Neighbour's Construction Work - 2021-05-17

 Some long pipes arrived, probably some drainage or plumbing work.

[Progress.151] Big hail storm last Saturday, leaf guard installed

Saturday (21/2) around 11:30 am, we went to one of the Chinese restaurants in Eastwood (a suburb next to Epping) for lunch. It was pouring quite heavily, and half way through our meal all the lights in the the restaurant went off. Luckily the emergency light turned on immediately and we were still able to quickly finish the lunch. Without the air con it was extremely hot.

When we walked out the restaurant, we found that all the shops on the street lost power. It certainly caused some impact to all the businesses that day! Then the hail storm started, it didn't last a long time but it's quite amazing watching all the little ice blocks falling with the rain.

We quickly rush home after the storm and found half of our sun room flooded with water. Didn't have time to take any photo as we were busy cleaning up.

The water slowly disappeared after about 10 - 15 min. This is what our sun room looks like after the clean up, flooring tiles still quite wet.

We have 3 drain holes at the back, I quickly check all of them but couldn't find any sign of blockage. I think it's probably because there's just too much water to be handled.

Also found that there's so much water that it formed a small valley in the garden at the front as below.

Talking about the front garden, I took a photo from different angle as below. And yes, you can see the new house by Eden Brae right across the road.

Compare to the following one last July, these plants have certainly grown pretty well! Urh... Please ignore the ugly fence, which neighbour refused to share the cost for replacement... Our plants have done an excellent job in blocking the view...

We just finished the installation of leaf guard over all the gutters, which should have also helped with the water drainage. A few photos below, it wasn't very clear though.

Tell me how you feel about the quality of the work, and like to see if you can pick up any problem from these 2 photos. We are still waiting for ABC Seamless to fix a few things, which I will try to cover the details in future post.

[Progress.149] New Year Surprise!

Happy New Year everyone!

We have a new year surprise the other day. First my wife noticed the water flow into the bathroom drain was quite slow during shower time. After some continuous nagging, oops sorry, I mean "friendly reminder", we decided to get our hands "dirty" and visit the "underground world"...

Before that, all my dear readers, can you please show your hands if any of you ever open your bathroom drain cover and look what's inside the plug hole? It's certainly not a nice scene, and normally we would just expect to see lots of hair down there causing the blockage.

Well, then take a look at the photo below and see what we found in our Ensuite bath room:

Yes, concretes! Big handful of them! In our newly built house and we just moved in for around 8 months!

We quickly checked all 3 bathrooms and the laundry. All the ground floor ones are clear, a few smaller concrete debris were also found in the main bathroom shower area upstairs.

The worst one is the floor drain in the middle of the main bathroom upstairs. The whole thing was blocked by a huge concrete as shown in photo below, only a few small holes left around the corner could allow the water to flow through. We suspect someone poured the cement down the drain during the construction...

We contacted our builder and they quickly sent someone to remove it last week.

The problem sort of resolved, but that doesn't solve the mystery, why?

Conspiracy thinking starts emerging....Why is there concrete in there? Was it done accidentally or purposely? Who would do that kind of damage? .....

After some discussion within the family we think the only person who could be using cement/concrete, and working in the wet areas after lock down (and before handover) would be the C & L tiler subcontracted by our builder.

We did have our own tilers after handover for tiling the kitchen floor and front porch areas. But we watched/followed them quite closely everyday, they won't have a chance to go upstairs to do anything.

We also recalled that the tiler from C & L did the ground floor tiling job quite well. But when it comes to the upstairs ones, not sure whether he used it as an opportunity to train his apprentices, or was he busy with other jobs and thus not paying much attention to ours, we complaint a few times about the quality and even the builder's own inspector asked him to re-do a few tiles in some areas.

I don't think that's a problem with my builder as the tiler is the subcontractor, and it's almost impossible for inspectors to check each and every drain/plug holes for wet areas...

So, as a lesson for all new house owners who ever complaint about the tiling work (who didn't?), make sure you check "inside" the plug holes for all your wet area! It might be a "common trick" for tilers to show their "revenge"?? Don't know...

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Any way, that's it for the not-so-happy stuffs. I like to share with you some more interesting ones, hopefully would cheer everyone up a bit for the new year...

I found these beautiful drain covers from Linkasink. It's quite amazing to see the plain, boring, drain covers can be in so many different kinds of shape and design!

Finally, to stop those hair blocking your bathroom drain, there's this product from Kaboodle.


Note sure if all these products are available in Australia...
Happy New Year!