And then, when everything seemed to be going so sloooow, the roof went on.
All of a sudden we had a
real roof on the house - actually it only took the roofies two days or so to get 80% of the roof in place. Essentially a stapling job with premeasured and precut steel.
It took another two weeks to finish the rest of the roof - mostly the capping around the edges. During this time we had some heavy rain storms in Sydney so a lot of water poured into the house, down the walls and through the gaps in the capping.
The metal capping looks, at least from the ground, like a massive tinfoil tray bent over the edges of the brick, to form a large
lid.
The roofies also dropped in 2.5cms of space age insulation under the steel roof. After a lot of thought, we asked for more insulation to be added once the [interior]
gyprock was installed inside, in the hope it might quieten heavy rain, or hail, on the flat (metal) roof. The builder added insulation to the value of 4.5 - which is acoustic and heat insulation in one package. In a few months we'll see how effective the additional cost proves to be...
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| In go the roof batts |
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On goes the steel roof.
It took approximately 2 days to get most of the roof on.
The whole roof was clip-locked in place with no nails breaking the surface. |
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| Here's a shot of the metal capping bent over the double brick outer wall. |
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We used an additional 4.5 rated insulation under the standard roof batts to help
cut out the heat and the noise from rain, hail and possums... |
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| Acoustic batts waiting to be gyprocked into the guest bathroom ceiling |
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| Apparently gyprocking is cheaper than real plastering - but it's no less messy! |
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| Three weeks after we got back from Cuba the painters turned up to apply an undercoat sealer to the exterior render. |
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| Close up of one of the (expensive) commercial grade aluminium windows after the renderers have been through... |
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And joy of joys, the tinted undercoating goes on.
This is crunch time because it's so hard to judge, from a sample pot no larger than a small Vegimite jar, how the final colour will look on the house. |
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What we both did not want was the sort of bland house colour that all new houses seem to be painted these days
'cement', 'stone', 'taupe', 'moss', 'mould', 'muddy grey' (greige), virus and mushroom.
I think we succeeded! |
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Robin going into the house to check if anything else had been done today!
It's unfortunate living so close to the building site because I can go there nearly every day so get to witness, first hand, how excruciaitingly slow most of this process can be... |
