The Brick Saga

So here's the house after the patchwork bricks were pulled down and the site cleaned.

Our SS and the Austral Bricks representative said that we were unlucky and unfortunately it was a bad batch of bricks, some had been in the kiln a lot longer than others resulting in the darker colour. Austral told us that it would be at least three weeks before another batch would be made and our SS suggested that we select a different brick.



The Austral rep dropped in some samples of similar bricks and we went back through all the brochures. There was nothing that we really liked so we called our SS and had a chat with him. The hold up with the bricks wasn't a major problem for Metricon because they couldn't find a bricky to do the job, all their usual guys were on other jobs.



The Austral rep came up with a solution. They would sort the bricks before they put them on the truck so that we had a consistent colour.



Here's what arrived.

You can imagine how frustrated and unimpressed we were. They were even worse than the first lot we had received.

We've now had a third lot of bricks delivered. By this stage we were quite wary of anything said by Austral. We looked over the bricks ourselves and there is still some variation between the pallets. The bricks are suppsed to be so similar that they don't need mixing.

On Wednesday Wade had a meeting on site with our SS and the Austral rep. They built a couple of 'walls' with the bricks to get an idea of how they would look. We gave our SS the go ahead to use them, he had a bricky lined up to start on Thursday.

Our SS rang us late Thursday to say that the bricky had been to check out the job and had decided that it was too big, he wasn't going to do it.

At this point we were beginning to wonder if our house was ever going to be bricked (bearing in mind that the bricking was originally set for early July). The SS rang us on Friday to say that he had a bricky lined up to start on Monday and that he is someone that he has worked with for years and will do a good job.

So cross your fingers for us, hopefully I'll have some progress to show you on Monday.