Ghost Town!

Yep, that's a picture of a ghost town, posted to honor how desolate, quiet and vacant the work site has become this week!

Why are we a ghost town? Great question! I'll provide some insight, but certainly not an answer.
Last week finished off with the trusses to the garage being installed. As we understood it the next parts of the house to be completed needed to happen in a certain order to get to lock up stage, and they were the following...fascia and gutters installed to the garage, roof tiles installed to the garage, theater room and alfresco area, architectural cladding installed to part of the back of the house and the start of plastering (drywall) to the interior, pretty much in that order. Additionally the bricks were to have been cleaned somewhere in the middle with the majority of this work beginning, if not being completed, this week. I was off work Friday and this past Monday for Thanksgiving and on Monday took a stroll with the family down to see what work was going on at the house. Nothing, nada, zilch, zippo! We were bummed, but figured we wouldn't worry too much about it as we had a site meeting scheduled with our Site Supervisor the next day (Tuesday) at 2:00 PM. The better half went to the site meeting, but had stopped by the house to see what was being done in the morning. Again, nothing. At the site meeting, the supervisor seemed perplexed, stating that the fascia and gutters were supposed be put on that day, with the roof tiles to follow shortly after and the insulation which had been delivered Monday morning was supposed be installed with the plaster starting that day as well! That's a lot of trades people either not showing up or dropping the ball. I'm not a builder, but I'm guessing the responsibility falls to our site supervisor to ensure that the necessary trades people are ACTUALLY showing up to do their work and if they aren't, he would find out why. We had written a number of specific questions for the visit mainly asking when the aforementioned items of work were scheduled to be done. Despite most of them originally being scheduled for this week and despite our site supervisor giving this information to our administrator and that information not being passed on, there was a LOT of "ball dropping" going on this week, which started at about marble size and has quickly become a bowling ball!

The big shocker came when the better half asked the site supervisor when he thought we'd be in by. The answer? "Ahh, well hopefully, maybe by the end of April!" Bzzzzzt. Wrong Answer! Originally it was going to be around February. This was the guess at our first site meeting shortly after frame stage was completed. Now it's um, maybe by the end of April. Our baby is due May 8th and we will absolutely need to be in at least a month before then. That prediction would mean that it would take five months from lock up (we are nearly there now) to hand over! Seems a bit long to me.

At the end of the business day, we finally got an email with an update to our questions as to when the work will be started and/or completed to get to lock up. All of it is due to start with some of it to be finished by next week, so we are hopeful (given a good experience so far) that a LOT of work will happen next week to get us back on track, otherwise the ball may start to get too big and too heavy to drop!