Roof, roof, roof!

With Christmas fast approaching, I have to say I am happy with my present. This year we got a roof on our new house. I am very excited that it may soon be wrapped in batons, felt and tiles.

The lads on site have been working hard. Wonder if Mark used Roofers Ready Reckoner, a book he used to read when we were children full of charts and diagrams and maths. I wonder if he knows the old edition of this book from 1987 now sells on Amazon for over £100. He will do once he has read this.

Daddy Mark has been servicing the nail guns to ensure they are in full working order.

We are still so excited about the build and cannot wait for what 2011 will bring, hopefully two new family homes. We are also going to be spending some quality time enjoying the festivities and seeing our family. Just have to ensure that Daddy Mark and Keiran don’t eat to many mince pies, as we would hate them to put too much strain on the scaffold.

Our windows

Everybody needs good neighbours!

After a little while away from the site, due to the snow holding us back and the temperature being below 3°. The brick layers were back on site putting up the last few blocks. The windows look amazing with the detailing, a feature I believe it is called.

It is just amazing actually walking through the house and imagining where all the furniture will go.

A place for our car on bricks.

All four of us new Junction Road tenants had a little trip up there on Saturday, before Christmas shopping to have a little look round. We have found the perfect spot just down the side of Sabrina and Keiran’s place to put the Ford Cortina on bricks. We are really hoping our new neighbours will appreciate the plans for our new gardens. We know we are moving to a nicer area just not sure we have the etiquette for all that yet.


Next to come the roof!

Up stairs

So the brick work has been steaming ahead and I cannot believe for the first time the houses seem like real homes. We have electricity in and meters.



Has been a little cold over the past week and apparently you cannot lay bricks if it is less than 3° probably because the sand is frozen solid and the water. Les and the boys have been working really hard. We have upstairs and scaffolding. Apart from the weather and Nicolas fractured wrist not much seems to be holding the build back at the moment. So mum and Mark are off sunning themselves on their cruise while we freeze and wait for the temperature to pick up.

Autumn Shopping

A tree at the front of the site

 

It looks like autumn is here and things are getting wet and cold; which is no real issue for people who pop down to the building site once a week. I would hate to be a builder at this time of year getting wet and cold. The houses are really taking form with brick work actually going up around the outside.

We also have all the pipes and tubes and things that happen underground in. The drive has been covered in hardcore so is ready for a lovely new place to park our cars.

Soon to come the upper floor! So exciting! The joys of being a well brought up female are to send the boys up to the site and explain we need to work, at home and then spend the whole day browsing the internet for floor tiles and furniture. Looking at sites like NEXT and Laura Ashley. Just Nicola and Sabrina doing what mum taught us to do well.


We are wondering who is living in our houses already as we keep finding random objects. Last month we found a single brand new shoe. This week somebody left us their left over saturday night takeaway looks like they had a good night out. I won't tell you what other things we found!

 

Thinking about shopping

So the latest update. Things on site are still moving along a lot of underground work has gone on pipes, wires and other such things. We have taken down some of the hedge and trees on one side at the front of the site to run the pipes underneath.

The lads have been insulating our homes over the weekend. Hopefully this will be keeping us toasty warm next winter and saving us lots of money on the central heating. I am really looking forward to the laying of the under floor heating system and from the research I’ve done its eco-friendly and energy saving. So more money for shopping I think!


Talking about shopping, it seems to be all I can think about, but I keep getting told I cannot buy any furniture until we have a house to put it in. So I have been researching key essentials that will be needed before we move in. We are hoping to have pocket doors between the kitchen diner and lounge.


What is a pocket door? - A pocket door is a system of building a counter frame which is then integrated with stud wall construction, either timber or metal. The pocket door counter frame creates an envelope the same width as the finished wall for the door to slide into, thus hiding the door within the wall cavity.


So during my research project about pocket doors I found loads of nice pictures and expensive prices! Coming from a sci-fi loving family the best had to be Star Trek pocket doors the clip I found on You Tube which was great. Think we will be opting for the regular kind though that you push into the wall yourself.

MOVING ON UP!

Everybody has commenting on how quick things seem to be moving along after reading the blog.

Well nobody is more shocked about the progress of the building than us. We have been at work at week and dropped by this Friday evening to see how the block and brick are coming along.

The site now looks like two houses you can walk in the rooms. You can begin to think about where the furniture is going. In all it is really amazing. They told me the block work would go up quickly I didn't think they meant this quickly. It seemed like we were forever digging in the dirt and now we have houses.

Still lots to do with more drainage, sewage, water, gas and electricity all being connected. I wonder what everybody will make of these pictures!

I am really getting into this blogging lark to. Although I'm not the best writer in the world, I am thoroughly enjoying looking at the stats behind the blog. We have had 500 readers so far including 7 from America, 2 from Canada and 4 from Australia. Amazing really how interesting dirt, bricks and building can be. Perhaps it is just the site of us in tatty clothes and work boots that keeps drawing the readers in.

Floor in

There was no building work on site this weekend! The Wrights went away to Bournemouth. Mark and Les went to the Isle of Man.


 We popped by on Saturday to see our site and the floor is in. It is amazing how quick things are moving now.



The imaginary downstairs toilet



Its not behind

Sabrina and Keirans House

Busy, busy, busy! This weekend Stephen went down to the site to move hardcore around the brick work. We are nearly up to the floor level. Les the bricklayer has been working very hard. From now on its up, up, up! After we have put in the floor.

The current features of the houses include holes in the brick work well we have to have somewhere for our waste to flow. Not long now until the first poo will flow through those.

The Wright Place

Although the weather has not been great over the past few weeks and it is muddy and squelchy, its like wading through can’t remember what it reminds me of.


Mark has been saying he has gotten so wet the water was running down the back of his trousers where he has a gutter in his butt crack. This is useful as it might save us some money when it comes to buying pipes for the rain water from the roof.

love it!

So this weekend the fun started the boys were on site laying the first bricks. Keiran etched his name into the first brick as it was to be laid in his house. It was a busy day on site moving blocks, making up muck and laying blocks. More concrete crushing was  required.

Sabrina and Keiran went away for a few days last week and got engaged! They are planning on getting married next year. So now there is also a wedding to plan. Mum is going crazy over the thought of shopping and choosing colours with Sabrina. I hope Keiran knows what he has signed up for. Nothing like a bit of hard work from our family this year life is non- stop!

Blocking Good Progress

It has been a while since the last update on account that we are all so busy. This weekend we have been moving blocks, to get them ready for the brick layers to start the block work. A very exciting phase in the build; where from the ground houses will hopefully appear.

I always knew Mark was good at maths. I remember from my childhood, at about 9 years old, I had trigonometry explained to me. I didn’t understand this concept then, I grasped the concept for my GCSE maths where I got a B, but have since forgotten how to use this skill. Why you ask may I be mentioning this? Well I have always known that building involved lots of mathematical understanding, but not quite realised how much. Until we are on site discussing and mentally calculating how many blocks to stack in which places, believe it or not you have to work this out. It apparently saves you from moving the blocks twice and wasting time and energy.

So moving the blocks themselves was a physical task which we all did together. Whilst working, Mark also informed me that for every block we moved we saved 8p on a labourer. So whilst carrying it was a good opportunity to practice my 8 times table.


My head is now filled with Maths! So what to do with the rest of my Sunday after dinner? With maths in my head I suppose I had better get on with planning a few maths lessons for the children at school.

Mix-Up

Sabrina and Keirans Place

So it has been a while since the last update due to the Wrights running around the country socialising and partying, Nicola is also going back to school, boo hoo!

The site has moved on lots and lots the footings have been dug and filled with concrete. This involved several weekends of concrete mixing and Les in the trenches spreading it out.


What, you may ask have we learned about mixing concrete? Well, if one person loads the mixer with cement, one puts in the ballast and the other person adds the water the job gets done faster. Although bags of cement are heavy and dusty and after a day on site even you boogies are concreted up your nose. Water is less physical work but be careful not to catch the bucket on the edge of the mixer, this results in the water flying back out at you making you soaked wet through to your pants and you begin to wonder if it is water ,or if you have wet yourself.

We have been introduced to the concrete crusher this weekend which is a noisy machine that eats large pieces of concrete and smashes it up into little chunks.

After many years of being told not to play with fire, we lit a bonfire and enjoyed burning everything we could find on site.

The Wright House