[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.

[Tips.013] Keep Track of Daily Weather Observation Records

When you sign the contract with your builder, you will notice there're a few clauses which talks about weather.

What it actually means is, if your builder finished your house on time, there's nothing to worry about. If you are unlucky and it wasn't on time due to whatever reason, the builder will get some figure about number of raining days, double it (every raining day requires extra day for the site to be dried), then use it as excuse for negotiation.

I briefly talked about this in my previous post [Tips.006] Ask for a copy of Contract in early stages.

This tips is about: instead of waiting for your builder to provide some high figure which you might not know how to verify, you might want to start collecting that data yourself. And it's quite simple, just visit this web site from Bureau of Meteorology.

As shown below, the web site shows the daily weather observation record of past 13 months for all areas:

I clicked on Sydney and this is what I got for the current month:

Scroll to the bottom and you can choose any record from previous 13 months. So all you have to do is check it once every few months and write down the total number of raining days. Or you might even want to print it out for record!

Hopefully everything is on time and you won't need to use this, but who knows, better be safe than sorry!

[Progress.008] Are We There Yet?

Weather
It has been pouring like hell in the past 2 days. The weather forcast for the long weekend doesn't look good either. Yes, we need more rain, but how can I start my construction in such bad weather? Hopefully before my construction starts, we got enough water and the rain stops...

Report Required for Tree Removal
Council wants us to find an arborist to write a tree report before they could approve the tree removal. Still struggling on this, as we don't want to spend $500+ to be told that the tree is healthy...

Are we there yet?
Still working hard on the drawings and tender, already picked up a few mistakes:

The ensuite door was changed to sliding instead of hinged, but the drawing wasn't updated.

The space reserved for dish washer under kitchen benchtop was moved to cater for sink position, but the power point still remain in original location.

They added extra robe door in one of the bedrooms as requested to fully utilise the space. But from the drawings, it shows that the newly added right hand side door will hit the room door when both opened.

Felt like dealing with IBx, our outsourced partner at work. You paid them money for service, but you still have to double check what they did...

They even put in a note on all drawings: "It is the responsibility of the owner to ensure that the layout and all special inclusions are correct".

Just received the "plain English" contract yesterday. Looks like need to spend another week on this document...