Deck construction

Yesterday we created the frame for the deck.

Today we completed bolting and nailing it together.


Having completed the frame we screwed floorboards on. On the close side of the deck the boards are screwed 2/3rds of the way across the deck and on the far side 1/2 the way across the deck. You can see a trap door opening in the middle, actually that is for a hatch that we haven't built yet - when it is in place it will allow us to access the top of the water tank to clean the water filter.

Progress pictures

To see a brief movie of our house being built please click this link. We haven't included it directly in this blog as people with dial up internet will find it too slow.

Deck construction

Our footings have been dug, and today we finished the piers (you can see them in the foreground of the photo) and installed the pitching plate (that is the piece of wood that dad is looking at against the wall of the house).


Erina and mum also made our backyard look a lot bigger by pruning the trees hanging over the fence, and Erina and I poured the remaining footings for the retaining wall. Today was quite a productive day despite ending in a storm in which we were drenched while packing the trailer to go home. The man doing our cornices finished today also.

Deck construction

Our builders are now on holidays and they have been kind enough to hand the site over to us for deck construction. Our construction certificate came through two days ago so now we can start digging the footings for the deck. To make life easy we hired this mini excavator as we knew we would have to go down quite a long way as most of the soil in the area of the footings had already been disturbed when they were laying our stormwater pipes and installing the water tank. Unfortunately though, everywhere we wanted to put the footings had multiple pipes passing through - so a quick re-design later and we found some spots to put the footings and work continued. One of our footings had to go down 2 metres though and because of the proximity of pipe work this had to be dug mostly by hand!

Here are some photos of our accomplished excavator drivers (Dad, Stephen and Erina)!

Looking more complete

The gyprocking and eaves are done now (but the pink bits are still to be painted red - that is currently just undercoat).

Wiring and internals before the gyprock

The electricians have now completed pulling power cables through the house, and now we've installed the phone, network, TV and alarm cables as well.

A roof over our heads

The tilers have been hard at work, they started in the morning and by 10:30am the roof was already looking basically complete - throughout the rest of the day they just went around finishing off the fiddly bits (cutting tiles to shape along ridges and valleys and cementing the ridges in place).

Nearly looking like a house

The gutters have now been installed and the safety rails have been setup for the roof tilers, and the green coating on the roof is the sarking that has been installed for the tiles to go on top of.

Gutters are on

The brickwork is all complete and the gutters have been fitted ready for the roof to go on.