During this week (Wednesday) the roof was started and finished by the time we came to see the house on Saturday. This is what the place looks like now.

The bedroom window (left) still requires a feature colorbond shade to be put over the top, and there are still the cosmetic features like the arches that are supposed to go around the verandah and the final features over the unfinished peak at the front door.

Other views of the house look like this.

The front feature all painted on the second storey showing the second bedroom.

Western view of the house, with brickwork under the windows still unfinished, but a beautiful roof now showing. At some later stage in constuction, the skylight-windows will be put in. There will be two on this side of the roof, one over the stairs and the other in the bathroom.

Showing the northern most point of the house, with kitchen and upstairs bedroom now roofed in and the outside painted.

Sliding door to the family and meals area. Brickwork is pretty much completed on this side of the house.

The garage, now waiting for final plastering and rear and front doors to be installed.

Inside, they have also left windows open to dry out the floors now that the roof is on, and have started trying to clean up the clay gunk that has been sitting on the slab on the inside of the place for weeks. This is a sign that the proper cleaning of the slab will start, and that plasterers will soon get their chance to do their thing on the inside of the place.

Looking down the hallway from the front door.

Looking across rooms (through walls) from the study.

Doing a search on the online street directory on name alone won't find you the estate, but searching for "Point Cook" and scrolling west sure came up trumps.

At the time we bought our land, we were told that our court and the one over the way, Durack, we two of the bigger courts in the estate, with most of the streets being thoroughfares. Lucky us!

Garage bricks are almost complete with only the top right-hand side wall to go to be finished.

Much more pleased with the way the bricks look at this stage.

The whole western elevation is completed. You can see in the frame roof structure the outline for the upstairs rooms.

The perfect spot for my out-of-the-way, full sun clothes line area! (You have to plan ahead!)

The northern elevation with all bricks completed up to the second storey. The window is to the third bedroom and below showing the meals and kitchen area.

Work is nearly completed on the eastern elevation, which shows the formal areas of the house, lounge and dining, and the rear family room sliding door. We are still thinking hard about what to plant here and how to present this area as it is on the dark side of the house, but has a wide access space at 3.25 metres from the wall to the boundary fence.

Back around to the southern elevation - the front side of the house with the bulk of the brickwork remaining to be completed. I cannot wait to see the brick work done and get an idea of how the colours will tie in with the roof and front door - due to be "mountain blue".

Progress!!! Something actually got fixed. The pipe in the laundry has been moved to its correct location, although difficult to see in this picture. Now all that remains to be resolved is the mix up with the tap mixers in the ensuite.

The weekend came around just into August and we thought it would be a good day to go and see if anything had happened during that rainy week. At first glance it didn't look like much had happened. Looking a little closer we noticed they had started on the second feature facade that sits over the garage.

Happy with that we moved to look around the house. They had started on the brickwork which you can actually see in the picture above. The brickwork is one area of the house that we really want them to get right. This is because the bricks we have chosen are more expensive than standard bricks being "pressed" and not "wire-cut". The particular bricks we have chosen have an oxide feature on them and they need to be laid in a certain way to make sure that the effect comes out clearly.

So, although we may be overly picky, we weren't entirely pleased with the brick work we saw on our little inspection. We thought the bricks were too patchy in that there wasn't enough care taken with making sure that the same kind of brick didn't get placed too closely together in the same area.

Do you agree??

Baring in mind, the bricks still need to have an acid washed over them to remove the powered oxide still on the bricks and doing so will lighten the overall effect...

Both John and I agreed that we had expected more care to be taken with the brick laying and so we agreed that we would call the site supervisor and the brick manufacturer to start dialogue on the bricks and our disappointment with the method in which they were being laid.

That is not to say that the workmanship was poor, far from it in fact. Our bricklayer sits the bricks very nicely and rakes out the mortar exactly how we were hoping it would be done. We had also seen some very poor brickwork around the estate and said that we hoped our bricky would not be as poor. It is the choice of brick colours that concerned us.

On the Monday we had discussion with the site supervisor who approached the bricklayer about our concerns. He said that he was using the technique described by the manufacturer but the colours happened to turn out in that way. He said he could understand our concerns and agreed to knock out certain bricks to add more variety in areas that might appear to blocky in colour.

We suggested that he open more of the pallets and use a greater variety of colours from the range - so I guess we will see next time just how this has helped in the appearance of the brickwork.

Other views of the bricks and house.