Week 4: Concrete, baby!

Hello all, a slightly delayed post due to a long weekend in chilly Melbourne! (on a side note, I highly recommend seeing Book of Mormon if you enjoy musicals, like a laugh, and are not easily offended...)

Early week 4 mostly consisted of preparing for a slab. Reinforcement got delivered, plastic got laid and the site really started to take shape.

Our engineers were also consulted by the builder to check the re-stumping work and the preparation for the concrete.

After 2 days of prep, the concrete was poured in a few hours - and all of a sudden - we had a ground floor!

What did we learn this week? Firstly, rooms on a slab look small! Our house is never going to be massive, but we know that rooms tend to expand and shrink according to the stage of the build. Also check that you have a set-down in the slab for your wet areas (this is so when the tiles go in, you don't have a 'step down' to the rest of the house; oh and it handily prevents flooding!)

What decisions did we have to make this week? The main ones were unrelated to the slab pour. In fact, it was regarding windows. The upstairs windows need to be ordered soon so that the upstairs cladding can be removed, the windows replaced, and the house re-clad in quick succession (to limit weather exposure as much as possible).

Like everything in the construction industry, the choices of windows are endless. Not only material (aluminium, timber, vinyl, fibreglass...) but also style. Not to mention colour, glass type, glass colour, and also size!

We are going with aluminium windows due to their low maintenance with regards to re-painting and warping. While we accept that this won't give as authentic a look as traditional timber windows would, our choice of a clean crisp white will match an accent colour on the exterior, as well as give a clean look on the interior (where we are using a neutral palette). Upstairs, most of our windows will be double-hung, in keeping with the style which would have been popular in the 1920s. Casement windows would also have been in keeping with the period but are much harder to fit flyscreens or security screens to.

Example of a double-hung (or sash) window

Example of a casement window

We had actually done quite a bit of thinking about the windows during the design phase, but still we have had more thinking to do this week! I rushed out to the manufacturer to check the colour choice in person, a few of the downstairs windows have been made bigger, and we decided to go for a 'low E' glass on certain windows to improve thermal performance (at a minor increase in cost). Your window supplier should know from your plans which windows require toughened, or safety, glass (for a start, bathrooms and stairwells).

Windows are a super-important part of any house, and my advice would be to take your time checking each and every one before they are ordered. Any fan of Grand Designs will know that delays on windows arriving can set back an entire build schedule by weeks to months!

That's it for this week, please comment below :-)