The roof edge

This Friday, we also took some pictures of the edges of the roof which now has nice silver looking sheet metal covering the edges. The roof gutter and drainpipes will be the same material.

Here we can see that the tile edges in the concave corner of the roof looks quite jagged, and unaligned. Dan the Builder ensured us this will be fixed later when it’s not too cold and wet on the roof for the glue used.

Here Angelica inspects the roof balcony from the outside.

(A zillion bonus points for anyone spotting what she just noticed.)

Water and sewage

Me and Angelica made a quick visit to the house this morning, before work.

We noticed that two city workers was there digging a hole in the street, to hook the house up to the city’s water and sewage systems.

This was supposed to have been done a month ago, so when the builders needed water to mix the concrete glue used when building the outer walls, we had to ask the neighbors for water.

It was a good thing we where there, because they told us that “they would only run the pipes to the lot boundary, not all the way to the house. So we needed to connect them to the house ourselves”…

When we left we said to each other; “Wasn’t that exactly what the contractor said when doing the water/sewage-line installation in early January?”

We called him up, and yes, they had indeed already run their (our) end of the water/sewage pipes from the house out to the lot boundary, in order for the city to connect to them later.

Which of course meant that the city workers today should be connecting to the pipes already in place!

Our contractor said he would clear this misunderstanding with the city, and we assume that we saved ourselves a bit of trouble (another hole in the street) and money, by turning up at the house at the right time.

The Beam in the Eye

Seldom do I quote the bible, but it seems appropriate here, sort of.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Matthew 7:5

When looking around the house early February, after the roof frames was put in place, we could not help but noticing one tiny little detail in the living room, that stood out as being, shall we say, “a beam in the eye”.

Perhaps you can spot it too?

Indeed, we’ve done the drawings of the house ourselves - but those drawings was drawings of the desired floor plan, and of the desired exterior of the house, and contained no construction details like, say, the placement of the roof frames relative to the windows. We’ve had no other requirement here than the living room being open to the second floor.

Those drawings have been made into proper construction blueprints by the general contractor, and supposedly looked over by a proper architect and a proper building constructor. One might think they would have spotted a thing like this? Note that the beam does not even look like the other ones, it’s much thinner.

We obviously have told the general contractor we are not happy about this, and they are “looking into a solution”, as they say. (Please note that Dan the Builder is not the constructor, so no blame on him.)

If we’re lucky, they will be able to completely remove the beam, without compromising the stability of the house. We’ll just have to wait for the general contractors solution proposal, I guess.