Not to be????

Oh well, we ventured down to our block on Saturday and again today, Monday the 24th Dec to see if we had power connected. But no, there was no power to our site... The rain has been persistently falling the past three (3) days so that could be one of the reasons why it didn't eventuate.....not sure, but either way it was not meant to be....

We will wait to see what 2008 brings....hopefully Henley's timeline will be accurate and we have great weather to accomodate the work being completed.

Maybe more news???

Have been advised that "D" is eager to get as much done prior to Christmas as he can... (i think i like him already). We are supposed to be getting the meter/power installed by Monday 24/12...

Do they still work right up to Christmas eve????

But not sure if the timeline is still in the correct order now....

14/12/07 - Site cut - DONE
7/01/08 - Set Out - DONE
8/01/08 - Drains
9/01/08 - Underground Power - BEFORE X'MAS???
10/01/08 - Concreter to start
15/01/08 - Commence Framing

Can the meter/power be installed before the drains???
Does that mean that security fencing needs to go up????

Will check out the block tomorrow.... and maybe on Monday arvo to see if anything has changed.

Definitely more updates to come....
Well done "D"..... you are off to a great start already....

Hello from our Site Supervisor

Today hubby recieved a phone call from our Site Supervisor, we will refer to him as "D" from here on in... "D" confirmed that the work will re-commence on the 7th of January, 2008 with the slab to be poured on the 10th of Jan.

He went through the procedures of site access , his availability, and that contact should be made through "T' our CSR. Which is all pretty standard....

Well, what a surprise to also hear that the frame will commence on the 15th of Jan!!!! I didn't think it would be that quick after slab pouring, but regardless, still happy.

No news as to when plumbing, roof, brickwork etc. will commence, but hopefully it will not be too long after.

We have advised Henley that we will have Kevin from New Home Inspections in for a few visits during the build process so that might keep the quality levels consistent.....which i'm sure they would be anyway.......



Oh also a quick update that our site was actually cut/set out on Tuesday the 11th of December. Our neighbour kindly let me know as she came round to visit her building site...



There are now 15 houses out of 21 in our street that have commenced with 2 already complete and the new owners have moved in. Next year is going to be really busy when everyone seems to be moving in within the space of 3-4 months i would say.....

Have to have a street party i think.....yeah right i hear you say......any excuse..... LOL.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE, SURPRISE!!!

I went down to the block on Thursday 13/12/07 to check if the earthmoving equipment was there ready for the site scrape on the 14/12 (the revised date).
But didn't i get a surprise when i drove down the street (which by the way is all abuzz with building activity!!!!) to find a toilet on our block....... at it has already been scraped and set out!!!!!!!!

Woooo Hooooo how happy was i?????

The revised timeframes given were:

14/12/07 - Site cut - COMPLETED 11/12
7/01/08 - Set Out - COMPLETED 11/12
8/01/08 - Drains
9/01/08 - Underground Power
10/01/08 - Concreter to start

We can only hope that the drains, power and concrete is on-schedule for first week back in January or earlier would be great too....

No fences yet though, no problems there.


Had a small issue with some tradies from Carlisle Homes though. There is one of their homes being built 2 doors down, and they sent an apprecntice over to gather water from our tap!!!!

Anyway i sent him packing and the next day we went back with a padlock to lock the meter.....that should put an end to their theiving days!!!!

But i suppose i'll have to keep it unlocked when our builder starts back on site.....don't want to hold anything up now because of lack of water now do we????

Just a little hiccup!

Okay so not really little, we called Henley on Thursday 6th of December to confirm a couple of things and it seems that our Site Start has been postponed due to the unavailability of concreters to pour the slab. Site start was going to be changed to mid- January 2008!!!!

Well, then i get "heated" and start firing off e-mails/phone calls to see what i can do to "fix" this problem. After much discussion it was resolved with a satisfactory result- well we think so anyway.

The dates are now as follows:

14/12/07 - Site cut
7/01/08 - Set Out
8/01/08 - Drains
9/01/08 - Underground Power
10/01/08 - Concreter to start

We hope it all goes smoothly from here on in.

Thanks to Henley sales/construction staff and Management for working out an acceptable solution to what was indeed going to be a very angry christmas.

Our Home - Slideshow

IT'S A DATE!!!!!!!!!!!

WOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

IT'S A DATE - THE 7TH OF DECEMBER, 2007!!!!!!!!

Our CSR has given us the site start date and we know that it is going to be a lucky # 7 for us!!!!! How exciting - we will be the last slab that Henley pour before Christmas 2007 - feel slightly honoured - although i don't think that it can happen fast enough for us....

I will spend the day out there and watch and capture as much action as i can to upload onto the blog.

So exciting - it seems that it has taken forever to get to this point - so much planning and the decision making process - although fun has been not without issues.

BRING ON THE 7TH OF DECEMBER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Some special friends from the Homeone forum are also celebrating special things on the 7th of December, they are:

Matt has handover of his Carlisle home:
http://ourgrandeplan.blogspot.com/

Arkraider is having their title released:
http://www.arkraider.blogspot.com/

BMP has handover of their home:
http://peedleville.blogspot.com/

DeeElle has their site start Date:
http://buildinginadelaide.blogspot.com/

and VJ is having their site start on the 6th - near enough to the 7th though....


Congrat's to all of us - i hope the day passes with no issues and we can all celebrate with plenty of alcohol!!! - theres been lots of hard work behind each and every one of these celebrations......i think we all deserve a nice drink!!!

Building Approval Recieved!!

We have been advised today that we have received our building permit approval....

Fantastic news!!!!!

One more step closer to having our beautiful new house.....

A little bit of a compromise on the location of the house on the land.....we had to move it back by 300mm, to make it 4m off the corner boundary. Funny though, we thought that we were already 4m back from the boundary line but obviously we were not.....

But we are now.. (lost you yet?)

No problems, as we still have a couple of metres at the back between the alfresco and the rear fence so that is still fine...

We are very excited to see the dirt turned over, will keep you updated....

GO HENLEY GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Construction Drawings Are Ready!

Well, we've been advised that the final drawings are ready and we should recieve them sometime this week. Will have to go over them and make sure everything is okay before signing them....
We've also been advised that it is about a week before they will start on the site. I'm sure that it will pass very quickly....
We will still go and check the block every week so see if anything has been done....just in case LOL...

WATER, WATER, WE'VE GOT WATER !!!!!

WOW, we went to visit our piece of dirt (again) yesterday and we were very happy to see that the water meter had been connected sometime between Wednesday 7th and Friday the 9th of November!!! I wasn't there when we visited on Melbourne Cup Day on the Tuesday.

Very exciting for us as we should have movement on site within a week or two now. My bet is about 1 week then it will be go, go, go for the site scrape.

While we were there we also met up with one of our neighbours, and they only have 2 weeks to go before they move in!!!!!

Gee we are so excited about a water meter, imagine us with only 2 weeks to go!!!!!!!

I think that we'll be blithering idiots by that time....

Must check the status of the building approval with "T" - our CSO and will update again soon.

Developer Approval Recieved.

Well after a week of waiting, we have been given the go ahead by AV Jennings who are the developer of The Chase Estate...

The application for a building permit will be made tomorrow, Thursday the 1st of November, 2007 by Henley. We have been advised by "T" that this should take about 10 days. Hopefully soon after we will see some movement on our little piece of earth!!!!

Step by step we are getting there.

Go Henley Go!!!!!!

DONE DEAL !!!

Well that's it, it's official, the contract has been signed.

A few issues with the drawings, but they will be rectified prior to the construction drawings being passed onto the developer and the applying of the building permit.

Bit of an anti-climax though as we thought that we would be on-site within 30 days... Not so, as the developer needs to approve the plans and we have been told that it could take up to 4 weeks to get through that process... that's even before the building permit.....

HURRY UP AND START !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway we are nearly there, in the home stretch now so hopefully on-site soon.

Time for a Tidy Up

Well, we thought that the beautiful sea of green that are our weeds needed a trim, so off we went to mow them.

Well hubby mowed and i supervised....

It will be a few weeks yet till building starts so we needed to attend to them soon anyway. They were so high, they surpased the mower in height in some places!

It's amazing how long it takes to get the job done though.

An hour and a half later........it was finished.

Enjoyed a lovely sunset and before we knew it, the light had gone....

ALL DONE!!!

It's Tender Time!!!!!!

Well, we know how poor we are going to be for a long time as at today.

That's right, we had our tender appointment with Henley.

We are keeping most of our additions to the house. The large alfresco, the larger ensuite, the large theatre and dining room and a few others ....

But it is surprising to see how much the unknowns can cost and ultimately add up to???!!!!!

Due to the confidentiality agreement signed at Tender appt, i cannot state specific values on this site.

But i can say that YES we are over budget, the H class slab was extra on top of the standard M class slab. Then although we thought that we were on a pretty flat block, having to excavate about 30cm out of the back on the block and level it will a few more $K!!!!!

The council and developer guidelines then kick in and that adds up to more $$$$K.

Lucky we had allocated a larger amount for site costs, but thought that would cover the fences and a few other items. Oh well... we just have to save a little more. At least we know that we are getting the extras that we really want.

We went over the standard price of the home with additions by about 26%. That's pretty average i suppose though.

The siting drawing is right on the money. Exactly what we had expected to see, which is great!

Our Tender Consultant was lovely and took the time to answer all of our questions and resolve any issues that we raised. We actually spent 3 and 1/2 hours instead of the std 3 hour appointment with her. She went out of her way to double check things as we are upgrading the standard house with a lot and there isn't another house being built that has all of our strucural variations/

We walked out smiling though. Yes we are spending a little more....but only about 3% over what we budgeted, but we are closer to getting our home.

We have a contract meeting in 3 weeks and we are very excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hopefully we will get through contract signing and be on site in mid-November. If all goes well, we won't have to look at the weeds growing on the block...

VERY HAPPY THAT THINGS ARE MOVING QUICKER NOW.

Again i am not allowed to name specific people due to the confidentiality agreement but we would like to say thanks again to all the girls at Henley's East sales office for their assistance and professionalism.

Hurry Up!!!!

Oh the disappointment, we drove down to visit our block yesterday and saw 3 more blocks in our street had had their water meter connected.....Not Fair....More people are going to get their houses before us............How sad.......

We sooo want something to happen soon......

Tender appointment is this Friday the 21st of September and we are hoping that all our homework for the past few months will pay off. We have budgeted enough for everything, but the deciding factor will be the things that might be thrown into the equation like additional site costs.... Trying not to worry though.....

Funnily enough we met someone who has recently built with Henley and has only been in the house for a few months and had similar internal colour selections to us.
We were invited around for a look and foiund that we are very happy with our colour selections. JUST WANT TO SEE IT FINISHED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We have selected our flooring now, and have gone for the 15mm Boral Silkwood Range in Spotted Gum (Natural finish) similar to the one displayed here, but ours will be laid running the length of the house, not accross it.

Our old Carpet was a Godfrey Hirst Carpet - from the Tibet range in Mocha colour. We have sourced the flooring through Fowles.

We have since changed it to a Quest carpet - Charisma - Cassia colour - 100% wool:

Hopefully we know have done our sums and are pleasantly surprised on Friday at tender. If all goes well i won't have to compromise on anything and we might even be able toadd a few more options into the equation.

Wish us luck................

Talk about Indecisive!

Well i thought our colours were all signed, sealed and not really delivered, but then we went driving around and saw similar houses with black windows like we originally wanted. Although we don't want a house that looks too dark it is hard to choose colours that co-ordinate with our bricks to get the look we want.

The colour consultant suggested flush off white mortar with our Ironstone bricks. We ended up choosing a raked mortar and agreed to the off-white, but then after seeing it on houses with similar colour bricks, we both agreed that that was not the look that we wanted for our house.

We wanted a raked natural morter, and hopefully it does not look too yellow against the bricks. Time will tell. We also changed our Paperbark windows to Black as we originally wanted. The roof tiles, guttering and fascia will remain as black. We were undecided though about the garage door. We have selected a Paperbark, but tossed up jasper and Sandbark as well. We were warned away from black as it was too dark.

So we hope we have got it right now. I feel a little more comfortable with black window frames on the brickwork. I want the render and garage door to be the feature of the front facade, not the windows.

We will not know for sure until it is built, but we feel confident that it should look pretty good.

I don't think that i want to go driving around for a while, we are happy with everything so far........

Colours, Colours, Colours.....

Well today we had our colour appointment at Cosham Interiors. Started out stressful, but ended up being very easy. If you have read our last post you will know that we had issues with our previous selection of brick colours and floor tiles.

Well we are proud to say that as of 4.00pm today it is all done!

Woo Hoo!!!

We selected the following:

We have tried to remain fairly neutral in our colour tones so that we can accessorise with blacks, whites, possibly red and neutral shades of brown/beige. What a shame, cause that means we have to buy some new items for the house...... Hubby is going to love it.......(not).

We have placed the colours on Spotted Gum which is engineered timber flooring from the Boral Silkwood range. It is the type of colour that we are after. We want something with light tones, without going for Tas Oak etc as they are too soft. With kids we need a timber that will withstand Tonka trucks and tough toys......

Good Luck i hear you say????

This colour scheme is the opposite of what we had in our last place. We had black granite benchtops over cream cupboards. Light cream porcelain tiles and red ironbark floors, so this seems very different to us. We are not big fans of the 70's dark wood cabinetry so we have gone for something in-between.

We hope that it all looks great when it all comes together.

We just have to wait and see.....

At least we are one step closer in the process to getting our new home.

CAN'T WAIT.............

Colour changes

Well, we had a busy weekend, we spent Saturday arvo looking at as many Henley display homes as we could to see what colour options were available to us.
We thought we were pretty set in our colours...........

BUT THEN on Sunday we went to Cosham for an information session and were advised that since we were tiling the shower bases, we needed to choose a tile that was 300x300mm in size. We had originally chosen a 400x400mm tile. Since we do not want the shower base to be a different colour to the floor tiles, we decided we needed to choose another tile. Simple task.....Maybe not.....

Needless to say, that was the beginning of a few changes that we ended up making. The kitchen c/stone benchtop colour changed, as did the door colour as did the top cupboards colour as well as the glass splashback.

Ohhhhhhhhhhh...........Back to square one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then we were advised that there were some new bricks in the standard range, so the colour of our original brick might change too... So instead of going for a darker red/brown brick with black highlights, we might go for a lighter brown with some black highlights.... We have our appointment for final colour selection on Friday so we need to make our decision soon anyway.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY TO ALL THE DADS OUT THERE!

Until next time.....

Another Busy Weekend Planned

Well after having last weekend off with the kids, it's back onto the house stuff for us. We will be spending Saturday 1st September looking through all the Henley displays (in the nearest village)to make sure we have all the colours just right. The tiles, cupboards, caeserstone, brick and render colours etc.

We have an information session with Cosham Interiors booked on Sunday 2nd September and a Colour selection appt next Friday the 7th of September. So this is our last chance to make selections and see how they look in a larger scale. Choosing colours from a tiny sample and a single tile is not what i call an enjoyable experience.

We are pretty well planned so far though. I keep colour samples, we have sample bricks and roof tiles that we continue to look at and re-confirm that is what we want to look at for a long time to come. I do not want anything that is going to be a "fad" and will be outdated in a few years so i am conservative with my colour selections and think that i can always accentuate with accessories.

I know that when we sold our last place. We had so many compliments on the decor and so many offers on the table on D day that proved we had presented the house tastefully. We know that we need to keep things neutral and the lines clean.

Our colour schemes are fairly neutral, beige colour walls with some darker feature walls here and there, black and white for accents and timber floors, with darker brown/grey colour carpets. We have black leather sofas from our old lounge suite, which will have to do for now. But i'm sure that i can buy more stuff. You know what they say, out with the old and in with the new.... (much to hubby's dismay).

We are not changing much....(yeh right!) The c/stone, tiles, door furniture and even the toilets are being upgraded just to mention a few, so we want to make sure that we are 100% positive on what we want.

I am looking forward to more space though. Having a kids room has really excited our 2 little ones. They can keep it as long as it is kept clean!!! (mum's rules)
We will have multiple entertainment areas, 1. the Family room, 2. The Theatre/Rumpus room and 3. The Kids Retreat. Not that i don't mind being a family unit. But our family-members have very different views on what they like to watch & do.
Hubby likes to watch car racing, 10yo likes to play Playstation, 3yo likes to watch kids movies & car racing with daddy and i enjoy movies. So needless to say that sitting down in front of one TV ends up as an issue most times.

I get quite excited at this stage. i love this aspect of the building/renovating process. Anyway, we'll update the blog on Sunday with our choices. I'll see if i can get some photos together to upload of the colour selections.

A little piece of normailty.

It was our first weekend for a long, long time that we didn't go looking at display homes, didn't look at interior colours & concepts, bricks, flooring etc. We didn't even go down to stare at our bit of dirt.....

It was nice to spend the weekend playing with our children and being "normal". Sometimes we tend to forget what is most important in the world. Sounds soppy i know, but it is nice to stop worrying about the building process every now and then. It brings a sense of normality to our usually busy lives.

Until next time.....

Our block & House

Well hi to all. This is our block of land in The Chase Estate in Berwick, Victoria. Settlement occured this week and we can finally call this piece of dirt ours.
Ours is a so called "corner block" at the top end of a T style court so we have some restrictions as to what the side of the house (that does face the end of the court) looks like.

************************************************************************************************

We have chosen to build the COTTESLOE with HENLEY.

We have optioned it up quite heavily with the following changes:

* Castlereigh Facade (Galbaly facade pictured here)
* Adding 2m to garage width incl. a roller door for rear access
* the rumpus will become a theatre and will be larger
* the dining/meals are will also be larger
* we are adding a bath to the ensuite
* internal access into the study from the garage
* an alfresco (all going well with budget)
* a corridor from which to access BR's 2, 3 & 4 instead of BR4 coming off the family area
* we are also adding a wall and double doors to close off the living room to make it a seperate zone to entertain in
* adding double doors to the study

A lot of changes i know, and these are only the large ones. Lots of little ones too. We'll try and update the plan and upload to this blog.

Our New Life

Hi everyone, well here it is, our testament to the next few months where we will put ourselves through hell to have exactly what we want....Our new home...

We have chosen to build with Henley. Our home will be The Cottlesloe - but with a few twists.