Concrete shoes

Another week has gone by and now the footings are in, with reo bars sticking up to accept the blockwork that's going to form the base of new walls for the living/dining/kitchen area and also the retaining wall to the garage, sorry carparking, area.  This apparently freaked out the neighbor who was concerned a multi-storey block of flats was going up. 

It's also now a flattened backyard, with nothing remaining of the vegie patch at all!  All the new stormwater pipes are in under the new flattened area too.  The good news is that the cracking on the south-east corner is probably just due to stormwater accumulation, so may only need repairing rather than a big structural fix.  We'll see how it turns out when it's had a chance to dry out and the structural engineer reassesses things.  The roof framing is a bit of a concern, with a lot of warping to the purlins, so we might have to look at replacing them. Not so much from a structural point of view, but more because the new part of the roof is metal and so will have dead straight lines, making the old tiled roof look even more wonky in comparison.  Apparently some of the roof props were resting on the ceiling joists and so not really doing much propping properly at all!

On the inside, we've been looking at furniture layouts for the living space too, concerned that it's going to be a tight fit, but it's still hard to tell how big the space will really seem once it's got walls all around and a ceiling in.  I'm pretty sure that we should get some custom joinery desks made for the study so they fit exactly, but we've got a while before we need to do that. 

But at least this week it was only a very short walk to the site meeting, as we're round the corner at Milly's place.  Ruby tolerates Charlie's incessant whining we think (check out the look on her face), but they seem to get along most of the time at least.  Noah the cat has made himself scarce, probably quite sensibly really. Off to Chris and Jenny's tomorrow for the next ten days or so....