Sunday, September 25, 2011

Ding, dong the contract's signed!

I keep wondering what is going to go wrong, because everything seems to have gone off without a hitch this week....

Ben was working in the Tarneit area on Thursday and Friday this week, so he dropped into the Keogh office on Thursday afternoon to see if the contracts were available yet. He was told to come back on Friday and they would be ready then. The next morning he gets a call at...wait for it....6.30am (!) to say that the contracts were ready to be picked up! Hooray!

We poured over them on Friday night ahead of our 9.30am meeting on Saturday morning. The HIA contract part was easy, because we have gone through all of that before. Specs were good too - we couldn't find ANYTHING wrong with them at all.

So, we then rocked up to the meeting on Saturday morning with no changes to be made - Frank had set aside 2 hours for the contract signing, so about half an hour of that time was spent actually signing the contract, and the other hour and a half was spent talking about his recent trip to the NT and all of his tips for the building process.

After leaving the Keogh offices we decided to stop in at The Tile People just up the road to get started on researching what is available. After wandering around for 15 mins feeling a bit overwhelmed about all the choices, a lovely sales person named Deb really helped to narrow things down. Even though this wasn't a "tile selection appointment" as such, she spent about an hour with us showing us all the options and pulling together a nice theme for the bathroom and en suite.

We have decided to put a feature wall on the wall separating the shower and the vanity in the en suite:


I want it to have a similar effect to this (but without the bath in between):


So these are the colours we have chosen so far for the ensuite (clockwise from top left):

  • Wall tiles in shower / above vanity
  • Stone tile for feature wall
  • Laminex samples of the vanity bench ('Stipple Seal') and vanity cupboards ('Moleskin')
  • Floor tiles (I think these were called 'Millenium Black')



For the main bathroom we are going to have the same tiles for the walls and floors, but in the shower we are going to use the following as a feature stripe down one wall:



We didn't get the names of the tiles yet as Deb is going to put together a list of all we have chosen and email it through to us on Monday. We will still need to go back and make a formalised tile selection appointment as we didn't get to doing the laundry or kitchen, but at least we will have a good idea when we go.

Deb gave us samples of all the tiles except the stone one to take home. When I was having a closer look at the floor tiles this afternoon, I got a very familiar feeling....so I dug out the samples from the original tile selections that we had done with Ultimate Tiles for our Premier house and...low and behold, they are the same tile! I guess no one could say we aren't consistent about what we like!

Same tiles - the little one up the top left corner is the version we had originally selected with Premier, and the large one is the one we selected yesterday for our Keogh house

So what are the next steps?

  • While we organise getting certified copies of the contracts to the bank, Keogh will be organising the final engineered drawings, applying for the council permit, and so on;
  • We will meet with the builder and electrician in a few weeks to finalise our colour selections and electrical plan;
  • We are going to be providing most of our own light fittings so we are going to be researching our options in this area before the colour and electrical meetings to make sure everything ties in with the overall 'theme'.




Monday, September 19, 2011

Side fence + back fence = our property is now half fenced!

Came home last week to an interesting letter in the mailbox - the rear neighbours are almost ready to move in and want to start putting up fences! Seems like this house has sprung up overnight...I'm sure it was only a few weeks ago that they had just started bricking!

In any case, we gave our new neighbours a call to discuss the fencing. Turns out he is a chippy and wanted to put up the timber fence himself at cost price through materials sourced through work. We were hoping to put up a Colorbond fence rather than timber, but our new neighbours were set on timber so we acquiesced. The fence bordering the existing houses is timber too, so at least the new fence matches in (although we will need to get some of the existing fence replaced as it is in quite a state of disrepair).

He is a fast worker, because a few days later we got a call to say it was all done! Given the warm weather on this weekend just gone, we made the trek from Watsonia to Kilmore again to check out the quality of his workmanship. I must say, it is looking good...although it has skewed my perceptions on the actual size of our block - it makes the block look a lot shorter in my opinion, although Ben assures me that we will still have about 30 metres of backyard for the dogs to run around in.


Our new back fence


While we were there we also took along a copy of the plans, some string line and our big measuring tape so we could mark out the house. Two hours later and we were able to walk through our "house" - very cool! It is a bit hard to see the string line in these pictures, but some of the markers should be visible.

Marking out the house


In other news, final plans have arrived in the mail and it is still looking like a go for final contract signing on the 24th of September. We hope to see the contracts in the mail this week....hooray!

Thursday, September 1, 2011

We have plans!

We received a very special package in the mail yesterday - our plans! It's very exciting :) The building process is finally starting to feel real again, like something is actually happening....

Ben ran out to Officeworks today to make some big copies so that we can go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. He got some done up in A2, then decided that wasn't big enough so went back for an A0 version - it's huge! It's looking good so far, with only a few little things that require changing.

Frank from Keogh gave us a call to follow up on the plans today, and we have made a tentative booking for a meeting for the 24th of September to sign the final contracts, giving us a few weeks to make any changes to the plans beforehand. With any luck, we may actually have something done on site before Christmas!

In the meantime, we have started to think about what colours we want for the outside of the house, so we stolen your idea Linda and made a trip to Bunnings to get some sample pots so that we can have a go at colouring the house plans. We are going to attempt this over the weekend, so will post up our efforts in a few days time.

Here are the plans as they currently stand though - click the images to see a larger view if you wish.


Floor Plans




Site Plan - heaps of room in the backyard for the doggies to run around in!




Front Elevation


Side and Rear Elevations