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'.

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!

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

Let's talk about price, baby!

Let's talk about price, baby!

Let's talk about you and me

Let's talk about all the good things, and the bad things

That could be...

[Sung to the tune of 'Let's Talk About Sex' by Salt 'n' Pepa - pathetic, I know!]

We received the preliminary quote from Keogh via email on Monday evening, and this was followed up by a face-to-face meeting on Saturday morning. As for the price...drumroll please!......we have come in at about $10,000 more than our initial Premier contract.

However, this is primarily driven by the fact that this quote includes provisions for Keogh to provide the outdoor decking and Caesarstone benchtops in the kitchen, neither of which we chose to include with Premier. The question is now, should we cough up the extra $10k and keep these options, or move them onto our list of things to do after handover? Decisions, decisions.... 

So far the biggest components of the quote are the stumps/site costs and the timber flooring, which are to be expected. The other big cost is the kitchen. We are going to style the kitchen on Premier's Delatite / Jamieson kitchen, with white vinyl wrap cabinetry and a country mantle. However, the actual shape of the kitchen is a little different - more of an 'L' shape and then a separate island bench. Somehow, I think we might have just enough storage space in the kitchen - at last count, we are up to 15 pot drawers!

Refresh: This is the kitchen in Premier's Delatite

There are still a few small things that we tossing up upgrading throughout the house, and I don't really see anything else that we could cut out apart from the deck and the Caesarstone benchtops, so if we want to keep close to the original contract price then these are the things that are going to have to go. That, or we scale back the kitchen in some way.

What are your thoughts on having a double vanity in the ensuite? The bench in the ensuite is 1800mm long, so it is definitely long enough to comfortably fit two sinks, but I don't know what the advantages or disadvantages would be for this set-up. I like the look of having two sinks, but what does it really mean in practical terms? How does this affect the storage space in the cupboards underneath, having all that added sink paraphernalia?

Today we continued the house-oriented weekend by visiting our storage locker, as we needed to confirm the measurements of the fireplace and hearth that will be going in the family room - I had forgotten how big the mantle actually is! Should come up really nice in this room though, especially once we get the insert sandblasted and repainted and put in our pretty flowered tiles.

Pretty fireplace

So what are the next steps?

We have scheduled in the next meeting with Keogh for two weeks time, so we have until then to decide what changes we want to make to the current specs. If everything is okay, we will then sign the Preliminary Building Agreement and proceed to drawing up the contracts - hopefully this process will go much quicker than it did with Premier!

P.S. We have also updated the pic of the house in the header, as this is a more accurate reflection of what the house will look like now (except for the dormer window). We are thinking of using a similar colour scheme, and we will be having the same archwork as shown here.

First Draft of New Plans

After dealing with Premier for 8 long months, with all of their delays and "it will be available next week" comments, it is very refreshing to have Keogh say to us on Saturday that he will have the first draft of the plans to us "next week" and then have them arrive on Monday night!

So here they are. We will probably change a few little things, like swapping around the linen from the study into the family room and maybe widening the fridge space, but on the whole I think we are actually almost there. Let us know what you think, as now is the perfect time to incorporate any of these changes because we have another meeting with Keogh first thing Saturday morning. We would appreciate any advice or comments that we can take with us to our meeting!

Second Meeting with Keogh Homes

We had our second meeting with Keogh Homes yesterday, and it is looking quite postive indeed. We took in our initial sketch based on our discussions from the first meeting - he was very impressed with our scale drawing! Over the next 2 hours we then went through this in detail, tossing around ideas and improvements.

It was quite interesting to hear some of the things the designer came up with, and being an accredited energy rater he has a really good understanding of how to best make our block work for us, in terms of both energy efficiency and actually living in the house. We have decided that this time we are going to go with a weatherboard design, in order to allow us extra room on the width of the house. We also feel that weatherboard will fit in with the style of Kilmore a bit better. We were thinking of something along these lines:

I really love that little corner gable on the verandah in the first picture, and with our current sketchings we should be able to incorporate something like this. Once we decide on a design for the outside I guess I'll have to update our blog header picture!

We put down an intial "design deposit" with Keogh yesterday. Basically this means that this week he will put together our intial house draft and preliminary costings. If we are not happy with this, we can walk away and get a refund on what we have paid so far. If we decide to proceed, the money already paid will form part of our final deposit. He thinks he will be able to have this ready for us in the next week electronically, and then he will post out a scale version in hard-copy. We have another meeting in two weeks time to dicuss. We are still not 100% decided on Keogh until we get these drawings and costings, but we do at least know the ballpark figure so things are looking good.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

Big things have happened since our last update. When I last made a blog entry, we were still waiting for the contracts to arrive that Friday. Well....5pm Friday came and went, and we had all but given up on the contract when we received a phone call at approximately 8pm that night. Apparently there was a problem - a big problem...

I won't go into too much detail here, but suffice to say that there were some major issues in our original site cost estimations. Our house had been costed to go on a slab, when from day one we have said that we will need to go on stumps. We weren't happy, Onley wasn't happy, and Premier wasn't happy. After much consideration, we decided that it was all too hard and notified Premier that we no longer wished to re-sign the contract with Onley. We requested a full refund and left it at that.

Then on Thursday we received word back from Premier - they don't want us to go! They offered us Prime Construction instead, and offered to provide us with a 45 day site start. It seemed like a fair offer so we considered this, but when push came to shove, this still doesn't resolve the costing issue. And after all the delays we have experienced to this point, frankly we are a little bit over it all. So on Saturday we notified Premier that we were rejecting their counter-offer.

Where does this leave us now?

Essentially, we are back to square one - back to the drawing board. We had a meeting with Keogh Homes on Saturday morning to investigate what they can do for us. Keogh are a much smaller project builder, but they specialise in period homes and the quality of their work is outstanding. The designer gave us a lot of helpful points to consider in our new design, so we have been busy putting together an initial sketch of what we want. We have another meeting in two weeks so it will be interesting to see what he can do for us then.

We have also been looking at Highview Homes again, as it turns out they CAN build on stumps (they just prefer to build on a slab). They have some really nice weatherboard cottage style houses (the Seachange series in particular), and include a lot of the period features as standard. It just comes down to whether or not they have a floor plan that suits.

Stay tuned...