Brickies and Unexpected Arrival

The brick layers are back in town and have been very busy, when we arrived on site this morning they had nearly finished the 4 brick columns in the outdoor room and were frantically sending loads more bricks up the conveyor belt on to the scaffolding ready to do more work on the upper story.
Had a quick peek through the windows but it didn't look like we'd had anything else delivered to site yet.....

Brick Piers

Brick Piers Near Completion

The SS rang me later on today and told me the garage door is on. (Already!?) [no photos yet I couldn't get back on site today]. He also informs me the bricks will take about one more days work and then we will be at enclosed stage. That means Metricon will be wanting a very big chunk of money soon.
I asked him about how under the stairs will be finished and it turns out this will be boarded and will have a door on it so we will have a nifty storage space, cool! seeing as we had no idea about that as there is no indication on our set of plans.

The carpenter is back on Monday to start on the exterior cladding and the inside joinery and hopefully the kitchen cabinets will arrive the same day. I asked if he could give us a rough estimate of a finish date he explained he couldn't at this stage but said that once the painter starts it would normally then be another 6 to 7 weeks. Will we be in before Christmas? Most definitely will be (yes! yes! and yes!) and if not he has told us we can stay at his house so he must be very confident it will be completed by then.

We have been pondering what mail box we can have as we'd like something quite contemporary. However as we are not allowed to do any construction in the nature covenant at the front of the land we will only be able to have a post going into the ground, hmmm not much scope there then when you see what they have in the local hardware stores! Some serious web surfing later and we have come across these designs by a company in Noosa, what do you think?