Flooring progress

Work continued on the new house over the weekend.
Saturday saw me battling with my Meccano set aka the steel flooring system.
As luck would have it the very first two bearers I needed were to be found at the very bottom of the pile of steel. Accessing them required moving virtually all the steel beams and re-stacking them in 33 degree plus heat!
Our hottest day since January.

Once I found the necessary beams it quickly became obvious that the computer driving the assembly robot had a different view on reality to most of us.
The pictures below shows part of two five meter beams which are meant to be mirror images of each other. Those brackets are meant to line up!


Thankfully the DW came to the rescue and was able to nut out a solution all the while a sick infant constantly demanded attention. I just can not concentrate when kids cry!
Boy am I lucky that the DW can achieve amazing feats of concentration under such circumstances.

The first room I started on was a study. I thought this is small enough to let me learn the tricks and hopefully can easily be finished in a small amount of time.



After a few hours of adjusting things the end result is the first room of steel flooring bearers and joists.
When it didn't rain on Sunday I quickly went back to sealing the dry block-work. Wow three whole days without rain ;)
I was able to get another third of the interior done. The constant trips up and down ladders and scaffolding with 16 kg of spray sealer on your back makes for a tiring but productive day. The sealer was able to dry completely which was lucky as it is once again pouring with rain.

A sunny, lazy sunday afternoon.

The local lantern parade went ahead on Saturday night. Boy5 went despite still being sick from tonsillitis. During the parade as he held his lantern high he kept saying that this is amazing.... he just couldn't believe how much fun the whole thing was!
Sunday gave us a lovely sunny day, the first for a long time. Late in the afternoon we all sat out on the daybed. The sounds of frogs calling in hope for more rain filled our ears. The other sounds were crickets and various bird calls as they signed off for the night. Boy7 and I sat and watched the last of the days wind tickle the tallest gum tree highest leaves. They were bathed in sunset red in the fading light. The best thing was relaxing and hearing all these natural sounds. I pointed out to Boy7 that we could not hear any man made sounds as there are no close neighbors, just as it should be.

We soaked up the sounds of a fading day sitting side by side with big smiles on our faces. It was a great way to see out the last of the weekend.

W.I.P cleaning and sealing the block work.

The work on cleaning the block work continued over the weekend.
This sort of work is boring but necessary.
It consists of scrubbing the walls, removing any splatters of mortar, then flooding the walls with the hose. Finally a light pressure wash finishes them off. There was lots of struggling with scaffolds and many trips up and down the ladders.

The cleaned block work then requires 2-3 days of hot dry weather to fully dry out before I can seal it.
We have had many days where we have some light rain of one type or another then a day of sunshine before the wet weather returns.
I have been trying for a few weeks now to get a cleaned area sealed but the weather just hasn't allowed it.

The Sunday forecast was for rain and showers for the rest of the next week.
Luckily the rain didn't arrive on Sunday and I got two rooms sealed on the interior.
The work is messy and I destroyed a set of glasses from the mist like over spray which set hard on the lens. (This will be a costly lesson).
However by Sunday evening the walls in the two rooms are done, they look good and soon I can start on the steel sub-floor for that area.