Yesterday (Monday), just two of the team were here. Luís had other things to attend to.
It didn't seem that much happened except for some of the cementing around the granite blocks that make up the main walls of the room.
I had already done much of the filling in of the gaps and it was mostly ready for the finishing surface.
One thing that I had done over the past weekend was to make the holes and slots in the wall to take the boxes and conduit for the electric system that will be installed. I used a round hole cutter designed for ceramic tiles which worked fine for the clay bricks but proved to be woefully inadequate against the granite. I ended up breaking out the rock with a cold chisel and disc grinder. João used the same method to quickly complete the final 3 points. So many new methods and challenges crop up in this place, but it's all a learning curve.
Today, the plumber is here to place the pipework for the bathroom and kitchen. I had already installed the intermediate pipes from the main bathroom to the top of the stairwell. This placement was based upon our original plan where the bathroom was at the back of the room, too late to change that because the walls are all installed upstairs. It was really not much of a problem though, the new water pipes will be run inside the wall at the side of the new staircase, then underneath the floor to the bathroom and finally through to the kitchen.
Not the evenly spaced, straight, and regimental work that we would expect but that's how it is here - it works (we hope) and that's what counts. Once it is all encased in concrete no one will ever know.
Of course, although I had already shown the existing pipework to Luís, the plumber was unaware that the new system was not connected to the old one. This meant that testing the new work would be difficult at best. But, after a brief discussion, it was agreed that Luís could perform the pressure test the next day by linking the hot and cold circuits and then pressurising the whole thing.
Edit: There are 1,000,000 points on offer to anyone who can identify that one joint (out of 34) that the plumber forgot to crimp 😂
Yes, when the pressure test was executed, it got to almost 2 bars before one of the joints bust open and we saw that it had not been finished.
On the bright side, the granite walls are looking even better now that the finishing layer has been placed around the blocks.
Tomorrow, the drains and some scratch coat on the brick walls.