SLOW OFF THE MARK

A bit of finer weather saw us finally get to pop out to our block yesterday to check on our new purchase, and we found that....
5 Blocks have had a site scrape done!
Another one has a little hand made sign in their yard with their name and lot number on it, ready for action.
3 Blocks have scored a tap!
1 Block has the works!! Site scrape, tap, rubbish cage, cut & fill, Portaloo AND retaining walls!!!
And sadly to say, NONE of these blocks belong to us. :-(
Guess I was wrong in thinking that there would be no time between Settlement and Christmas to get any work done! Oh well, at least we won't be the 1st ones moving in when our time finally comes!
What we did find on our block was this...

3 fresh soil test holes. I have no idea why....we have already had 1 soil test done and there was never any mention of needing another. Oh well, at least it means that they haven't forgotten us!

Also pleasing to see that the Developers are putting everyone's money to good use and are moving ahead on the park landscaping

BBQ Shelter area with nice new tables and benches

A bit of crazy paving going on

And some more park benches for good measure

Moving right along....Congratulations to the Neil Family on their fantastic Christmas present - a lovely new Cremorne!

Well done!!! And a big thank you for your support and inspiration over the last few months. :-)

To everybody else... I hope the New Year sees some fantastic progress for us all as we endeavour to catch up to Toni! :-)

Merry Christmas Everyone....stay safe and be happy!

LAND SETTLEMENT!

Well, ten and a half months after we signed the contract, and three months later than expected, our bank balance took a big hit on Thursday as our land FINALLY settled!
Not without a few last minute hiccups... settlement was meant to happen on Wednesday, but didn't go ahead due to something on the developer's side of things, and we also got stung for council rates and land tax from the day of signing the contract, NOT the day of settlement, so there goes another lazy 1k that we were not expecting. D'oh! Should have read that contract a little more thoroughly!
So, now it feels as though Boxing Day has come early. All the build up, excitement and anticipation of waiting is over and there is not much to do! PD have been quiet...but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that we won't be seeing any on site action before Christmas.
Probably just as well, it's such a busy time....School finishing, Kinder concerts, sporting breakups, end of year parties, work parties and Santa has only just started her shopping! I would hate to get a tap and be too busy to go and check it out!
Here are some pics from the last few times we went out to the block. Who would have thought that it would be that wet and miserable in the middle of December that any plans we may have had to go out and visit the land that we now own would have to be put on hold??? Well actually, it is Melbourne after all....






BBQ area/Shelter/Seating under construction

Can you make out that grey building off in the distance? That is the new Safeway and Town Centre due to open by the middle of next year. Yay! Proximity to shopping!

A nice grassy knoll. Newly laid turf in the park.

The park again...lucky we BYO'd a ball!

Will good things come to those who wait?

Well I certainly hope so, because waiting ( not terribly patiently ) is about the only thing we have been doing lately! It has been a long time between posts, mainly because there is not much to report. Land settlement STILL hasn't occured. What was meant to be September was put back to October, which was put back to early to mid November...which now looks like being the end of November ( don't think I'll hold my breath! ) That being said, I think we will lose our chance of a December site start...PD won't commit to the possibility of bringing us forward to December until they know one way or the other what is happening with the land...even so, to settle at the end of November AND make a start on things before everyone packs up for Christmas is seeming more and more unlikely. :-((
On the land front, not sure what the holdup is, but they don't seem to have much more to do...





We have lamp posts in the street.... the actual light fitting would be handy though!










We have tree at the front of our block. The jury is out on this one, not sure whether I like it or hate it. Not sure whether it will have interesting foliage as it grows or look like it has survived a bushfire! If I was to follow Newbies path and name my tree, she would definately have to be Black Betty!



DS - " Who needs a new house - I like dirt! "






And surveying the pitch for future fun and games!


So everything is out of our hands now, we have no choice but to wait as patiently as we can. And I shall have to live the " build dream " through all of those other bloggers out there who are seeing some good progress lately....can't wait to join your club!

SIGNED, SEALED AND DELIVERED.

Well, the contract has now been signed. And contrary to my preconceptions, there isn't much to report as it all went fairly smoothly. Granted, the tea and bikkies were not out, but at least the water on offer was cold, and the air between CSC and DH had cleared.
We ( meaning I ) were paranoid about there being mistakes on the plans/specifications/contract, so I was scouring them like a hawk. Surprisingly, there were only a couple of little mistakes ( render to the wrong part of the facade...which actually would have been quite a big mistake to me if not picked up! ) and 2 windows which we had wanted as awning were on the plans as fixed. CSC was very efficient and these things were changed without any fuss. We even decided to make a couple of last minute changes.... render to the rumpus/alfresco wall, extra cupboards in the laundry under the bench, move the backyard garden tap, different spot for the H2O tank... all no problems. She ( CSC ) was very intent on pointing out that NO further changes can be made after 7 days...so last night was ( hopefully ) my final mental brainstorm.... have we got everything that we want ( up to the point we can afford! ) and are they in the right colours?? I think so, I hope so....
Also to come out of the meeting was the building time frame - 187 days ( read 26.7 weeks! )..GRRR!!!... but they are looking at the possibility of bringing us forward from a Feb. '09 start date to a Dec. '08 one...fingers crossed!

Yay! Movement at the station! After 2 weeks of not visiting the land, it was exciting to turn up today to find out that we have a crossover!! And footpaths!! And the roads and gutters are almost complete. One step closer to getting out of this rental! Woo Hoo - roll on November!

Standing in OUR Backyard, looking North..

And East...

And West...

Standing at the top of our street...

Excited DD

OUR Crossover...





And from another angle..

And another...

And one more for luck...

A win for us!

Well, as the title suggests, we have had a win today with regards to getting the downpipes etc. changed from zincalume to colourbond...and at the reduced price of $1800. Yay! Thanks to all who supported us and encouraged us to query this with CSC. Thanks to DH ( love ya honey! ) who had several difficult phone calls to CSC - firstly to be told ' NO - just under $6k IS the price!!'. Secondly to be told ' you are being a drama queen over $4k ( is she for real??? ) and finally, 3rd time lucky - ' whoops, sorry, I made a mistake, how about $1800??? Great, we have a contract appointment to front up to next week! No tea and bikkies for us, and we're off the xmas card list too!

How is it so?

Right royally mailto:P#@$@# off today! As I said on an earlier post, we wanted to get a price on upgrading our gutters and downpipes etc to colourbond. Seemed like a good idea - cutting down on future maintenance, and others out there kindly let us know that their prices came in between $1k and $2k dollars. OK, that sounds fine, would be happy to pay that, so requested a price from our CSC... and it has come back in at just under $6K!!!! Excuse me while I pick myself back up from off the floor. Quickly shot an email back to CSC - " excuse me but surely you have made a mistake ", to which the reply came back " no mistake, that's the price!! ". Aargh!! How is it so? I don't want to sound like a whinger, and the idea of this blog was not to be so negative, but to create a happy journey of our building experience, but not feeling so happy at the moment! Are we getting ripped off??

Countdown to Contract

One week until contract appointment and counting!
Madly trying to think of any last minute changes that we might wish to make so as to avoid any PCV's - don't like the idea of those. Have already contacted our CSC re possibly getting increased wall insulation instead of / or in addition to wrap, and changing from painted zincalume gutters etc to colourbond. We haven't got a price on these yet, need to wait until contract ( of course! ), and if the price is not too high then this is probably something we will get done.
I had also deleted the included extended bench top to the laundry ( why? - laundry is not that big and I wanted somewhere to keep the ironing board up. ) Now I think that some extra folding space will be good, so I want that bench back!
Also need to chase up about water tank ... fairly useless if it is not plumbed to a garden tap, as I have heard some current PD homes are plumbed to the toilets only!
And I may also get a price for extra soundscreen ( at the moment it is in the rumpus only ) to any bedroom that backs onto a bathroom/laundry. Getting everything will be out of the question, too much $$$$!! So hopefully we will be allowed to pick and choose what we want to keep in/delete once we finally know the prices at contract!!

Electrical Selection Appointment

Back in to Hopetoun yesterday for our electrical appointment. It was quiet in there which was good as we had 5 kids in tow! The appointment ran very smoothly, although very long - 3 1/2 hours! I couldn't believe that picking out where to put the power points took longer than the colour appointment. Our consultant ' D ' was just fantastic, very easy going and helpful, and even though I felt we were quite prepared in knowing what we wanted, he came up with lots of good ideas. It was also good seeing how much everything cost, unlike the colour selection appointment where we were flying blind with regards to the cost of our chosen upgrades. Our final price went quite a fair way over the amount that we had allowed for in the tender amount ( whoops! ) but at the end of the day, we are happy with what we have got. Here is a little run down of what we chose...
21 'chinamans hats '
37 downlights
3 outdoor flood lights( rear and side )
Front lighting
SS fan to alfresco
Numerous dimmer switches
Lots of extra power points
3 phone points
2 powertainment boards
Island bench power point
Bosch security alarm system
Pre wire package for future solar power system
Pre wire 5.1 Home theatre speaker points inc. subwoofer cable & GPO
HDMI cabling for wall mounted plasmas

K'ching, K'ching... the price continues to go up.. and i've realised that although we were there for over 3 hours, there are still things I forgot to add in, just hope I can ring on Monday and make some changes.
On the land front, the asphalt roads are down - Yay!! The developers are hopeful for a November title release. If PD aren't going to start until Feb. though, I don't really care if the land runs a little late - let that money sit in the bank a little longer!

Just a couple of pictures....

The Floor plan.

The Bricks ( Austral Hawthorn )

The Roof Tiles ( Monier Barramundi )

Colour Selections

The mandatory inclusion of the list of colours selected. "T" is totally over discussing colour choices, me - I love it, maybe it's a girl thing!

The Facade : Hotham
The Bricks : Austral Hawthorn
The Render : Jasper ( to garage and bedroom 2 )
The Garage Door : Jasper, Contemporary profile
Gutters and Fascias : Woodland Grey
Beam "thingy" above portico : Woodland Grey
Downpipes : Woodland Grey
Front facade and all main living room windows : Timber stained "cedar "
Mortar : Flush off white
Aluminium windows ( to dead side ) : Stone beige satin
Water tank : Slate grey
Roof Tiles : CSR Monier, Tudor profile, Barramundi
Internal walls : Wattyl Chalk Beige
Architraves, Skirting, Internal Doors : Wattyl Chalk Dust
Kitchen benchtop : Coral Reef
Kitchen cabinets : Vinyl wrap, country square profile, in " Parchment "
Bathroom and ensuite cabinets : As for kitchen but in " Polar White "
Bathroom and ensuite benchtops : Limestone
Powder room and Laundry cabinets : " Oyster Linea "

The PD experience to date.

It has been a mix of good and bad so far actually. Initially all good, dealt with either a genuinely really nice and helpful sales rep., or a mighty good salesman!! Did the usual walk through the house to see what was standard, what were upgrades and talked about what variations we wanted to make. Mr. Sales rep would say things like " go for ...... - that looks grouse." " Why don't you .... - they're grouse." " Get the .... it will be so grouse." Which is why we have now labelled him with the nickname - Grouse!! Walked through and picked out our 1st lot of upgrades- k'ching, k'ching..most of what was displayed were upgrades and the total goes up quickly and significantly. No problems there though, happy with what we picked, OK with the costs, so paid the initial deposit to sign up and get the soil test done. Next step was to go to our Tender Appointment. Additional site costs came back a bit higher than we we would have initially anticipated ( considering there is less than 1m fall across the block) ..k'ching. Adding on an extra 1.5m to the width of the garage PLUS further additional site costs for the bigger garage were higher than anticipated... k'ching, k'ching' k'ching!! Gee, this is starting to eat into my new furniture fund! Numerous mistakes in the tender doc. had to be fixed up on the day despite numerous emails prior to this detailing further changes we wanted to make. Left there feeling not too bad, on to colour selection we go!!
We probably made about 4 or 5 trips to Hopetoun Interiors prior to our colour appointment. How disappointing to meet most of the weekend staff there!! Really, why bother? Apathetic, ignorant, disinterested. And not being able to disclose the price of upgrades..that really bugged us. So around we went, picking out possible choices, always in the back of our minds to be careful...that choice could add thousands to the final cost. Who knows, there were probably things that we would have upgraded to anyway if we knew the price, but didn't in fear of budget blowout. I think that their process actually works against them... I think that they don't disclose the price hoping that you will just upgrade everything, get to contract, find out that it was actually more than you had hoped to pay, but you have fallen in love with your choices, too hard to go back and change things now because " gee, if I downgrade the bricks, I'll need a different render colour and if I change the render, I'll need different roof tiles" and so on and so forth - and I am not going back to Hopetoun so what the heck - just add it all on, and i'll say pretty please very nicely to the man at the bank!!
Our actual colour appointment went very well - quickly and smoothly, even with 2 littlies in tow! Our girl " K " was great and although we felt that we had done a lot of homework and were pretty set on what we wanted, she was great and had a lot of ideas and info. on what was used in certain display homes etc. I had fun, "T" attended and survived, but colours aren't really his cup of tea!
The tile selection appointment was attended by me alone - "T" more than happy to miss out the experience and stay home on dad duty. Not much to report from that day, because I chose 2 tiles for the whole house - 1 floor tile for ensuite/bathroom/laundry/powder room floor, and 1 tile for the showers and bathroom/ensuite/laundry splashback!!
Not long after these appointments, our relationship with PD soured a bit. Not to bore you with too many of the details, but we requested info about our prices that they were not willing to give out, and had to shuffle around a couple of appointments due to the baby being sick ( didn't want to go to contract without having done the electrical appointment 1st, which is what they wanted us to do. ) Also, we asked to see a copy of the contract before the actual contract appointment - whoops! Big NO NO apparently, not at all accomodating with that request! DH does the 'hard calls' here...he certainly had a few over a number of days, with a couple of people on the heirachy list, and finally all was worked out to our satisfaction. Wouldn't have happened in the 1st place though if the process was more give and less take, and more flexible when dealing with peoples lives!
So now it is on to electrical selections next week and contract the week after ( a bit scary to actually meet CSR considering our phone and email history. ) I dare say she won't be pulling out the tea and bikkies!

Land again - from another angle.

Enjoying the view.

Our Land

Somewhere off in the distance, behind the big tree...

Note to self....

Note to self .... work out how to get photos off the camera and onto the computer... no IT skills here!

Once upon a time..

Once upon a time, we were happily living in a lovely home in a beautiful and leafy Melbourne suburb, and for numerous resons, decided it was time to move on to a new home. 3 bedrooms, 5 children under 10, very large backyard, hard to keep looking gorgeous despite the water tank with continued drought, lounge,dining and family rooms...all very open plan and great while the kids are little but thinking forward a few years, no where separate for the kids to be kids and for the parents to have time out!! Being an older suburb, there aren't a lot of parks and bike tracks etc and being so hilly means that riding bikes out in the street was a big no no for the kids. Buying established and paying all that stamp duty was something that we considered briefly but it seemed that by building again we could get just what we wanted at a reasonable price. So it is off to the outskirts of Melbourne for us to build for the 2nd time!! Our chosen suburb was really the only place that we considered moving to and looking for land ( if you count out our recurring daydream of living in Noosa! ). We really like the country feel and the wide vistas and being only 13 minutes from our old home was a big bonus. Our 1st foray into land ownership went terribly wrong. We bought a re - sale block through a real estate agent who told us that there were no covenants or restrictions attached to the land restricting what we could build. Ummm, hello?? Yes there were! A very small building envelope... we are looking to build a bigger home, not downsize!! Quickly exercised our right to cool off in relation to that purchase, and then cooled our heels for a while so we didn't get burnt again! Our next step was to do the rounds of the display homes to find a home that we liked, then find the land to match. P.D. was about the 5th builder that we visited and we instantly fell in love. Initially we liked "The Hayman", but then we found "The Illoura"... a little bit more $$, but with a better layout for our family ( we have gone for the 5th bedroom option ILO study ), so all of the kids will have their own "wing" with a kids games room/ retreat to boot! Next to find land, which we did in early February. A 670sqm block, running east - west, which will suit our chosen house design perfectly, with the alfresco area being on the north side. Not quite as big as I would have liked but a) about as big as we could find at the time and b) as big as we could find, as flat as we could find and it was within our budget! I hope that ILO of our previous big backyard (1240sqm), the planned parks and bike paths will be great for the kids, and there will be enough room for us to create a lovely garden. Land was initially meant to be released in September, but now looks like being November. Fingers crossed, gutters are in, roads are graded. The next step for us was to sell our house 1st so we knew just how much money we had to spend on the new build. It was very important to us that we didn't end up owing more on the new home than on the old. So come May, the house was on the market and 8 days later it was sold. So now we find ourselves squashed into around 14 squares of rental accom. for 12 months while we wait for PD to build our Illoura! I sure hope they stick to their word and build in around 20 weeks ( supposedly starting early Feb '09 ) - it's crowded in here!!

Blog " Under Construction " !!!