Week 14 (ish) - phone pics

So I know in my last post about the house I said I wouldnt' bother putting up pictures, but I changed my mind. Here are some I took on my phone last week. Apologies for the low quality, but I didn't have my camera on me at the time.

As you can see, it's ready any waiting for the slab to be poured. It seems like its taken an age to get to this stage. I can't wait for the frames to actually go up so that I can see where the walls are and get a better sense of it.

Sydney

Just a quick follow up on a previous post - the TCV gig last week was great (John Paul Jones is a legend), and it was excellent to catch up with people in Sydney. A big highlight for me was John Paul Jones's piano interlude, which was excellent. Check it out in the Youtube clip below!

That Youtube user has fairly good quality vids of the whole gig set up as a play list with all the track names. That's actually a little bit shocking - I was expecting just crap phone rips, but the whole gig is pretty much up there and you can see and hear everything. It's amazing what technology can do, but I can see how that would piss bands off - sure its a poor substitute for going to the gig, but its also free, which makes spending $100+ for the gig a little harder to stomach.

Although maybe its not that much of a thing - I'll certainly still go to the gig rather than just watch it on Youtube, its just not the same.

Anyway, here's another video of the gig, this time of Mind Eraser, No Chaser, which I dig.

One thing I did realise while I was up there is that I cannot handle the Tekken drinking games like I used to...although I can apparently still whoop all of you at Tekken while passing in and out of consciousness.


For those less in the know, the Tekken drinking game goes along these lines. You play a modified version of champs and challengers in versus mode, where the champ has to drink when they win, in addition to staying on. While it's a litte crude, the idea is that if one person is better at the game, they will soon be too inebriated to keep winning, giving everyone else a fighting chance. Unfortunately for me, it took Rob and Brian a little too long to hit their stride.

Also did a couple of other groovy things in Sydney, like visiting the beach, catching the ferry to Manly, ate some excellent food (including sushi train, dope style laksa and a bitchin burrito), hit some shops and generally lounged around. I bought a couple of new business shirts, including a blue gingham shirt. That's right, I'm bringing gingham back.

Things that I'm looking forward to at the moment (in chronological order):

1. Leaving work today;
2. Pay day tomorrow;
3. Multicultural festival on Saturday (which will see excessive amounts of exotic food and beverages consumed) followed by;
4. Drinks for Dana's birthday;
5. Melbourne in a couple of weeks with my boy dos4gw; and
6. Prodigy in Sydney in early March.

Just build it already.

This delayed gratification business isn't working. The delay is giving me this shits proper.

Still no slab, but it should be any day now. To counteract my disappointment at this, I jumped the fence last night and checked out the rest of the sites, including one unit that is a mirror image of ours and already has the concrete as well as a frame up. My conclusion is that the inside looks a decent size. Still fairly compact in terms of the rooms, but comparable to what I have now, with more bedrooms and extra storage.

This makes me happy.

My plans on how to set the living room up look like they will work nicely, although the space will change again when the walls, roof and kitchen are in. At a bare minimum, the TV placement looks like its going to be ace. I can't wait!

We've also had some advice from the real estate agent that says June/July for completion, which gels with what we had estimated, but maybe a little later. No photo's this post. I have some, but I can't really be arsed, and they don't cover any new ground. I didn't manage to take any while I was sneaking around on site last night, mostly because the light was going and I was too excited to be breakin the law (but not in pants as tight as judas priest)...

Now that's out of the system, some other news. Looks like Massive Attack are coming to town. That should freaking rock. Looking like mid-March, so there's another gig to go to, just when I'd decided to be a tight arse again.
Time to get the hell out of the office and play some borderlands. I'm really close to finishing the damn thing, and there are some weird alien mujumbo's that need their arses kicking!

Raymond Luxury Yacht

Monty Python rocks.

Week....10?

It's been a long time between drinks on the weekly updates, what with there not being much process since the first part of the foundation was laid.

However, that all changed last week! There are now bricks piled around the foot print of the house, which have hopefully now been laid onto the concrete that was poured like 6 weeks ago. Hopefully I'll manage to pop up and check it out tonight after work. To tide things over until then, I've got some pictures of the different steps that will happen before the slab gets poured.

This is our lot, resplendent with piles of bricks around it.

The next step involves putting up these pole things, which presumably aid in the brick laying. I hope they're not being used as a guide, because half of them are wonky. Maybe they're actually temporary clotheslines for more domestically inclined brickies. Who knows? Certainly not me.

After the "pole" stage, the bricks that were previously sitting around the footprint are..(drum roll please)...laid onto the footprint. My understanding is that the final floor level of the unit will be level with the top of the bricks you can see in the picture below.

Bonus brick laying shot!

The next step is for all the plumbing lines and I think the first bits and bobs of the electrical lines to be sunk into the earth that will be under the slab. My guess is that the bit with all the pipes sticking up in the picture below will be where the kitchen, laundry and at least one of the bathrooms will be.

After all the pipes are in, the ground inside is levelled off and topped with this grey gravel (I think it might be called gun metal or something). The units below have been finished to this stage for a while now while they wait for the rest of the units (including mine) to be completed so they can pour the concrete. I don't know how they stop the concrete from pouring straight off the edge of the unit as the gunmetal is flush with the top of the brick line, but I'm sure those zany builders have an answer for that.

So that's it. Hopefully there will be some more progress this week!

In other more interesting news, I'm going to Sydney for an extended long weekend next week, and catching Them Crooked Vultures play on Australia Day. I'm really looking forward to it, will be good to catch up with some Sydney peeps, hit the beach and play drink the beer (I'm going for the high score!).

To close, here's my fave TCV tune at the moment:

Plasma

It completely slipped my mind, but we also had a few little events at home before Christmas that are probably blog worth. The first is that I picked up a new TV in the pre-chrissie sales, for a bit of a bargain too.


With a little help from a friend in the brash bargaining department, I picked up a Panasonic 46inch 1080p Plasma (TH-P46G10A) for $1,850, around $650 off the ticket price, and $350 cheaper than I'd seen anywhere else. Pretty sweet deal! Here's Panasonic's website photo of the bad boy:

It seemed so big when we got it that I almost second guessed the purchase - it seemed to dominate the room and it was so much bigger than it seemed in the show room! That wore off in seconds and the size doesn't look too big at all. I'm very happy with the purchase, although at first, it was painfully obvious how low resolution the SD digital channels are.

As a bonus, the TV came with a free camera (via redemption, which is taking forever). The camera is a Pana Lumix DMC-FT1, which is all kinds of rugged, shock proof, water proof etc. It can even do HD video underwater! I'm pretty excited about it, I have never had a camera quite so fancy before, and am very much looking forward to it.

The other big thing is that our housemate moved out, which is most excellent! We now have some additional room in the living room, a spare bedroom and less clutter generally. There's also one less person to consider when we have people over, or want to stay up late etc.

The spare room has already come in handy a couple of times over the Christmas break.

Good times.

On a more sombre note, I leave you with a warning - Don't watch Terminator: Salvation. It's really terrible.

No updates...

...because there has been no progress, on our bit of the site at least. There is still stuff going on at the other town houses at the site. Mostly ground work things like plumbing and building up the little bits of wall at the base to the floor level and squishing out the dirt in the middle to put the slab on top.

This is not very good descriptive language, but I'm not sure what it is all called. I've been learning a lot about how houses are put together. I'll make sure I put up pictures when they're doing it to our place, but I probably won't bother while they're just doing it to other ones.

Until next time, here is a classic interwebs video where a nerdy looking dude in an orange jumper breakdances with mad skills (yo):