Da Boss made a good call purchasing the house back then, it's worth at least twice as much as whatever he paid for. I regreted that I didn't look for one back then.
LOL! It was a risky move. I actually put the house back on the market within 6 months of buying it! Well, fortunately, things evened out... and I finally scrapped together enough money to finance this renovation.
1 - They even added a new column inside the house. Of course, the wall you see there now (behind the new column) will ultimately be demolished to build a new wall further out. 2 - That new column extended upwards to the first floor. 3 - This is how the new columns look from the first floor. 4 - They started to knock down the brick walls of the first floor. 5 - How the first floor looks from the ground.
1 - They start hacking the first floor to build a new beam to sit on the new column. 2 - Check out one of the workers with his jackhammer. Looks quite menacing, eh? 3 - The guys hard at work... 4 - Here, they are building the new wooden framework and scaffolding for the new concrete extensions on the first floor. 5 - How the hacked floor looks like from upstairs.
These guys dismantled the single-panel solar water heater because I would be redoing the roof. Otherwise, a simple cleaning of the solar water heater doesn't require its removal. After the new roof is done, they will reinstall it. This solar water heater is kinda small... but I cannot afford a new one at over RM 5K (~USD 1666). Plus, it would be kind of wasteful to junk this solar water heater.
They pour the concrete and spread it out. Then they even it out. Last picture shows the water dripping from the concrete that was just poured upstairs.
How I wish that was true... If I am lich, I wouldn't be scouring shops and warehouse sales for discounts and offers to keep within my budget.
Hahahaha!! I have no choice. I have a tight budget to work with. The contractor is telling me I need more money to do the work, but it's not like money's falling from the sky, right? So I have to do a little legwork to keep costs down.
I'm definitely keeping all the trees I can. For some reason, my neighbour chopped off two very nice trees just outside his fence. What a shame!
Time to remove the water tank! The original tank is a 300 gallon FRP (fibre-reinforced plastic) tank. It started "raining" when they cut into the pipe so I didn't stick around for them to finish draining it. Last two pictures show the wooden scaffolding they erected right to the top of the stairwell. That's where they will build a new concrete slab to hold the new water tank and a skylight.
1 - Check out the "forest" of wooden scaffolding in my future "command center"! 2 & 3 - Once the newly built extensions were ready, they built up the brick walls. 4 - Check out the firewall dividing my house from my neighbours. Although it appears to be well-plastered, the developer didn't do a good job. During a recent heavy downpour where the rain was literally coming in sideways, rainwater seeped through small holes and cracks in the cement and drenched my neighbour's ceiling! Needless to say, he wasn't happy at all about it, but honestly, no one expected this to happen since the firewall appeared to be plastered over. Fortunately, all we needed to do was plaster the holes and then cover the firewall with plastic sheets just in case. 5 - After the bricking up.
I bought four rolls of Miron A+ to heat shield the roof. These are supposedly better than the regular aluminium-wrapped bubble wrap heat shields, because the PE foam in the middle won't lose its insulating properties as quickly as bubble wrap. Better be worth the extra cost!
Went up the reinforced concrete roof the other day. Quite a scary experience since falling would mean some broken limbs at the minimum. But these guys are FEARLESS! 1 & 2 - The workers assembling the galvanised steel trusses for the roof. 3 & 4 - This is where the skylight will go. Looks a bit small but should be good enough to light up the stairwell. 5 - We were worried that the 500 gallon water tank might not fit since it's 6 feet tall but in the end, they just needed to adjust the position of some trusses around it.
After the steel trusses were done, they moved onto bricking up the new walls and installing the door frames, because the clay roof tiles were not scheduled to arrive for a few more days. Unfortunately, it's the monsoon season now so things are slowing down a bit. They are definitely not going to make the deadline...
