Boys and girls, the word of the day is COMMUNICATION!

So, it has now been a month since the contract was signed. The loan has been approved and the documents have been signed and sent off, so this week we thought it was time to check up on what Keogh was doing....

In our last post we wrote that Keogh had told us they were waiting for the final engineered drawings, so we thought that the plans should be with council right now, right? Wrong....

Turns out that when Keogh told us two weeks ago that they were waiting for the final engineered drawings, they meant that they still had to give the draftsman the go ahead to start the drawings. This would be fine, except that the designer thought that the builder was following this up, and the builder thought the designer was following it up. End result? No one was following it up and nothing has been done - grrrrr!

So now it will take anywhere from one to three weeks to have the final drawings done up and checked, then another week or so to put together the council permit application. We asked about the likelihood of having a site start by Christmas, and the builder only said it is "probable". I think "probably NOT" is the more appropriate response, but maybe I am just being pessimistic.

One thing we did not want to have to do with these builders is ride their backs every week to make sure things were happening, like what we had to do with Premier, but now it looks like we are going to have to. We will be giving them a call again at the end of the week to make sure everything is on track again, and perhaps talk about scheduling in the electrical appointment and/or colours appointment sometime soon. I would just like to have something "housey"to do again - I think I am having withdrawals.

We did go and have a look at a beautiful open house on Saturday which helped to curb the housey urges a bit. The property in question is on a similar-sized block to ours, and the styling and look of the house was very much in line with what we want to achieve, so we thought it would be good to go along and see what ideas we could pick up.

Front view

Kitchen and family room - quite like the fretwork separating the kitchen

As expected, the house was beautiful inside, but I also love what they have done with the back deck and backyard. We are still going to need to put up another retaining wall between our house and the backyard once the house actually goes up, and it would be great to do something like what they have done. Got some great ideas from this excursion, so it was well worth the trip.

Backyard - like this retaining wall and how they have done the steps into a wide lawn area

Like the look of this deck area too

In other news, we have now been blogging about our house building experience for 12 months - seems to have gone quite fast (although we still don't have a house!). In that time we have signed contracts with two builders, terminated the services of one builder, and visited more display homes than you can poke a stick at!

We have had over 2,600 page views since starting the blog, and thanks to our widely-travelled friends, we have had visitors from the US, Germany, the UK, New Zealand, Latvia, and even Mongolia! Wow!

Here's to the next 12 months - and our house finally getting built :)