Blockwork
The brickies are on site. Not every day — they have other projects on, so we get them roughly once a week — but when they are here, they get loads done. A good run of a day, and you can really see the difference.
With the walls and window openings starting to appear, it’s suddenly much easier to picture how it’s all going to feel.
Standing in the living room opening, and looking out over the field, we are able to see exactly how the view is going to be.
Seeing the view from the main bedroom window prompted a conversation we probably should have had earlier: what exactly do we want in our eyeline from the bedroom? – probably not a caravan and some old sheds.
We would rather have the brickies here every day. Watching progress happen in weekly instalments when we are itching to see walls at full height requires a certain amount of patience. However, when they are available on site, they build quickly. A day’s work is a decent amount of wall.
The silver lining to the pace is that due to some ongoing technicalities around the build warranty and site insurance, we still do not have a completed mortgage. The next invoice comes when the blockwork is completed — so the limited availability of the brickies, for the moment, is doing us a bit of a favour. It’s a race against time to get the mortgage completed before the blockwork is completed!
The scaffolding arrives
At this stage of the build, the entire structure is single skin. The outer leaf goes up first — one block wide — and the inner leaf follows later. So when the scaffolding went up, every wall on the site was in that state. The builder had made this clear to the scaffolding team.
Within about half an hour of them arriving, a scaffolding pole went too close to a wall, and a section came down – fortunately, not a large one. He was not too pleased!
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