Holly just sent this photo of the concrete pour.
Slab was planned to be poured last Friday but sickness amongst the team meant they weren't ready. The builder brought in extra work and got things moving over the weekend. The kids and I popped in on Saturday morning to have a look and snap some photos. Builder also took some. The space for our new kitchen looked amazing on Saturday morning, with lovely Winter sun pouring down onto it as it will when most of the far wall is glazed.
Pour happens today. Very exciting given this is the big point where we start moving up! Weather seems to be in our favour for now.
So demolition is nearly complete. Builders are now working on excavating down for the main slab where our new kitchen will be. Concrete apparently should be poured end of this week or early next week.
Holly and I popped in on Friday to see progress. The back half of the house is now pretty much gone. Also some photos from a bit earlier in the week when Holly and Tracy visited.
Holly popped in on the house this afternoon and snapped these.
After a rather frantic week of moving stuff around the house and clearing things out, we're ready for the build to start. Holly's been working like a trooper on this!
Builder moves in today with all his stuff, gets the site setup and start demolishing the back half of the house. Our furniture and stuff are distributed between the front rooms, shed and some at our friends' place.
As promised, here's the before photos.
For those I haven't mentioned it to, we're about to do a major renovation on the house. We've lived here nearly 8 years and done a couple of little changes over the time, opening up the dividing wall between the kitchen and lounge room, re-doing the kitchen and bathroom, and adding on a little laundry out the back. But we've reached the limits.
We spent a few months looking around for somewhere with a bit more space in our area. The Sydney property insanity combined with how much we love the area meant anything suitable with 3 bedrooms was in the $1.4 million+ range which is just nuts. So we decided to extend.
Fortunately we have an awesome building designer in Tracy. She's probably spent an average of a day a week in our house since our first kids were born on the same day 5.5 years ago. She's managed to work out a really clever design that builds us two more bedrooms, creates a really functional and bright kitchen/dining space while maximising the amount of sun we get and heat it'll keep in. All while keeping to the same envelope of land use.
We're going up and down at once. The back half of the house will be demolished completely, then a new ground level much closer to the ground will develop. A bathroom will sit next to stairs down to the kitchen/dining and stairs up to the new first floor. Upstairs we'll have two bedrooms and another small bathroom. The back of the house will be a wide glazed view out to the garden. All the new windows will be double-glazed, providing great thermal performance and substantially reducing the impact of the ever-present planes going overhead.
Excitingly, we're building with Hempcrete! It's basically walls constructed from the cellulose core of the hemp plant and some lime. The walls will be quite thick and providing good sealing as it's built into forms on-site. Thermal and acoustic performance is stratospheric, it's carbon negative and breathable to allow Sydney's humid Summer air a way to escape.
Pretty exciting! We move out today into my parents' place for 3-4 months, then it should be done. I'll post some "before" photos once we've finished moving all the boxes out of the bit that's going.
I get about five calls a week where a recruiter finds my name in LinkedIn and call our company reception number asking for me by name. I can see this on my phone so I'm always prepared for them to be a cold call, otherwise they'd have my number.
It's got to the point where I ask if they're a recruiter straight up and then say "no thanks, not interested" and hang up. Anything else and I end up wasting a good half hour as they give me the spiel and expect me to give a detailed description of what my team does and our backgrounds, to zero benefit for me.
Sometimes they get a bit shitty about this and follow up with more calls or emails accusing me of being rude. Cos there's nothing more polite than cold-calling someone and wasting a bunch of their time trying to flog him a product he doesn't want.
Today's example was pretty hilarious. I'll change names to protect the innocent and not so innocent, but I want to point out that the name dropping she did was in italics which I thought was quite hilarious.
Funnier still, she claims to specialise in "Software and Web Development" yet her title in LinkedIn is rather clear: Recruitment Consultant - Business Transformation & Development
Well, it made me laugh anyway.
Hi Simon,
I hope this finds you well.
I just got off the phone with you after being cut off once you heard I was calling from a recruitment firm.
If given the opportunity, I would have explained that we have an existing relationship with the business having liaised with someone in finance and someone else in finance.
I have personally supplied to someone actually in my department as I specialise in recruiting across the Software and Web Development market.
The reason for my call was to introduce myself, gain a better understanding of your role and your team, and become a potential point of contact for you should you require the assistance of external resources when it comes to on-boarding technical hires.
It was a professional introduction that was cut short and so I do hope that you are willing to speak at some point in the future.
All the best,
Recruiter McPimp
On Saturday my nearly 5 year old asked me why the heat was going out of the room by him leaving the bathroom door open. He's not really ready for the Second Law of Thermodynamics just yet, so I thought we'd run an experiment.
We put a pot with hot tap water on the stove and started heating it until it boiled, then turned it off. Then we put a metal cup of cold tap water into the pot of hot water. We measured the temperatures of both at intervals.
Here's the resulting chart, and the raw data in a spreadsheet. My next step is to get some graph paper so we can go through the process of creating the chart by hand. I think that'll be instructive.
Not sure he really got it, but we both had a lot of fun doing the task. He really loved taking the measurements, which is helping with his reading and comprehension of numbers at least.
A few years back The Economist had a great chart on health care spending showing the split between public and private spending. What's interesting is the huge proportion of government spending from the supposed land of the free market.
The Wall Street Journal further illustrated this in 2011 with a chart showing the absolute numbers spent per capita (and life expectancy, but I think that's too crude a measure of health outcomes to be particularly useful). What's amazing about this is that the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than the UK, yet the healthcare consumer then have to chip in about the same amount again!
I thought it'd be interesting to include Australia in this to inform the current debate, and to update with the latest OECD numbers. The results are quite interesting and haven't changed especially. Americans are still spending way too much on healthcare, both publicly and privately. Australians are on course to do the same. Thanks guys!
I've shared the Tableau workbook on Tableau Public: