Did some burn test on the pink insulation material the other day. The result is shown below.
From photo below, you can see that the insulation turned from pink to grey white colour and become quite crispy. The short video shows the burn testing process. The high temperature melted the top plastic cover of my lighter, but the insulation material wouldn't burn at all.
After 2 busy weeks, it's finally Xmas time. The construction work for 2007 finished on 21/12 (Fri) and won't continue until 14/1/2008 (Mon).
I noticed I haven't create any weekly summary posts since mid-November, and was a bit concern about whether all the issues are been tracked/updated properly. I will definitely try to get it all done during the Xmas break.
The followings are updates for the last week of 2007:
The gyprock work started on 17/12 (Mon) with the upper level and on 18/12 (Tue) we were surprised to find all the ground floor walls and ceilings also covered. The first photo was taken from the front porch. We have 3 "Corbelled Shoulder Arch" and these are the 2 in lounge area, viewed from the main entrance. You can also see the metal thing they installed for the arch. As the cornice hasn't been installed yet, you can clearly see the gaps between the walls and ceiling. This is the meals area, next to the kitchen. This is the kitchen area. Forgot to mention that the other day, our supervisor mentioned to us there's a mistake with the height of the kitchen. He mentioned it's too low and needs to be raised a bit higher, otherwise the benchtop can't be installed. I thought that was the brick layers problem, but he said it has been wrong since the frames been ordered. The worst part is, the whole window, the gyprock wall and bricks outside all have to be re-done... Sounds like a big job to us, and don't understand why they still let the brick layer, electrician, gyprock work continues as wouldn't it be much easier to fix if they stop all works related to that area when they found the problem?? Will definitely record this as a major issue... This is the bay windows area at the back, next to the alfresco. This is the last arch, which leads to the powder room and study. The door at the left is the garage door. This is the front bay windows area. This is the wall of laundry, there seems to be some gap in the area where 2 walls joined together. The photos below are from 20/12 (Thu), first one was taken from my mobile. The insulation guys have fixed the alfresco. Hope these insulation material won't fall down again... Again, viewed from front porch area, the patterns on the walls & ceilings make the whole area looks like an aboriginal art gallery... The 2 "Corbelled Shoulder Arch" in lounge area now looks quite different. The metal thing is no longer visible. This is the meals & kitchen area at the back. The gaps I mentioned above in the laundry area were also nicely covered. The garage. Other than the removal of scaffolding and brick cleaning for ground floor (which was interrupted by our neighbour last time...), looks like all the external works have been finished. I heard from a friend who built with our builder a few years ago that everything after the gyprock work will be very very slow. Will wait and see how it goes. At least I don't have to worry about bad weather any more...
We thought it's going to be a quiet weekend after the busy week, but we were wrong, it's even worse....
When we drove past our site on Saturday (15/12) morning, we were quite surprise (yes, another unexpected one...) to see a trades person who just finished washing the ground floor external bricks, was locking the gate and just about to leave. He wasn't in a good mood and we soon found out why, our not-so-friendly neighbour also approached us complaining about the trades person's strong water flow causing damages to her garden, and she just had a big argument/fight with him... yes, yes, I understand, ...very sorry about that.... yes...blur blur blur blur....
Any way, with the external bricks all cleaned, the whole house looks even more impressive. We were all very happy about it, until we looked inside..... It was a horrible scene, all the nice and tidy insulation work in the alfresco, garage area and front bay window were damaged. I couldn't believe what I see... The alfresco part as shown below was the worst as the ground was full of mud, and all the insulation materials on the ground were soaked in mud water... This is the garage, some of the new delivered cornice were soaked in water as well... This is the front bay window, again, insulation fallen from the ceiling and water everywhere, this is disastrous...I don't understand why would our builder organise to have the bricks cleaned at this stage...They should have lots of experience about this, and should know how to organise different kinds of works in proper order/timing to avoid disasters like this... I then noticed as shown below, the side wall wasn't cleaned?! I thought the cleaning work was all done!? Or was the guy too pissed off by my neighbour and decided to abandon the work?? There's not much we can do about it, and will leave it with our builder to sort it out. May be they should install a camera, or send a guard here. This way they can work out our neighbour's schedule, and when no one was home, quickly sneak in and get the job done... We were quite happy to see the 2 air con pipes been re-sealed. The air con contractor called the other day after the inspection, tried very hard to persuade us to leave the 5 minute patch up job until early next year, which we wouldn't accept. Obviously he wasn't very happy, and that explains the long tangling tape not been finished nicely... As shown below, the unfinished roof job between the porch and the front bay window was still as it was, without any progress. What's even worse, the bay window ceiling is now blocked by the insulation stuffs, wonder how is our supervisor going to fix the leak. We are also quite happy to see the huge hole above garage now been filled with beautiful shining tiles instead of the previous blue sarkings... I also noticed this tiny little hook been used at the edge of the tiles, I think this must be to fasten those smaller tiles which were cut into small pieces to fit the roof valley lines. What I don't understand is, why are they only been used in one side of the valley and not the other side? I thought the insulation problem was the last thing we need to worry for this week, while we were planing to leave, I noticed another major issue. Again it's on the roof valley tiles near the front porch, but this time it's on the other side - the garage side. Have a look at the photo below and see if you can pick up anything... This is another closer photo for the same spot in a slightly different angle. You can see that at the end of the metal valley there wasn't any tile or gutter under it. So instead of leading all the rain water to the gutter or the roof tiles, it goes straight into the sarking! I think I can now understand why Allworth homes, one of the builders we approached last year, prefers to play safe and refused our request to add any bay windows to their house designs. The roof design for bay windows/porch area really needs to be looked at carefully, otherwise there will be leaking everywhere.
For all of you with bay windows, front porch, or complicate roof designs, have you checked your roof design carefully for leakage??
On Thursday (13/12), all the insulation work seems to have finished. As shown in photos below, all the timber frames for external walls are filled with all these pinkish insulation material. This photo shows the ceiling of the front bay window area. Look at how they connect the tiny strings like spider web to prevent the insulation from falling down. This one is from the kitchen/family room area, also filled with insulation. I noticed some of upstairs ceiling area wasn't finished yet. I was told they will come back to finish it after the gyprock walls/ceilings all done, don't know why though. On Friday (14/12) there was this huge bin been delivered. This probably means the builder is planing for another site clean up to get rid of all the rubbish. Luckily the bin was placed inside the fence, hope our neighbours won't strike again on this excellent opportunity, ... And my beautiful 4 steps cornices were also delivered, can't wait to see them been installed. There were also lots of boards been delivered, which I believe is for the walls and ceilings. These boards are huge, looks at least 7-8 m in length... At the back of the boards, I noticed this writings: "VILLABOARD LINING - PRODUCT CONTAINS SAND, A SOURCE OF RESPIRABLE SILICA.DO NOT BREATHE DUST AS IT MAY LEAD TO SERIOUS PERSONAL INJURY OR DEATH. CONTACT JAMES HARDIE AND FOLLOW INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS AND MSDS." Not sure what you think about that, standard safety warning messages? Or was it to avoid the company from been sued? This reminds me about the sad story of asbestos victim Mr Bernie Banton, better keep a safety distance from these dangerous stuffs...
On Wednesday (12/12) we have our first inspection. Our supervisor was on site, and Howard from "H & K Ryan & Associates" was there as well in his fancy little car, marked with beautiful marketing signs everywhere. While Howard was busy checking, I just wonder around. First thing I noticed was cables everywhere, was the spiderman here yesterday?? I then noticed the eaves lining for front porch was also finished. The wire for the light was also done. There was this special little pipe in the powder room ceiling area, looks totally different from other much bigger pipes for air con. I think this is for the ducted fan. There were lots of thin lines in the frames & noggings. Looks like these were left overs from Tuesday's insulation work. There was also this huge pile of insulation materials in the family room area. Those insulation guys were pretty quick, even though my wife stopped them quick early on Tuesday morning, they still managed to finish this meals room wall. Just imagine how are we going to do any inspection if all the walls were like this -- fully covered with insulation... That's Howard in his shiny green vest in the background. I checked the frames for the sliding door and quite happy to see the damaged frame fixed. I then noticed a problem, we paid extra to upgrade the tracks for all our sliding doors to heavy duty ones but the ones been installed are only the normal J type ones. As shown in video below, Howard picked up some squeaking noise in one of the bedrooms upstair.
In the alfresco, I noticed some electrical wires entered the house through the same hole as the sewer pipe. This doesn't look good and I hope this will be all be covered when the ceiling were installed. Compare with the diagram below, I noticed in the robe for one of the bedrooms, the air con pipe should be coming down from ceiling through the area at the right (marked in red), but somehow they decided to add another block in the middle (marked in green) and take a short cut... Howard also found that the roof above the front bay window doesn't seem to be finished yet. I will let you know later why this is a major issue to us... If you have been following my blog, this is a closer look of the unfinished front roof above the garage, listed as an issue the othe day. You can also have a better view of how the sarkings are been installed with the pink foam and other stuffs.. Howard also picked up 2 of the air con pipes upstairs weren't sealed properly, this is one of them. I heard that because of the coming holiday, all the trades person were fully loaded with work. Everyone is trying to get everything done before Christmas. And I think when you do things in a hurry, the quality dropped... We have a triangular flower box next to the stairs. According to the drawings, the power point should be "inside" the flower box, so that we can install some lights if required. But the power point was installed far above the box, need to get it fixed. After some research, I changed my mind about connecting my "future" projector with "future" receiver with HDMI. Mainly because not many projectors (within my budget range) support HDMI and the cable was quite expensive. I bought this RGB cable instead for the projector.
To be honest, I wasn't really sure when will my projector based home theatre be fully finished. There will be lots of other more important things needs to be done first, before this "nice to have" entertainment stuffs. Any way, just like the ceiling speakers, I just want to get the cabling done at this stage, will worry about the rest later... We noticed there were quite a lot of frames been cut and then joined again with some sort of "re-enforcement". It doesn't look right to me, but according to Howard this is quite normal. He mentioned a term which I can't remember. The reason was, it's very difficult to have all the frames in straight line during installation and that's why the carpenters do this to adjust the frames accordingly (for the gyprock walls). When the cable work finished late in the afternoon, we got even more cables everywhere. Security cables, speaker cables, network cables, telephone cables, ...etc, I try to take a few photos on every spot, but it's still quite confusing to me. All I know is, the white ones are for electricity, the pink ones are for speaker, the black one is my RGB, the blue ones are network cables.... Before the end of this post, let me tell you why the unfinished roof work picked up by Howard was a major issue. After he left, I did further checking, and noticed some bigger problems. As shown in photo below, this is the area right under the unfinished roof work, the white/greyish thing (at the top) behind the timber is the roof valley. It ends there before reaching the gutter and all the water just run down from there and you can still see that the timber right under it was quite wet. Actually all the bricks under it were wet. I pointed this out to the supervisor and he promised to get it fixed. This photo is from the other side of the same wall, which is inside the front porch. Again, you can see there're some signs of leakage as well. In the end, Howard was quite happy with the quality, most of the thing he picked up were minor issues (except the roof). At least we felt a bit relief. Hopefully our builder can fix all the issues before Christmas, otherwise we might consider stopping the payment...
