A slab of the non-drinking kind

What tipped me off today that the slab had been poured was not a call from the site supervisor - in fact I've not heard from him in almost a fortnight.  No, actually it was an SMS from a Metricon staff member: "Please be advised your next invoice has been emailed to you today, original in the mail".
Sure enough in my inbox, an invoice for solid five figure chunk of dollars - the deposit and slab payment.

So instead of going straight home out to the East, I arranged to be picked up from our North, where we could take a look.

From the above photos we can also now get a pretty good idea of how much back yard we're going to have, along with the width of the path down the East side of the house.  Since North-West neighbours have got their fence in, that's now the point where that boundary is, and on the East side the garage is on the boundary.

Slab poured

Excellent - I am now the proud owner of one large block of concrete.

No slab yet

Still no slab.  Actually, there was no call late last week either to say that it had been pushed back.  Fingers crossed, I made a trip out to the block on Sunday in the hope something had happened which I wasn't told about, but that's not really the case.  There's a big shipment of foam blocks on site, and some other lining, but not a lot of actual work.

Guess we'll just want and see what happens this week.  Forecast is good for most of the week so there should be no real excuses.

Oh yeah, and somone's been using our area for having some fun - we found fireworks :D

Someone left a gate open...

Saturdays trip to have a quick look around/walk the dogs allowed us to see what they've done with putting all the plumbing and electrical stuff in.  There's still no slab down of course, but it's looking much flatter.  Actually, it's in a stage I've not seen another build in, I'm not really sure what's with all the gravel.

Anyway, someone left the gate wide open, so we decided to have a careful snoop around.

Maybe someone else can tell me what the story is with all the gravel... which incidentally we found has a lot of glass in it.

Slab delay

Well as was to be expected, eventually some kind of delay was going to come up.  It didn't take long, weather pushing the slab pour back.  The site supervisor so far has been pretty on top of things in making sure he calls each Thursday, but had to report that the slab was being pushed back to Wednesday due to the rain and further forecast.

While on the phone to him I took the opportunity to ask about any close-down over the new-year period - it sounds like the builders/contractors close down from the week before Christmas through to the second week of January, and they stagger build re-starts from then until the last week of January.  So there could be anywhere from three to five weeks of no activity, which will push completion back (so we're looking at April now).

How fast things happen

Initially I'll just drop by once a week until the slab is down, as there's not a lot to really see - other than some earthmoving and a block of concrete.  The other houses in the area, however, show how quickly things happen.
You might recall that behind me I've said the following are bring build - east to west on the next street, a Metricon home, a Porter Davis home, a Henley home almost ready to be moved in to, and another large Metricon home on the end of that street.  Last weekend, all three had slabs down.  Here's what their progress now looks like, just one week on:

So for now, they're putting in electrical and sewerage... they've also given me a nice choice of pet rocks should I choose to keep any.

There isn't a great deal of progress that can be easily seen this week - you can see where the garage is going to go because it's been cut in slightly more, but when they do the box and frame for the slab next week, and the frame at the end of the week, it should be hard to miss the concrete base.

Looking forward to the call to provide updates on Thursday or Friday.