[Progress.065] Brick work almost done, new issue with alfresco drain pipe

It has been raining for the last few days and we even have a wild thunderstorm last night. The brick work was almost finished, if we can only have a few days without rain... Well, the rain did stop today, but today is Sunday! We need a non-raining week day to continue the brick work. Hopefully everything will be finished this week as they said -- as usual, only if weather permits...

As shown below, we only have very little work left at the front, see if you can pick it up from this photo.

This is a closer look, yes, it's the top part of the front middle window. Also, if you look at the right hand side, the windows sill also wasn't finished. Actually, all windows sills weren't done yet. There's also some brick work left in garage and the last alfresco post.

Talking about the alfresco post, we had a chat with one of the brick layers on Friday. He mentioned the reason for delaying the last alfresco post was because they have to wait for the concrete footing to be fixed -- and it has been done. They will finish the last post once the rain stops... Based on this, I start comparing all the previous photos for that area this weekend and found a new problem -- a drainage pipe on the ground for connecting down pipe from the last alfresco post was missing!

The first photo below was taken on 15/9 when the frame was half done. You can see the drain pipe right next to the concrete footing/piere highlighted in red.

The second photo was on 20/10 with brick work half done, the pipe was still there.

The next one on 30/10, the pipe disappeared! And you can see a few bricks been half buried next to the concrete footing. May be this is the "fix" the brick layer mentioned --- the original concrete piere probably wasn't in the right place and they need to dig a bit extra side wise, put in the concrete, and then support it with some bricks. That's probably why the pipe was removed -- to give way to the concrete pier.

This is another photo taken on 2/11 (Friday). The way they place the bricks around the footing doesn't look quite nice to me. And since they removed the drain pipe, hope the underground underground wasn't affected, and I wonder how are they going to connect it back??

The last photo was taken today, I found this poor little fellow been dumped under one of the scaffoldings --- yes, this is the drain pipe that's been removed. I can recognise it as it has this special cut on the top. From the length looks like the builder will need to dig quite deep (around 250-400mm ?) to connect it back (or replace with a new one?). Well, as long as it's fix, I don't really care how are they going to do it...

As it took me a while to scan through so many photos during this incident, I was discussing with wife about the idea of using our video camera instead of digital (photo) camera to record all the things happening at our site.

Main reason is, with digital camera you can only take photos of a small area at a time and it's almost impossible to cover every angle. Also sometimes it can be a bit difficult to identify which area was the photo taken (try to compare 10 close up photos of bricks or frames...).

With video camera, as long as you don't move too fast, you can sort of "scan" through the whole area, wall by wall, windows by windows, frame by frame. Only issue I can think of, is with digital cameras you can use the flash lights during night time, it can be a bit difficult for video cameras at night or during poor light condition... Any way, will give that a try next time if possible.