Tea Party at Mons Avenue

A couple of weekends ago, we invited some people around to have tea and choose colours for the walls.


In the "informal lounge".


Emmanuelle, Gramps and Nonna discuss the finer details of architecture...


Karen and Tracey discuss the finer details of bringing up babies while Daniel eyes out the tea.


Steve and Andrew discuss the finer details of...


Mrs LJ and Philip still working hard on a Saturday morning. Site office was moved into the boys room.

View over stairs to our dressing-room area.

Bridging the gap

Over two months have passed since the last post.

A lot has happened since then. That post was written during one of my last days of working for MIP. After that I moved over to Genesis and with that I had to give back my notebook that had everyting on it. I did save everything but getting the environment back up has taken some time and I suppose my new job has kept me busy.

Anyway. Where were we?


The roof was going up in September...


This is downstairs looking at the kitchen.




The boys room with ceiling in.


Wells had to put a flag up when we got to the top.


It was time for the flat to go now and make way for the new garage. Kessi inspects the scene...


The south side of the house.


The North-east Side of the house. Doors are in! Looking at the dinning room area.


Stairs are in. No longer do we need to climb through the upstairs window...


The boys room about to get their floor laid.


Disaster. Early one Monday morning, the site-office and storeroom below it catch fire.

The heat from the fire cracked all the windows on the south side. All had to be replaced.

And so that pretty much has been what has happened over the last 2 months.

Rain and more rain

There has been a lot of rain lately. Things are wet and we are hoping to get the roof on by early next week - before the next rain arrives. Below is the view that will be above the basins in the en-suite batchroom.

View from the street looking up at the windows on the top right. The circular window (boarded up) had to be moved 10cms after they put the beam up as it was not in the centre.

Benedict sitting in his room. We wont have that much sunshine as there will hopefully be a roof soon!

Looking dow in to the kitchen from upstairs. Same beam will be upstairs.

More Updates

The boss and his son inspect the goings on. Hard-hat mandatory!


The boys room. It looks like it will be quite big. We aren't so sure about the master bedroom. It appears that the measurements were not very accurate and we might have lost some millimeteres...

Upstairs. The stairs will come up under the black plastic. Window in background is master bedroom. indow on right will be spare-room/study.

Deciding on what to have on the floor upstairs.

Update

Time has passed and there has been some progress! The site above is what we got back to. About to pour some concrete on the upstairs floor.




This was to prove a must-see activity for the boys. They waited for the trucks to arrive - 6 of them.



There was a pump truck parked outside to move the concrete over the wall and to the first floor.





Here the concrete is poured.
Apparently it only took about an hour. I was not there so Mel took the photos. Now it was time to flaten it out:






Here is the view from upstairs. This is taken from the South-east corner of the house. This will be where the boys room will be.


A few days later and the walls upstairs are going up nicely.



The boys having a look outside their window.

Quiet moment

We've gone away for a couple of weeks so there will be no update. Here are some pictures taken before we left. We wonder what will be waiting for us when we get back...

Cement is running

The cement has started to run... Here is the ground floor going down viewed from the old stoep. The pillar on the right is where the kitchen stove will be (behind it).

Quotes have come in for the different windows. We had originally decided on top-opening windows but decided to change that to side-opening. It's going to be more expensive but we think it will look better.

Foundations in

View from the North-east corner. The first pillar is going up today. The foundations have been built:
And they have started rebuilding the walls they demolished last week. Much better...