Frame Complete

At 2:51 pm yesterday, I received a text message from Metricon Homes notifying me that the next invoice had been emailed. This of course signalled the completion of the roof and wall frame stage!

Not a word from our site manager!!! I wish I could take Nick’s carefree attitude about J’s lack of communication but his no weekly updates is really annoying and frustrating me.  It would have been nice to hear about the frame stage being completed directly from the SM, not from some electronic alert. I might be nitpicking because we are thrilled with the progress thus far. The quality of work on our house is testament to his ability as a site manager so in that sense I can’t fault him. He’s doing a fantastic job. It’s just that his aversion to phone calls is not very endearing! Sorry for the mini tanty, but to keep the blog honest I wanted to get that off of my chest 🙂

Anyhoo, I hot footed it down to the block to check out the works and at 5:30 pm on a Friday afternoon I was pleasantly surprised to see trades still working. The small team of chippies, all three of them, were tinkering upstairs. I think they were putting the finishing touches to the master bedroom window. Great to see and I almost felt compelled to race down to the bottle shop to buy them a slab of beer. I say almost because all good intention went out the window as I got well and truly distracted by the loveliness of their handiwork! I absolutely love them all! So very happy and excited by having reached another giant milestone..

Bring on bricks baby!!!

I’m in love with the Monument windows..

Side view of the huge feature staircase window

Up close and personal – love it!

Windows all in the Study

Home Theatre feature window

Kitchen splashback window

Picture window in the Powder Room downstairs

Framework and roof trusses in our Parents Retreat complete…love the huge proportion 🙂

 

 

And so we have frames

Before the Christmas break, our site manager informed us he was aiming to start framing the week of the 12th January. By that time, the slab would have well and truly cured after 28+ days of laying dormant.

So, Nick had been driving by on his way to work since Monday in the hopes of catching the builders in action. It wasn’t until Thursday when the chippies were finally out in force and boy did they make up for lost time! In two short days, they smashed the first floor frames out of the park and the house is starting to take shape. Welcome back to the block Metricon, happy building!

To give you an idea of how fast they had the frames up, these first set of photos were taken at midday on Day1.

Front view with the garage to the left

Rear view of the Family Room with a nice big opening for the sliding stacker doors

Side view of what would be our Home Theatre

And these piccies were taken at the end of day 1. As you can see, the first floor frames had all been erected and some of the wall panels started.

As luck would have it, our SM was on site when Nick rocked up to watch the chippies do their thing. Needless to say he jumped at the chance to have an impromptu site walk through. Lucky him! He reported that SM had spotted a couple of really minor errors.

1. The opening to the Butler’s Pantry was too narrow. He thought they’d erected the frame the wrong way as to the right of the opening is the narrower fridge cavity so all they had to do was flip it the other way around. Easy peasy! Great pick up SM!
2. We decided to have all our bifold and sliding stacker doors rebated into the concrete so they sit flush with the floor. Price per door was $110 so all up only cost us $440. Somehow the concrete rebate in the Dining was missed. No biggie and an easy fix.

Gotta be happy with the man in charge of building our house. He thinks framing will be complete by the end of the coming week. Let’s hope he continues to please 🙂

And to round off this post, here are some pics showing progress on Day 2..

Steel beams now in place over the garage door opening

Floor joists for the second storey completed

Loving the wide entrance! Can’t wait to see our massive front door go in

Exciting week ahead for our Hudson! Bring it on, Metricon.