Apologies and advance warnings; concrete proof – slab, soakpit and sewers; lonely brick storage site; Dino’s dilemma; men at work!; the sacred interstitial space; graffiti message, but not from us

Apologies if you’ve been eagerly awaiting This is the House that Roy and Verne Built: Part Two after the first in the series, Part One: Breaking Ground, which we celebrated back in April 2021. After the slab was laid in May, the site lay cold and abandoned until four months later when – spoiler alert! – the hoped-for, prayed-for and longed-for bricklayer team eventually came on site.

Now that we’re just about up to the second level, here’s the story of the build so far. Feel quite free to gloss over any dreary construction details (I know I would), and simply savour all my lovely photos of Roy.

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10 May: The slab goes down!

Just in time for Roy’s 70^th birthday, things started happening on the site at 543 Burns Beach Road. The Collier plumber came to lay pipes, and the footings were done by the same chaps who would come the next day to pour the concrete slab foundation, or simply slab. Footings, by the way, are what stop your house from moving away from its intended position. They are therefore by definition A Good Thing.

Footings are what stop your house from moving away from its intended position. They are therefore by definition A Good Thing

As we trotted down the hill at 7.45am (little else could have got Roy up and about in public that early), a concrete mixer was driving away from the site, along Elinda Lane. Oh bugger! Had we missed the action? No – that was the second of three trucks, and there was still another load to be delivered. Hurrah!

The wet gloop was transferred from the turning-drum-mobile into this impressive Pumpcrete contraption with a lofty crane that pumped it into various areas of the slab as required by Bob and his mate.

Last of all, they did the bathrooms and laundry room, with concrete that had reached just the right stage of thickness to be sloped for the drains.

Assured that they’d be there for at least another couple of hours, we adjourned to Sista’s at Burns Beach for coffee. On our return, they were still smoothing down the surface, like my late, Great Aunt Joey icing a chocolate cake. But it would be dry enough to stand on in a couple of hours, they said.

Taking them at their word, Roy and I were back down on site before sunset. It wasn’t long before the eagle-eyed Foreman noticed that the drain for my bath was on the wrong end: I like to face the door – it’s good feng shui, and prevents enemy ninjas sneaking up behind you and holding your head underwater. What’s more, the drains for the showers were placed centrally, instead of at one end as would be required for the linear drains we’d specified. Fortunately, that turned out not to be problem.

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17 May: Soakpits and sewers

A couple of days ago, we noticed that four soak pits had been delivered. It would have been hard not to..

Before that, on Friday, The Foreman had also observed the slab awash in water: a hosepipe attached to the mains at the gate had been led around it and was constantly sprinkling it. This is called curing the concrete – wetting it prevents it from drying too quickly and ensures a stronger, less fragile result. It’s not always done, especially for residential projects. Thumbs up to Collier Homes!

Today a plumber came to put the sewer in – very important work! But Roy noticed that he was working from an outdated plan. That exonerates last week’s plumbing contractors from their apparent mistake with the bath and shower drains: they’d done their job right according to the (wrong) plan.

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24 August: Brick storage site

Our neighbour Graham dryly referred to the site as a brick storage facility. That’s just what it looked like for a long, long time. For four months, in fact.

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20 September: Promising signs, and Dino’s dilemma

Site supervisor Alex invited us to an 8am meet-and-greet on site – a promising sign! Wonderful Wally was already there when we arrived, “chalking out” lines with red and blue thread. Alex arrived with coffee – welcome in the cold easterly wind; and then came Dino Mascione, Chief of the Bricklayer Company.

Dino underscored what our friend Susie Amara (Collier Homes) had explained to us: He’s having to work through an unprecedented bottleneck caused by the current building boom and labour shortage. Finding and keeping competent tradesmen is tough at the best of times, and doubly so right now.

1. One factor is that young people are no longer attracted to the tougher “wet trades”, such as bricklaying, plastering and tiling. There’s also the pull of the booming mining industry, where you can head north and drive a bus for $80K a year.

1. During the last WA boom, he said, bricklayers poured across from eastern Australia to fill the need; they also came from Ireland. Now of course, with the virus-related restrictions in place, no one can come into WA from anywhere. (And that’s still the case.)

2. July experienced 28 days of rain – and so was a write-off. In fact, this has been the wettest winter in living memory, and Australian building sites are a bit like Centre Court at Wimbledon used to be. Rain stops play.

We showed due empathy for Dino’s dilemma, and told him our dilemma, too. How and why we’d bought the plot (see Part One). That our new home had already been three years in the planning. That I was wearying of trying to produce proper meals from a kitchenette – and couldn’t wait to have a real kitchen again. Please, please build our house!

6 October: Men at work!

Two weeks after that site meeting, the bricklayer team started work. Wally was there, and we met Tony, Graham and Lewis. A fourth guy would arrive the next day. Smiles and happiness all round.

We’d been told how quickly the walls would take shape once they started – but it was still a surprise. On Day Two, Roy spotted that the door between Guest Bedroom 2 and the Jack-and-Jill bathroom was not only the wrong size (the big 820, instead of the 620), but also in the wrong place. Fortunately, the mortar hadn’t yet set and they were able to knock down and rebuild the wall.

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Amazingly, the ground floor took around three weeks to build – even including a few days off for rain (or the threat of rain). Immediately thereafter, the crew cleared the site, and then the scaffolding was erected. Now, at last, we can climb the ladder, walk around the surprisingly safe and sturdy scaffolding, and see how much sea we’re going to be able to see from the balcony.

I can see it’s going to be tough to lure Foreman Roy away from his quality control role… especially as he caught a couple of mistakes during the ground floor bricklaying. One that wasn’t able to be corrected was that the walk-in wardrobe is too narrow by 5cm, meaning we may not be able to use the particular IKEA shelving we’d planned for.

The other real cock-up is having to accept an unwanted small wall to absorb the “bounce” of the stairs, interrupting the flow of the entrance hall. This was an architect and engineer issue that fell between the cracks due to poor communication. Best not to brood – we’ll do a Pollyanna instead and make a feature of it.

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24-26 November: Interstitial space (at the risk of losing my last reader*)

So, our new house is directly between Carl and Carrie’s house and the beach! We weren’t sure until granddaughter Holly spotted the crane that was delivering the steel girders and trusses for the ground-floor ceiling – or first-storey floor, depending how you look at it. It’s called the interstitial space.

(*Probably Paul Barfield.)

The crane wasn’t on site long – I was lucky to get a few shots on my morning run.

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Roy is quite passionate about the interstitial space, and thought our readers might share his fervour if you could only see it in all its glory. He even asked me to postpone publication of this post while he made a special trip down the road to photograph it for posterity.. and for you. So, here it is:

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The Ballroom

Here’s what we found when Foreman Roy inspected the site a couple of days ago, inscribed on the wall of the first of the two secondary bedrooms. Wicked daughter-in-law Carrie has dubbed this space the Cock ’n Ballroom.

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