Week 13 : Plumbing rough in and more plastering

2 more days, and it's officially the third month of the building process. We started with site preparation on July 21.

The plumber is supposed to be on site today, but I haven't spoken to my sister yet, so I don't know what happened. Last night, I finished all the drafts and designs of the plumbing lines, talk about cramming.

After months and months of going to Borders every weekend, and browsing through every home magazine, we've come to this point. Every bathroom design I see is as pretty as the other, and I just want them all. It's just hard to decide on bathroom layouts if you're designing for three different bathroom profiles - 1 large family bath, 1 small bath, and 1 masters bath. We still have time to come up with the final decision - I think.

Hiring a tradesman in the Philippines

The rough-in of plumbing should've started 2 weeks ago, the same time as the electrical rough in, but it's hard to find a reliable plumber. I've searched all over - from my relatives to the plumber of a friend of a friend, to Facebook! The simple thing of hiring a plumber is so stressful.

The culture in the Philippines is quite unique when it comes to hiring a tradesman. Here in Australia, when we need a plumber or a person to fix something at home, we just call them up or look their names from truelocal.com.au. We are more or less assured that the person can do the job, and do it well. Otherwise, we can always call Fair Trading to complain if the tradesman is a scam or did a very crappy job.

In the Philippines, we always look for a tradesman referred by a relative or by a friend, or by a neighbor, as long as somebody we know gave the referral. The tradesman should be a 'kakilala' before we can even trust them that they can do the job and not run away with the money. It's just the way it is, there's no system to certify trade skills or perhaps there's one but I'm not aware of it. There's no reference to check if the tradesman can really do the job and there are a lot of cases where the tradesman runaway with the money without doing the job. It's worth to ask around even if it takes a lifetime, rather than hiring somebody you just randomly picked from the yellow pages. Oh well, it's all part of the excitement, isn't it?

Week 12 : The beginning of electrical and plastering

Bay Window

Front Picture Windows

C-purlins and Trusses

Front window

Office Room - Plastered

Rommel clearing the hallway

The main door - still raw

The "Grand" living room window - still in progress

Laundry Door - Plastered

Unfinished kitchen window

Backdoor plastered.

Kitchen right wall with electrical holes and plastered, breaker is there also!

Laundry Wall Window part has been plastered

Labor day weekend and the coming of the 12th week

Tomorrow, I’m back to work. I totally enjoyed the 3 days weekend that past. I think I did a lot of things, or...reflected about a lot of things. Hmmm, mall, gym, Borders (5 hours!), grocery, arranged iPOD files (after years of trying, I did it!), eat out at fave restaurant, cooking, house cleaning, tax return (gruelling 2 hours, it’s not my favourite thing to look over documents of the past year), cooking favourite Sinigang, sleeping more than 8 hours, and many others to mention J
Those were the ‘did’ part, the reflection part are all still floating around my mind and up in the air. I will try to write them, whenever I can. I think it’s more effective that way – to write what you think as soon as you think about it. Who knows, it will be years before I can write my reflection, just like what happened to my iPOD files.

Oh, one reflection I can remember is that I spend too much time in Facebook. Yes, that creepy social networking site. I don’t like the thought that I find myself always logged in on Facebook browsing stuffs that I don’t really care to the point that it seems like I don’t have other better things to do. I should just cook or read that The Intelligent Investor book, but no, I am in Facebook. I should just do Yoga or research about my business prospects, but no, I am in Facebook. Argh!

I could have just use the time to hen I can spend it in a more useful way. I know, socializing is part of humans, but I just can't help but feel guilty if I spend so much time facebooking. The worst part is that realization strikes after, not before.

2 months and 8 days - Trusses and Ondoy

After 10 weeks and a super duper typhoon, we're still going strong in building the house. In fact, I heard that all the walls are now closed, and ready for electrical rough ins this week. We've been searching for an electrician, but it's just hard to find the 'skillful one'. Our regular electrician is now based in the middle east (what's new?) and we cannot find a candidate with equal skill and right attitude. I'm just so particular with these electrical stuffs because a lot of fire incidents are caused by poor wirings and other causes that has something to do with electrical. It's just scary. One of the girl that we used to play badminton with had fire in their house last year, and unfortunately, her kids got trapped and burned. It's just so tragic to hear these stories and I don't want to take the risk.

The trusses are also halfway. It's supposed to be finished this weekend, but super duper typhoon Ondoy (I hate Ondoy!) affected the work schedule. So, the timeline can be extended until the end of next week. I don't want to keep my hopes up too much because I heard that another monsoon will come this Thursday and Friday. It's already OctoBER! Give the Philippines a break, pretty please?

I've been also busy for the past month because mom and sister Karen came to visit as well as cousins, Achie Jac and Ahia Glenn. Never been around Australia that much until they came here, which is good because I appreciated this place more (at least I think). Now, I'm Sydney-overdosed, and I don't plan to go out even if there's an upcoming long weekend (Labor day! woohoo!). Hmmm, what will I do? zzzzzzzzzzz.....yey.

I feel that there are a lot of things to blog about and they're all stuck in my head. For one, there's Ondoy that struck Manila that killed a hundred people and still counting. I was online last Saturday because we came home early from our Blue Mountains tour. I overheard from Achie Jac that their kids were stranded in Market Market mall which is quite strange because that is a posh place and it's not supposed to flood. Anyway, I talked to mom when I got home and I thought that it's just a normal rain. We are very used to this kind of weather in the Philippines. I was online, checking out Facebook updates and got worried when Jun, my friend from Marikina created a shoutout asking for help. It's got to be serious, otherwise, he wouldn't be bothered to broadcast that he needs help. Until later that Saturday, I talked to mom again (thankfully, landlines didn't get cutoff) and she said that this is the first time she saw this level of flood working in our shop for 30 years. Whoa! I also talked to Jeff and he sounded very upset because his laptop and all of his hard drives are now being flooded as we spoke as well as the 2 Civics, and he cannot do anything but watch it soak in flood. I cannot believe this happened to Banawe, properties here are worth I don't know how much and all the commercial shops around and luxury cars and the famous restaurants - what happened to our street?? What happened is really sad. I just hope that our countrymen will be more prepared next time this happens.

Anyway, here are some photos of last week. The progress had slowed down because of the weather, hopefully it'll become better this week. We're still in the rough phase and funds are running out. *Panic mode*

High ceiling / stairs area on the left side

Bedroom 4 window

Master Bath window

Second Floor front view

2nd floor balcony front view

Ground Floor bath

Picture window high ceiling / living room area

Bedroom 1 ground floor

Bedroom 4 2nd floor

Masters bedroom door

Laundry room ground floor

Dining area 1st floor

High ceiling / stairs area

Perspective Rough

Week 7 – Slab,check! Now, the walls

Woohoo! The slab is now done. The good news is so far it’s still intact and standing. Up until last week, I still made some revisions with the floor plan. My mom and sister are in town for a visit and while we were discussing the house construction, my sister suggested that the office space in the 2nd floor is too big just to be used as an office space. My mom is the most workaholic in the family, and she will probably be the only one using that big space on an average of 3 hours per day. So, I thought it might not be worth to have a huge space that will only be used 30% of the time. So, Bedroom 3 and Home Office were swapped. I bet Bedroom 3 will be the best room because of the bay window. It will have the best view among all of the rooms and a balcony.

At this point, provision for electrical and plumbing are also done too. As you can see the orange PVCs in the photos.

Now, here are some photos of Week 7

Week 6 – Pouring of concrete slab

August 26 was the date that we set to pour the concrete slab, this makes up the concrete floor for the 2nd floor. For 2 weeks, the workers ‘stitched’ steels that will form the slab. They also used coco lumber to support the steel work and eventually the concrete slab.

We requested for several quotations from different ready mix concrete suppliers and ended up with Concrete Masters with a price of Php 3,370 per cubic. The cement has a specification of 3,000 psi and 14 days curing time. We also had to rent a Pumpcrete for Php 10,000, this equipment will pump the concrete all the way up to the 2nd floor. The whole pouring process took just an hour. I’m glad that we chose to do it this way rather than the manual way, because who knows how long that will take!

They say that this is one of the most critical parts of the job and I’m happy that it’s over. Here are some photos of the site