Hope is a cruel temptress
Took the day off work on Thursday to meet the Houspect building inspector onsite because finally the brickwork has been completed.
About half an hour into the inspection guess who turns up, the missing roof guys (who should have started on Tuesday, but until I wasn't even sure they existed). Well they turn up and get straight to work (rather industrious) claiming they will be able to roof the equivilent of 50 square metres of floorspace a day, so all being well they will finish on Wednesday the 14th of June. They seem fairly competent (but then I siad that about the brickies too) and the main roof guy had a long chat to my inspecotr about some new roofing standards that have come in recently to make sure they both understood things the same way.
And THEN bout half an hour after the roofies turn up guess who else turns up! Glenn the Brick Supervisor, and that WAS a surprise. As it turned out it was a really good thing to have happen as my Housing Inspector showed that he is worth his weight in pure gold as the first thing he did was introduce himself to Glenn and then take Glenn around the construction and point out the major things that need fixing and then gets agreements from him to fix them. Now I know what you are all thinking, you are thinking "It will never happen" and so was I but then Glenn got on the phone in front of us and called Ventura Accounts and cancelled the payment to the brickies, and then rang the brickies and told them get over to the site and to fix a series of issues if they wanted to get paid. I was almost impressed (I say almost because I have learnt to reserve my judgemtn until something actually gets done).
Although I must admit that I was slightly stunned at the flurry of activity on my block, we had the inspector measure and hitting and testing everything in sight, Glenn on the phone arguing with the brickies, and 4 roof carpenters balancing on top of the walls over the place (an OH&S nightmare!) moving long bits of timber around.
Still, most importantly the overall report from the inspector was that the brickwork was pretty good, all the measurements are accurate to within 10mm, the walls themselves are straight and not likely to fall down anytime in the future and the rooms are all where they should be. But boy is he sharp (he being the inspector) , on a blank wall of large limestone bricks, (full height and about 4 metres wide) he spotted 1 brick (one!) that was poorly laid, with far to much cement between it and the next brick (and we are talking cream cement here). I would never have spotted that, never.
The other major problems (relatively major to the other problems, but by no means huge problems in themselves) can be summed up in 2 words : "Lazy Brickies"
The problems are:
- Haphazardly spaced weep holes in the lower brickwork (2 in the space of 2 bricks and then none for 8 bricks)
- That one brick that was very poorly laid
- A lack of brick ties on ajoining walls. luckily however it only seems to be on the half height wall that forms the kitchen bench, there are no ties between the end of that wall and the main wall it butts up to.
- No ties on bricks that go over one of the interior doors, a couple of taps with a chisel handle worked a brick loose
- The biggest problem structurally was in the garage. The garage has 6 columns to strengthen it (siz point on the single brick wall that has a second rown of bricks applied) and only in 3 of those columns where steel reinforcing rods used. This will require quite a bit of work to fix, but fix it they shall!
That is about it for today. But finally some progress.
