blog

Sorting a ton of stuff out

Posted: 10-03-10

Window scare. Bathroom Tiles. Coloured glass. Kitchen measure-up. Solar panels.

On this the last day of my days off work, booked ostensibly to sit down on my arse and dribble paint all over our admittedly monstrous cast-iron radiators, we had a call to attend a last minute site-meeting with Kev the kitchen installer. Kev looks like former Shortland St cast-member Renato Bartolomei...he doesn't mind if we take the piss for it either - good man.

Kev is only a young-un...relatively speaking but is old-school. No computerised elevations here - Kev uses a pencil and some scrap timber to mark out on the floor where the kitchen units are going and approximately their dimensions - what a master. With all the Rayburn pularva behind us (See last blog entry) final measurements are now possible including the location of the 1.2m² Rimu-topped island in the middle.

We went to drop-off the fascia boards for our windows to the joiners up the road yesterday (we had had them for a week to pre-paint them before they were installed on the house). We were about to leave when Tasia spotted one of the windows fully made-up, complete with the spiralift sash-mechanisms and the 20mm IGUs (Insulated Glass Units).

So Tasia awoke at 3:45 this morning, probably in a cold-sweat (I can't confirm though as I wasn't of this earth at the time) thinking that due to an earlier mix-up between builder and joiner regarding IGU thickness (we were going for the fat 24mm but slimmed to 20mm to save cash) that the shims used to hold the IGUs in-place, would have to be rebated 10mm or so, which we thought ugly enough to resemble a pug-dog licking piss off a stinging nettle.

Upon visiting the joiner today to drop-off our instructions for coloured glass for the front-door, we spied the rogue window (or so we thought) and found the rebate to be only 4mm or so which was A-OK with us.

Emergency over.

Prior to that we headed 15 mins south to beautiful Pukerua Bay to visit a very nice chap about some coloured glass for our traditional villa front door. We chose 3 colours for the square corners, vertical and horizontal lengths and some patterned obscure glass for the centre and the fanlight above. Having also visited Heather at Colour Options the day before and confirmed the bench top and interior colours (Low VOC naturally) we're even more excited about how our new home is going to look when it's done.

While on-site, we were reminded that the client was to be supplying the bathroom flooring and did we want to lay it before or after our cast-iron clawfoot bath, sink and bog were installed? So we hurried along to Tile Warehouse who were conveniently having a sale and pre-ordered what now appears to be their last batch of "Lead" and "Snow" coloured tiles for the checked bathroom and En-suite floor-pattern.

Finally, and as if aaaall this isn't exciting enough, we spied Steve from Bryant Plumbing putting together the mounting chassis for each of the 2 sets of 15 evacuated-tube solar collectors for the Solargenius Solar System from Leap Ltd. We ensured they were mounted high enough to clear the shadow cast by the kitchen gable first thing in the morning, maximising light falling on the NE facing set and the NW facing set for afternoon and evening sun.

To purists who might say you should not only have your panels pointing directly due north (True North, calculated from Magnetic North, corrected for Magnetic Declination which itself varies with latitude and time...) and at an angle above 25° to better cope with lower winter sun, I say the roof is at 25° and we instructed the plumbers to install with a 5° angle to the roof giving us a satisfactory 30° angle. I also say: Look at the style of our home - allowances have been made!