Post Slab, Pre-Bricks

Couple of site works updates in this post, which I'll add to as time passes.

21 July 2022:

On the 19th of July, two large 1500 x 1500 concrete soakwells were delivered to site. According to the plans, one was going into the front left corner of the block and one in the back right near my existing shed. To our surprise, they didn't sit there long as the next time we went past the block on July 21st, they were already in the ground with two new pipes sticking up. Given the slab had only been down one week as of the 20th, I was surprised to see a digger had driven across it already (in their defense, they took the shortest possible route) in order to dig in the rear soakwell. Happy to see some more progress. There were also more PVC pipes delivered to site, along with several boxes of plumbing supplies so looks like there is some more work for the plumbing team to do before we're ready to commence the brickwork stage.

9 August 2022:

Over the last few weeks the weather in Perth has been nothing short of horrid. We've had a very large, very slow moving low pressure system sitting over the south west of WA and it's brought days and days of strong winds and rain so not a lot has happened at the block. However, last Friday, August 5th, a whole team of plumbers were on site with a mini excavator making quite the mess digging in all the plumbing for the new house. From what I could see, they connected some storm water drains, connected the mains water, laid gas and water pipes and also put in my provisions for my pool equipment that we asked for during the planning process. The wet weather continues so I'm not sure if they are finished yet or not as they haven't been back thus far this week. 

In other news, we had part of our boundary wall fall down during the digging of our footings for our garage, which abuts the boundary wall. An engineer was engaged after its partial collapse and to no one's surprise, found the footings from 1970 non existent. This is a 2m high, 30m long limestone block wall so we've had a couple of people out to look at it following a letter from the engineers and we're getting BMC Microfine Chemical Grout Solutions out to do some underpinning works on the remainder of the wall to ensure we don't have any futher issues with it going forward. Stannard are going to rectify the bit that fell down as part of the garage wall construction (which is itself a retaining wall with the cavity filled with rebar and cement). This underpinning works is scheduled for August 22.

18 August 2022:

Today we were meant to meet up with a Landscape Designer from The Greenscape Collective at Homebase Subiaco to go over our landscape master plan but unfortunatley she got covid and couldn't meet us, at least in person. Amanda and I went over anyway and dialled her in and went through our design, making a few tweaks and giving some feedback on things like stepper sizes, front wall design, plant selection, etc. We also had a look at a few things at Homebase such as aggregate colours, decking and flooring options. The Greenscape Collective will now go and make all those changes for one final check in before generating construction drawings for us. We're going to get Stannard to build the front wall from bricks and render it as part of the build.

30 August 2022:

A fairly quiet few weeks by all accounts. On August 19th, we had the first of our window frames show up on site, which was unexpected. The next day, the wooden door frames for the front door and the doorway between garage and mud room also arrived. We had BMC come out on August 22nd to complete the underpinning works for our western side retaining wall. They pumped roughly 5,875L of grout emulsion under 23 lineal metres of limestone wall to a depth of 1m. This has provided the 50 year old wall with a stable foundation and should prevent any further rotation. This was really just a piece of mind exercise as we are not doing any earthworks near this wall but better to be safe than sorry for the sake a few thousand dollars. The next day, several metal internal door frames were also added to the collection of door and window frames. As part of our fortnightly construction progress updates, Stannard informed us that we should see brickwork commence in the next four weeks, which is super exciting and in line with the 10 weeks post slab down they originally quoted us. It's been pretty wet since the slab was poured so it's been really good curing weather so I'm quite pleased it's had this time to cure properly and slowly.