We have a slab

Yay! The plumbing etc was done early this week, it was definitely in by Wednesday afternoon. We were hoping to get out to the block before the cement was poured, but alas when we went Thursday morning...it was already done. So no photos of the pipes etc. just some of the slab...as we were leaving the windows turned up too, so we got a couple of photos of those. It has also left me doubting whether I we picked the right colour. Our mortar will be darker than what the windows appear to be, and what about the render, will it match?? Maybe I should have gone with the 'magnolia gloss' ones instead, it is darker than the 'white birch' we have got.... or maybe even 'silver lustre' might have been nice. Its so hard to choose when the only samples you have are 10cm lengths of pipe, 4 bricks with mortar, and no render colour to compare with! Its too late to change now anyways, so I guess I shouldn't stress myself out about window colouring!! Also found out while checking the contract that not only do we have flyscreens for the windows, but for sliding doors as well. I didnt even see that until today *blushes*

So now the photos....


This was on Sunday, before pipes etc had been laid.

Our slab... it takes up most of the block, I dont think we will be having any backyard at all. Not happy about that, but what can you do when block sizes these days are sooo small!
Looking from rear of house to front. The pipes sticking up are toilet, laundry and bathroom pipes..the ensuite ones up the front.

This is the way they do garages here. The rest will be laid later on, towards the end of the build.
Our new windows. I hope they dont go "walk-about" while they are sitting there waiting to be installed.

It has all started!

Well as the title says, things have started on the block! We got an email from our Construction Liason Lady...'S'...to let us know that now that everything has gone to construction, she will take over from 'C'. We have to go through her if we have questions etc, and she says she will keep us updated fortnightly on progress. She also told us who our Site Supervisor is, we'll call him 'W' from now on, and that site works are starting and slab will be down within the next fornight. We also can meet W if we like, we have to go through her though to make an appointment. I think we will take her up on the offer, mainly to put a face to the name, find out how long building should take etc, and hopefully get a 'feel' for him... (see if he knows his stuff or if he's a dodgy SS!)... I will also have some Q's I will want answered too.
Luckily Mr G knows someone who has built and is living in the estate and kindly said she will go past and update us. We will be making weekly visits out there now that everything has finally started. Hopefully we can get pictures before the slab goes down, which should be sometime next week. I guess the next step after slab is the handing over of money.... eeekkk!

We have a sign...

Well the bank finally come through, about a week after my last post. After getting confirmation, we paid the deposit (out of our pown pocket :( ) and rang our CA, who was away. The replacement girl, thanked us and had everything sent to construction.... Yipee no price-rise!!

We also got a plan for the storm water disposal...theres a soak well on the plan-not sure if this is a good or bad thing yet. The council had deleted one soakwell from the back, (not sure where the water from the d/pipes goes for them though) and it looks like from the scribble on the plan the front one was moved from near the house to the near the footpath??? A bit later down the track we will go to the council and work it out between ourselves, we arent quite sure what it all means!

A call to Ultimate last week, had us excited as we were told that everything should start in the next couple of weeks. Our original CA 'C' is also back from holidays.

A trip to the block on Sunday had us (Mr G and I) cheering as we had our builders sign erected.....the kids weren't impressed, all they still see is dirt, once building actually starts I think they will be able to muster up a little bit of enthusiasm.... quite possibly it will dimish quickly though, when we drag them out there week after week!

The houses are going up all around in our section of the estate, so its quite nice to see it develop.

Kids sitting in front of the builders sign..(note the beanie miss7 is wearing :) )
Looking towards the main entrance..our block is the 2nd one in on the left, not visible in picture.
Looking down the street, directly in front of our block.

Looking towards our block from street in above picture.
Part of the creek area that cuts through the estate. This area is on the other side of the main entrance/our block. Our side of the creek hasn't been started yet.

You can see the main entrance from this picture, and the rest of the 'undeveloped estate.

While driving back home, I managed to get the kids excited when I seen 'Herbie' driving towards us....okay maybe I got a little excited too (I loved Herbie!!) Mr13 insisted it was the same car from the movies...after all there cant be 2 'herbies' ... I am sure he got miss7 and mr10 believing him! So all in all it was excitement all around!!

"Beep beep"

At a standstill.....

We are waiting, waiting, waiting for the bank to come through with our bank approval. It looks like what was a while ago agreed to, is now null and void, and we have had to apply for the house loan approval again...only to come up short! We are a week over our "date" of 11 Sept. and the bank is saying that our current house valuation is now not enough. We are risking the house price-rise if this is not finalised soon, (like today!!) and have to pay the house deposit of $12k ourselves...this is the only way we can get the loan, without mortgage insurance (getting that would mean a lengthy hold-up while they re-do the loan with the added amount in it and we haven't the time.)
The thing that annoys me the most is that we asked the bank first how much we could borrow before even looking, that way it allowed us to not look at houses/designs that were out of our budget and to keep upgrades minimal so there was not a lot of the back and forth between builder and bank.
On the plus side we did get our building approval from the council yesterday, haven't seen what "stormwater" system the builder has put in on the application yet, I think they used a soakwell...hope we can just eliminate that, but will have to talk to council first. That is to be done after hand-over anyways by us, so plenty of time to figure what we will do.


I hate this waiting, but what can you do?

A little closer now...

We have been out to the block and we have a tap...hurrah! :) Who would have thought that something so little would get me all excited. While out at the block, we have discovered that we are not the first to start building either. :( LOL! The block next to ours already has its brick-work started, (and has a whole heap of dirt half of which is piled on our block) at least 3 other places have their slab and a couple have their taps/electricity boxes. We said "howdy" to a.... I guess I can call him a 'neighbour' that is building just up the street from our block. He was walking around on his slab, lucky thing.... but I guess soon enough it will be us doing the same thing too. We haven't met the people building next to us yet... I already feel sorry for the poor people who have to live next to my brats kids!!
Some good news too...the bank has approved the loan...again... and our financial advisor got stuck into them for taking so long, so the bank...bless their corporate heart... has decided to start the 12 month bridging loan from this loan approval rather than the first one for the land. So that gives us the 3 months back, which is great. :) Hopefully that means that we may even be able to move into the new house before selling this one, which, in turn, means that we wont have to find somewhere to rent between selling and end of building.
Only thing we need to figure out now is schooling for next year.....

A much needed update.....

Well its been a while since our last update and things have been moving along nicely....

First off, our settlement went through and the block was officially ours on the 24th June....Hurrah! Then on the 14 July we got a phone call to let us know that soil samples are in....... came back much earlier than expected. Apparently around our area there is a lot of clay, and if we ran into that, then the soil had to be sent over east for some analysis, yadda yadda yadda, 8 or more weeks later we possibly would of had a large site works bill. Anyhoo luck was with us, our soil was okay, our site costs weren't too extreme and 'J' is coming around tomorrow so that we could sign contracts. On the 15th everything was looked through, signed and sent away. Then we got a call from our CA, 'C', for our prestart meeting....which brings you up to date. :D

Our prestart was yesterday, and it took about 2 hours. The variations need to be signed and sent back in the morning. Then we have until September 11 to have everything submitted......deposit, finance approval and building permit. These are the 3 things that could push us back with starting, 2 things are up to the bank and one is up to the council....I guess we will have to get out the cattle prod and make sure they dont take their time! :D

So I guess this is the time I tell you about all the things we have chosen, and things we have done to our new house. Pictures will be compulsory.... so you can all 'ooh' and 'ahh' over it. :D

First up is the external colours:

*Roof style:vienna colour:graphite

*Bricks: Burnished red/cream mortar

*Gutters/Fascia: solver 'weathered copper'

*Garage door: Jaspar

*Render: dune

*Feature render: Jaspar

*Front door: Dulux 'Box Red'

Time for some "Oohing" people!!

The internals are the tiles, bench, cupboards, they are:

Ensuite: *floor-stone grey *wall-matt white *border-contempo grey *vanity top-platinum micro *cupboard-licorice linea

Bathroom: *floor-stone grey *wall-matt white *border-striscia grey *vanity top-rock salt *cupboard-licorice linea

Kitchen: *wall-matt white *bench tops-ash dust *cupboards-licorice linea

Now the "ahhing"

The selection for all these were on boards (about 8 different ones) with all tiles/laminates assigned for the three areas. All we had to do was just chose a board that we liked best. We could not change anything....ie/ if we liked kitchen bench from board 2 and ensuite tile from board 4, we couldn't mix together, it was all of one or nothing. I don't mind the ones we have, its just not the ones I really wanted....(maybe on the next house ;) )

Door frames and trims will all be solver 'studio white'..... no internal painting is done by the builders, we will need to do that after hand-over.

Things we changed/added: *Deleted all brick paving, will do that after h/over with liquid limestone (credited)*added door to bed1's WIR & deleted shelf and rail *added a door to laundry *added a door to rear garage, and most importantly *added d/washer recess, (and contrary to someone's beliefs....it is not my hidey-hole... or the kids for that matter! )*Relocated trough to w/m spot *lowered taps and p/point to accomodate bench *lowered oven stack, so that I can actually see into microwave recess ( darn short people!) and added pot drawer under....albeit smaller to accomodate lowered oven.....should be ample room for all those trays :D lol.

For the electrical we only added a couple of extra lights, moved the theatre one (for d/lights after h/over), upgraded most single gpos to doubles and added extra doubles in some rooms. We also added conduit boxes for tv/phones/exhaust fans.

All up we only added an extra $4k, give or take... so not to bad.

The kids dont seem to be too interested in anything at the moment, took them out to the block, and we checked out the holes (from soil testing......2 metres deep)...they didnt want to get out the car, the red front door they barely glanced at.... so we haven't shown them the internal colours as yet. I wonder what they will do when we start cheering and getting excited at taps and portaloos on the property, probably wonder if we have truly gone mad. :?

While we (I mean "I") were working out our front colours, I 'photoshoped' the front in our preferred colours, here is the side and front view.

Okay 'ooh' and 'ahh' again please people! :D lol

I am not sure if the roof or the gutters are the right colour, we only had a 3cm x 2cm colour strip for the gutter colour, and the roof tile changes colour, we grabbed a sample tile at the 'home expo'....sometimes it looks black, others dark brown, and sometimes even a greyish black. So we did the best we could, if it does look weird after its built, I guess I have a 'handyman'.....(or at the very least 'a man'?)....to repaint it!!

Titles...we have titles!

Yes you heard me right. *happy dance*
On Friday afternoon, Mr G got the much awaited phone call to say that everything regarding the land had been finished and titles were released. YAY!!!
So we called our financial advisor, who will send everything on to the bank so settlement can go through. For the $10k discount, as per previous post, settlement had to be made by a certain date, as we were getting close to that date we got another letter to say that we had 20 working days from title release to finalise settlement, there should be no hold ups from our end. So rebate is good, but our house price has risen about that much in the time we have waited, not sure now if the air-conditioning will come to pass....at least not straight away anyhoo.
After the great news on the titles we received an email of our title # etc, (whatever it is you need, wont get anything else until settlement) and rang Ultimate straight away to find out what we need to do to get everything underway, and discussed the promotion that we seen in the paper. (Which we cant get as the soil tests will take too long...instead he let us lock in prices. :) )
We went in for the meeting and spoke to 'J', who was very helpful and went through everything. We signed up for the soil tests, transferred payment, and have to wait approx 8 weeks for results. A long wait because of suburb we are building in. Our main concern with the long wait is that the price of house is going up yet again, and this one will take it over our budget, so 'J' was kind enough to lock in the base house price as long as the only thing that holds us up is the soil sample. Seeing as everything is done, and has been waiting for the past 10ish months for titles, I dont think we will have any hold-ups at all. I even got a pre-start booklet, (not meant to get one yet) so I can prepare the selections I need to, in advance, and not hold up the process any longer than necessary at pre-start and contract stage.
As this is a 'plus series' ie: investor/first buyer/more bang for your buck, type property there are some things that we cant do, some good, some not so good.
Some good points: *The roof tile profile that I liked best are part of the range *We can get shower screens as opposed to rails *We are putting in a dishwasher recess *They are omitting the paving (so we can put in liquid limestone) *They are letting us put a door on the main WIR and not installing the shelving *Obsure glass to bathrooms (we get to choose a style for that too)
These extra upgrades will not cost a great deal and should be nearly equaled out with the paving rebate.
Not so good points: *Even though the range is nice, we cannot choose the laminates/bench tops/tiles that I wanted....they have pre-selected colour boards that we have to choose from and there's no mix/matching from board to board. *The brick selection is pretty dull (even without the limit of only 6 different bricks). *Cant change the mortar colour *Cannot change the plan in any way *All drainpipes are painted same colour as house at the builders discretion. I wanted contrasting colour to go with the fascia. *Other things that I dont like can be changed after hand/over

Now this is not all bad mind you, we like the plan as is (we will put in our own stud walls later ;) ), and we didnt think it was worth paying an extra $20k to just to end up paying for changes to the plan. I guess the upside of that though, is being able to chose your own laminates and tiles, although I am sure other things, like taps etc, are still charged as an upgrade.

Everythings ready to go, what needs to be paid is paid, the bank, I guess is doing their thing for the titles, so nothing more for us to do, but wait....again.