So, my work today began before I even stepped on site, with messages and calls coming through about how we are assembling the deck screens. Designing and manufacturing the deck screens in Australia was one of my least favorite jobs, and I knew that they would appear in my life again sometime, I just wasn’t prepared for it to be so soon! Thankfully, when I arrived to site, Craig and Mark (our Super Chippies) had mostly deciphered my drawings to work out what was actually going on, but I was still greeted with a “Good, you’re here. You and me need to have a little chat about these screens” from Craig.
After having “a little chat” about the screen layout, I set about finding and assembling more pieces so the boys could keep levelling and attaching the screens to the house. It had been such a long time working with the screens, I felt like I was standing around scratching my head for a while, trying to remember what I was thinking when I cut up all these pieces. “Where does this piece go?”, “What is this piece for?”, “Ooh, that dog has a puffy tail!”.
As the sun set, and the temperature around the front of the house became bearable once again, I shifted my focus to the decks and handrails (my surrogate children). I loved seeing the finished state of the decks and rails in Australia, and it broke my heart a little bit to see them pulled apart, so being able to put them back together again is such a rewarding experience. Like everything in the house, things don’t quite fit back together the exact way that they did when they were first put together, so to get the rails fitting properly, we had to do a little prying, some shoving, and just a little bit of trimming to get everything just so. Eventually, we got everything aligned, just in time for tools down and site pack up.
Spending a next few hours travelling between the front and back of site, to measure, cut and assemble pieces for both the screen and handrails, I got to admire all the work that everyone else was doing as well. There were the communications team, running around photographing and videoing all of the daily activities, while also jumping into construction whenever they could. The services team, running cables, untangling a nightmarishly tangled stack of wires, and making sure that our house operates like it was designed to. Design and construction, manufacturing screens for the front courtyard and for the back deck, cladding and insulating the roof, installing gutters, jigsawing back together our decks, and re-assembling our kitchen. And finally, our fearless leaders, Clayton and Emily, who after 9 days are still somehow functioning, and manage to keep us all on task, manage the daily running of the site, go to meetings, organize freight, manage logistics, and somewhere in there still find time to eat and sleep.
Thinking about everything that is happening on site, you realise how big this project really is, but also how important each individual person is to the project. We all have a part to play, but without each other, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.
– James Roth, BIM Manager