Short week

Right, so it’s school holidays and my house is a construction site. Therefore I’ve been going over to help as much as I can. Gordon and Graham, each with over 30 years experience, have been doing the actual building, I’ve been mainly picking up coffee and waiting for there to be a mess for me to clean up. They arrive at 7am, I get there just in time for smoko around 8:30. ​

On Tuesday I spent much of the day, after getting the coffees, pulling staples and nails from the timber floors. This was very enjoyable, and involved a lot of crawling and sitting on the floor. Meanwhile Graham dug 4 massive piers into the earth by hand, prepared cylindrical formwork and replaced a junction in a half submerged pipe. At the end of the day I was pretty sore. Graham didn’t seem to be. 

On Wednesday I could only stay for a half day as I needed to take Dani to the physio. There was a large pile of sand that needed to be moved from one area to another so I went over and picked up some coffee, and then found the shovel. Graham worked all day and moved at double the speed for twice as long. I was strangely less sore than the day before, but in a concerning numb kind of way. 

On Thursday the old bricks that had come out of the wall needed to be cleaned and re-stacked down by the back fence. I did this and felt like I was moderately accelerating the progress of the job. Gordon and Graham built the timber form work, finalised the piers and trenches, positioned the sand bed, calculated the concrete requirements and repositioned all the equipment. It was my last day as I would be busy with school work on Friday. 

At 4pm as I nursed a back twinge up the half disassembled staircase I said to Graham “Thanks for having me this week mate.” “Yeah” he replied, “short week.”

On Friday I dropped Pan at daycare, came home and immediately slept for 3 hours. Felt pretty long to me. Respect to the builders.