Five Days and Counting

It's been five days since we signed three contracts with the lead electrician, plumber and carpenter-mason for the renovation project.  Before that, it was only my direct workers undertaking simple demolition, getting the tiles out and knocking down portions of the wall.  Now the real work began and it's going along quite smoothly.  I don't know if that would still be my comment a few weeks from now when we encounter glitches but so far so good.    

Seeing these metal frames go up the wall, I can't imagine how they can support the gypsum boards since they look so flimsy but this type of system now commonly holds up most ceilings.  I had collected all the wood "pamakuan" from the demolition of the old ceiling thinking that they could be used but most friends advised me otherwise because it would eat up too much preparation and labor time.  My mom wanted me to recycle them to save on materials but I followed the suggestion of Tito Rene, the big-time contractor who said that nobody uses those "pamakuan" anymore.

We're taking all the old electrical wires and plumbing pipes out and putting in new ones.  I realized that there's a special kind of hot and cold water pipe that's not available in the "dirty" hardware.  When I looked for the PPR pipes the lead plumber told me to get, the hardware store told me those are for "high-end" projects and what they carry are just the ordinary blue and orange ones that are not as thick.  Among the PPR pipes, the white is cheaper than the green but then there are also two types of green fittings, with one type pricier than the other.

The funny thing I realized in the process of getting the list of materials I need to buy from the sub-contractor is that the items on the list may not be spelled correctly.  "Parring" turned out to be "furring" as in the metal strips used as ceiling support.  "Ribbon grey" turned out to be "ribbon grain" which is not that easy to find because this type of plywood is not carried by ordinary hardware stores.  Then I realized I've been pronouncing the names of the workers wrong because the one who introduced me to them was "bisaya" so I was calling Johnny "Junie" and Wengweng "Winwin."  

I learned some shortcut methods like buying ready-made door jambs which I didn't know existed so in the last renovation job, we just made the door jamb from the "pamakuan."  The head carpenter-mason in this case is showing me other methods to cut construction time by using simpler techniques.