured me that everything was fine and that it was well within tolerances, but I'm angling for a second opinion I think.

Just before I left I asked in passing where the soakwells were going to be put, idle curiosity on my part. He seemed surprised and after checking all of his plans we could find no mention of soakwells nor any plans showing where they were to be placed. Cue alarm bells at this point.

When I returned home I rang the building company an asked about soakwells. Asking him to confirm that the builder was supplying AND installing the soakwells. The Supervisor wasn't sure and didn't think that they were supplying and installing the wells since it wasn't mentioned on the contract, so I asked (in a rather patiently and nice manner I thought considering the drugs were wearing off at this point and I had a headache the size of the Queen Mary 2 on the way) why I had and entry on MY contract that said "storm water to be piped to soakwells $1800".

After a bit he did agree that that did indeed sounds like the builders were supplying and installing the wells. So I asked him for a confirmation because "sounds like" really was a comfortable position.

He called me back 4 hours later and agreed that yes they were to supply and install the wells. Finally!

I more productive news, the retaining walls are being built this Friday, and the slab hopefully next week, and the soakwells..... god knows.


On a more exciting note, My DVD boxed sets of Seasons 2 and 3 of Quantum Leap shipped two days ago and should arrive either today or tomorrow. The other half will be MOST pleased :-)

It all started with storm clouds and Ominous warnings

Friday was the day, the day it all began, the great construction project of 2006 (at least for me!).

When we finally got around to see the block, it was 8pm and it was dark, but the anticipation was high. We had no doubt we would see great things, we were promised it would all start on time. So when we got there (and you can probably guess where this is going...) we were a little disappointed to see that not a sausage had been done. Not one grain of sand moved and I was entirely doubtful as to whether a bobcat had been with 10 kilometres of the place.
(NOTE: for those people who are right now wondering why the hell I was expecting a small wild member of the cat family, a Felis rufus - http://www.desertusa.com/april96/du_bcat.html - to be anywhere near my block I am afraid we have been caught at the crossroads of a cultural misunderstanding and I am in fact referring to these - http://www.bobcat.com/ - and not the feline variety!)

So, you can imagine my surprise when I drove passed on Sunday to find that the (as of Friday) previously virgin untouched block was now a paragon of levelness. It would seem that the contractors for some reason best known to themselves decided Friday was not a good day to do earthworks and so instead came around on Saturday and did it then.

It was most exciting actually seeing the floor plan of the house laid out on our block! It finally get some sense of where the rooms were and how big they were was a great moment, especially when the family/meals/kitchen area appears to be much large then either of us thought it would be.

So now begins the daily pilgrimage to the new site to check on progression.

On a different note, I bought a 19-23mm Wide angled lens for my SLR camera on the 28th of Janurary, its it is being delivered today! I am most impressed with that, 8 days from purchase to it arriving on my doorstep, including 4 days of weekends. What's that you say, 8 days isn't impressive? Well let me add one more piece of info to that equation.. I purchased the lens online from an American store, in AmityVille to be precise and it got here, Perth Western Australia in 8 days). Impressed yet? I am.

I'm more impressed with the price. To purchase a wide angled lens from any store here in town it would have cost me somewhere around the $600 Australian mark, a similar lens bought in the US cost me $80 US plus only $36 US for postage. My first thought was "cheap imitation rip-off rubbish" at that price, but it comes with a 5 year warranty, is a Vivater (or is that Vivatar?) built lens and all the reviews I can find are very promising. Its not a professional lens, but then I'm not a professional photographer so all is good. Hopefully tonight when I get home it will be waiting for me.

The Armoured Plated Teeth of DOOM (and our house building starts!)

Well, its Friday morning, I'm at work and I need another coffee before the cotton wool that is my brain morphs into something that medical science generally recognises as a functioning human brain (key word there: functioning).
But more importantly its Friday morning and today our house starts being built !!

Now a different note, thanks to an Israeli company (in presumably, Israel) has developed a method for basically armour plating your teeth. Now THIS is what I call science! "The Israeli Company Fluorinex Active has developed a new technology that can protect the tooth from cavities for 5 years with one simple electrical treatment. The company is currently working on a small device which, together with a gel, will impose an efficient ion exchange process through an Electro-chemical reaction in which fluor ions displace the Hydroxide ions at the outer layer of the tooth. This is intended to produce a new mineral layer with significantly improved chemical and physical resistance to the aggressive bacteria and the resulting acidic environment in the mouth."
So in short they chemically alter the composition of your teeth into something that bacteria doesn't like, "but is probably quite incapable of drinking the coffee" (unavoidable and obscure Douglas Adams reference)

The mega teeth morphing company can be found here.

http://www.isracast.com/tech_news/tech_updates/010206tech.aspx

And since I'm in a link listing mood here is another one that may be of interest (not teeth related).

www.spurl.net

Due to different environments at work and home I daily use the Opera (my favourite), IE and Firefox browsers and keeping all of my bookmarks in sync between them was a nightmare I rapidly tired of, so now I use the Spurl web service and I havent used the bookmarking features of any of the broswers for months now as all my bookmarks are stored online and accessable thru a side bar like IE's history bar, Just awesome. I bookmark a page at work, go home and the bookmark is available :-)

The challenges of a narrow block

36.6 metres long, 9.59 metres wide, 351 metres square. Not a huge block of land by any means, but definitely not a small block either, but try finding a house that will fit on a block of land not quite 10 metres (~35 feet) wide.

I have been capturing my day to day experiences with this challenge on a nifty little program called DatePad (http://home.wanadoo.nl/ajberg/datepad.html) and it occurred to me that basically I was writing an offline blog, so I transferred things to here and I plan to use this now to track the (hopefully) daily progress of our new house as it is built, from a dirt block to a gleaming new monument to suburban living (again, hopefully!).

I am a software engineer by trade, optimistic cynical geek by nature (work that one out!) and hopefully (there's that word again!) by October 2006, a house owner.

The situation so far:

1. The land was purchased in April 2005, we ummed and arrred about it for a little while because it was a very narrow block of land, far narrower then the housing and building companies have standard plans for.
2. We ended up purchasing the land in April 2005 and started the process of looking for a builder that would accommodate the narrow block
3. We ended up with 3 builders, Impressions, Ventura, and Scott Park. Impressions, for some reason seemed to think we were not worth the effort, since about 2 weeks later we started talking to them they stopped talking to us, no emails, no return of phone calls, nothing... Not Happy! So they went of our list very quickly. Ventura was happy to design us a house to fit on our block for free, Scott Park charged as $500 for a design, but in the end the sheer effort the Ventura went to, daily emails, phone calls, nothing to much trouble, meant that they were our final pick
4. In mid November of '05 we signed the final contract for the house
5. And now tomorrow (3rd of Feb '06) the earth works start on our block! Wheee.

The house is everything we wanted, 4 bedrooms (1 becoming the computer room), two bathrooms, both with baths (a immovable set in stone requirement from the significant other), a lounge room, and a open space family, meals and kitchen, smart wiring thru out (yes!) and a host of other things. Plus a front and back yard and a lock up garage.

Can't wait! Hopefully (again!) by this time tomorrow there will be a hive of activity on the site (there had better be!).