Ground Floor Plate Height Achieved

On Monday November 28th 2022, we officially reached plate height from our ground floor. That's pretty much one month for all brickwork to be laid, including a few days lost to site cleaning in preparation for the crane, a day for the crane to lift the supporting structural beams into place, a couple of days lost to poor weather and a few days when Gary and the boys were offsite finishing some other jobs. All in all, I feel it was a pretty fast build, and neat too. We're really happy with the workmanship (brickmanship?).

The house is feeling great to walk around and we're really happy with the layout/design of it. The rooms already feel spacious and the brickwork gives us an idea of how high the ceilings will be. All the doors being 28c also help with the sense of space. There was only one on-site variation relating to the cavity sliding door, where they ended up removing one side of the double brick cavity to help access it later if need be, replacing the bricks with gyprock and giving us another 100mm of cupboard width in the scullery.

Yesterday we did our walkthrough with the electrician to confirm the placement on all our lightswitches, powerpoints, internet points, TV points and all other electricial items for the ground floor with Ray from Custom Electrics. He was very patient with us over several hours of walking through the house thinking about where we want everything. There weren't a lot of major changes, mainly a few more powerpoints for outside and an extra light in our void area. There were quite a few shifts of power points though (fortunately no cost for those!).

Unfortunately I don't think there will be much more progress this year given we're fast approaching Christmas and trades are still flat out. Our site supervisor has said his form worker simply will not give him a date and therefore he can't give us one. If we could have squeezed in the upper slab before Christmas then it could have sat and cured while everyone was on holiday break but never mind. Hopefully it's all systems go after the break and we can see the house continue it journey up!

Have a great festive season and I'll update again in the new year.