Facade update

External painting started on Valentines Day and the scaffolding came down today, giving us our first good look at the facade. There is still additional painting to be done, with the rendered ground floor to be painted the same colour as the cladding and all mouldings around windows to match the eaves i.e. Colorbond Surfmist.

Scaffolding was left around the portico for the installation of the roof frame, which will sit inside the brickwork with the roof invisible from the street.

First delay before cladding

We have had our first real delay on site since commencement – 8 working days without any activity on site. Not a big delay at all really, but as the days go by without any work on site it does begin to get frustrating.

By the time brickwork is finished, most building contracts stipulate that approx 70% of the project cost will be invoiced. It is a very big incentive to those project home builders to get that part of the project finished as fast as possible. It creates strong cash flow for them and from that point they can back off especially if they have plenty of time left to complete the build under the contract period. It allows them to allocate resources to other homes in the early stages of construction and keep that money coming in. Maybe that's overly cynical but from a business perspective it makes total sense.

The cladding started today and it will probably only take another day – if that – to finish it. Really looking forward to seeing how it looks once it is painted and the scaffolding comes down. At that point we will have a really good idea of what our new home is going to look like.

Click here to read about our external colour scheme selection.