FRAMES!

Monday 15th December 

I knew the frames had been delivered to our site on Friday along with our windows so to my excitement when I drove past our land I was witnessing our frames were in the process of being put up!! It was fantastic feeling being able to walk through and see our patch of dirt becoming a house in 3D! 

Our home! 

Our massive entry! 

Our lounge/dining/kitchen

Where our huge stacker will be! 

Update

Friday 5th December 

External plumbing done! Unfortunately they hit more rock which means more money but hopefully that  is the last of it! 

We have been told frames should be put up this Friday and roof on before Christmas closure! 

Not looking forward to the no action over the Christmas closure but that is just me being super impatient. 

Hopefully the next few weeks fly by. 

Slab - DONE!

1st December 2014 

The slab was poured today!! Woohoo. Excitement is an understatement. It feels so good to be able to physically see the footprint of our home and gosh does it look small!!!!! 

I know people always say it looks small but you don't realise until you are building yourself and physically walk on it that you realise how small it looks. The thoughts running through my mind are, is our lounge room big enough? Our ensuite looks so tiny that I feel like I could touch both walls by standing in the middle of the room (and I am by no means tall!) The doubt that fills your mind is incredible however I keep telling myself - it will feel bigger! 

Our whole land feels tiny and I start to wonder - did we do the right thing?  I guess it just means less landscaping right?! 

piering, plumbing and preparing for slab!

It all seems to be happening at the moment. Between working 2 jobs, planning a wedding and building a home - it all seems to be consuming my life with little time in between, so I am apologising in advance for the late posts.

18th November 2014

After all the excitement of having our land scrapped we were eagerly awaiting piering so we could get our slab! We were originally told that piering would be done Tuesday the 18th and to meet onsite at 1pm to do our measurements. My partner and I got their only to wait about 30 minutes to have no one show up. We called head office which was no real help. We left to go back to work to receive a call around 2:30 to say that they didn't have time because the other land in the street took longer than expected at piering and it would be happening tomorrow morning and to meet onsite at 12pm. 

Wednesday came and again it led to disappointment in saying they couldn't get the right machinery as the ones used yesterday wasn't suitable for our land. Piering would now be pushed back till the following Monday or Tuesday!!!! GREAT! 

24th November 2014

Monday 24th came and we had piering happening! Finally some other movement to our land! We were lucky to have come a little under for piering which meant some money back! Woohoo - downside was that they did hit some rock to the back of our land so a slight cost would arise from that. Overall not too bad. 

27th November 2014

We were advised that our site supervisor would try and get our slab poured Friday but at worst it would be Monday for us. Plumbing was completed on the block today - it is now starting to look like something!

Front of our block looking at the garage 

Backyard looking towards our terraza 

Back of our block

Looking towards our patio 

28th November 2014 

We are lucky enough to escape to Nelson's Bay for the weekend but before we snuck off we drove past the land to find they had formed it all up for the slab! Now we are talking! It was exciting to see the general size of our house. It looks so small but so big at the same time! Slab on Monday - you could say we are a tad excited! 

Our huge front patio! 

Standing to the back of our block looking at our Terraza 

And again

Standing at back looking at the largest side of the house

IT'S STARTED!

Not much has been going on since I last posed. It's really just been a waiting game and to fill in our weekends we have been busy shopping for the house which of course means spending money :)

It has been 15 business days and 3 full weeks since our countdown began. And to my excitement when I drove past the land today I seen them cutting our land and fences going up! 

Hopefully the next 20 odd weeks go extremely quick and before we know it we will be moving in! (I can only hope)

and.... WE'RE OFF!

So finally after the long excruciating wait with the bank and trying to get the extra funds from our bank from the price increase and colour selections, we now have conditional approval and our commencement letter in our hands.

Our 28 day countdown has begun and already we have noticed that our land has been pegged out and signed and sent back our final plans :)

Let's get this show on the road and start construction!

Stay tuned!.. hopefully you start to see lots of posts coming your way.

Colour Selections and contract signing!!!

After 8 months of patiently (or not patiently) waiting the day had finally come to do our colour selections and sign our contract. 

We arrived at the Beresfield head office on Monday 22nd September to do all the fun stuff! Once we arrived we were told sorry you guys will be unable to sign your contract today - you guys didn't go to council to pay a fee for the section 305... 

WHAAAAA? Not only did I not have any idea what he was talking about as it seemed like a whole bunch of gibberish, I cannot understand why we not been informed of this earlier? If this was all they were missing in order to have the construction certificate why wouldn't they call us? 
After that whole debacle I was less than impressed - it only meant more delays! 

So we moved onto colours! NOW the fun stuff begins. 

We had already been called on Friday to say that our brick had been discontinued so we needed to pick another one of similar colouring.

Externals: 

•  Bricks - Austral Silver
• Moroka to front piers -  miss molly 
• Roof - Colorbond Monument 
• Guttering, Fascia & downpipes - Colorbond Monument 
• 1200 front door with omni trilock 

Brick

Colorbond Monument

Our door Handle

Internals: 

• Walls - Taubmans Stonebridge 
• Ceiling - Taubmans white 
• Doors & architraves - Gloss white 

our paint colour 

Kitchen: 

• Caesarstone Bench top "Snow" 
• Polytec Createc gloss "Graphite" to lower cabinets - all handle-less 
• Polytec Createc gloss "Ultra White" to upper cabinets - all handle-less 
• 900mm freestanding oven with glass canopy range hood 

kitchen cupboard colour 

Splash back tile 

Our oven and range hood 

Our bench top 

Floors: 

• Carpet - Godfrey Hirst Ash Grey 
• Timber laminate floors - Clix Authentic Oak light grey 

After we did all the colour selections I suddenly realised that the price had gone up - A lot! It was at this stage that we found out that they issued us a price increase of $4090 due to us going over the 180 day tender HOWEVER they conveniently "forgot" to tell us about the increase and send out the paperwork (I seen our copies of the tenders sitting in their file) They reluctantly admitted that they had made a mistake and they honestly thought that they had sent it out..

At this stage to which I am sure you all could imagine we were extremely angry and frustrated! After some negotiating back and fourth, we had come to an arrangement however still not happy although we finished up and left. We called our sales consultant to tell her about all this and asked is she had any idea about the price increase of the delay in being able to sign the contract to which she had no idea.  She fought for us and was able to get us a little bit more of a discount, they had also agreed to make up the time to which we have lost  - which will be about 2 and half weeks at least. 

They had also arranged for us to go into the Woongarrah office to be able to sign our contract when it was ready (which was last Sunday) instead of sending the post which would of meant more delay. We signed our contract and didn't receive our signed copy for the bank till Wednesday. We are now impatiently waiting for the bank to do their thing and provide us with the commencement letter which will mean our 28 day countdown starts!!! 

This process started off painful and very stressful however I can't thank my sales consultant enough - she has been absolutely AMAZING and is a HUGE asset to their team. 

BRING ON THIS BUILD!!!

Quick update

The most exciting thing to happen in the last couple of weeks is that we were in and out of council with 2 weeks to the day!! I was so happy that we got through so quickly! (I may have been a little sneaky and used my connections to get us through quicker)

The next exciting thing is we are booked for our colour selection appointment on Monday the 22nd woohoo! Now the fun stuff starts to happen :)  We couldn't be more excited to pick out all our colours and get moving with this build!!

Until next time...

Tile selections!

This week has to be the best week of this whole process so far!

We have gone from settling on the block of land on Monday, going to Wyong Council for DA approval Wednesday and tile selections today. It has been one exciting week!

We decided to go with Tiles Direct at Charmhaven for our tiles selections and I have to say I was very happy with the whole process. They are lovely and so helpful, it is always nice when you have some one else's opinion to help make the choices a little easier. We were in and out in just over 2 hours.

We have always known we have expensive taste and today confirmed it! Going into today we had a rough idea of what we wanted and the look we were going for. We knew we wanted white wall tiles, dark grey floor tiles which was to carry up one wall and 300x600 tiles for both floor and wall.

After looking at the standard and upgraded samples of wall and floor tiles we instantly turned to each other and agreed that we did not like any of them as they were just too stock standard for our liking.

We ended up decided on a dark grey plain tile (it has no pattern at all) and a plain white tile to the walls, we carried the grey tiles to the wall behind the freestanding bath and shower (the wall of the niche) in the ensuite we did exactly the same except the grey tile went to the wall of the shower and window. We went with a white stacker feature tile in the niches.

This is the standard range 

Some upgrades tiles to pick from 

This is our bathrooms and laundry tiles

And another angle to try and get the colouring right

Our feature tile (top one)

This will be our floor tile which will be done after handover 

Again the lighting is difficult to show the tiles true colour

Our bathroom and laundry tiles with our main floor tile our main floor tile will be 600x600

WE HAVE SETTLED!!!

Just like our title suggests we have no settled on our land.

I can not contain my excitement to think that after a very long, tiring 7 months we can finally say we are land owners.

Even this morning I was starting to freak out that it wasn't going to happen after getting an email saying we needed to pay MORE money, to which I raced down to the bank to deposit straight into the account, to then getting a call saying settlement had to be delayed as the cheques weren't ready.

All I kept thing was OH MY GOD! Not again. We had already had to push back settlement from Wednesday as Darkinjung Land Council had not done their final sign off after registration occurred.

We can now move forward and go to council with our plans.

We need to keep our fingers, toes, legs and arms crossed we get through Wyong Council quickly. This girl is getting impatient!

Our plans

As promised I have attached our floor plan. Here is some of the changes that we have made. I am so happy with the changes that we have made and for the price it will such an incredible home for us to grow into. 

Our mains reasons for choosing Beechwood was the incredible value for money and was exactly what we wanted! 

Our must haves were: 

- Open plan living, dining & kitchen 

- walk in pantry 

- outdoor entertaining area 

- large master bedroom with walk in robe 

-1200 front door 

- Decent sized bedrooms to bed 2, 3 & 4 

- Enough space on our block to fit a pool in at a later date 

- Freestanding bath tub 

- Wall hung vanities (this is still an ongoing issue!!)

The changes/upgrades that we made to the Vedelho Twist were: 

- Pavillion 3 facade 

- Small extension to the garage to provide space for shelving 

- Delete the garage storage area to increase the foyer 

- 1200 hume front door 

- close off access from foyer to linen closet and combine to make larger walk in pantry 

- Provide extension to ensuite to provide entry to ensuite via main bed instead of the walk in robe - close off access from walk in robe and provide a shelf and hanging rod in place 

- Provide a microwave shelf and pot drawer under the breakfast bar 

- Increase fridge space 

- Provide plumbing in fridge space 

- Floor to ceiling tiling to bathroom and ensuite 

- Remove bath so we can provide our own freestanding 

- remove vanities and all tap ware for property 

- Removed floor tiling to living, entry, kitchen etc (we will do our own after handover) 

- Stacker door to living 

- Extended bed 2,3 & 4 robes 

- $15,000 genesis package 

- under mount kitchen sink 

- shower niches to bathrooms 

- Timber look garage door 

- Timber look window frames to front facade only (the rest will be white) 

- changed walk in robe and laundry door to cavity sliding doors 

- added a door to section off hallway and living/dining area 

- Waterfall edges to kitchen cesear stone bench tops 

- Increase the theatre feature walls to 1700 to be the same size as the living area 

I can't wait till it's time to go do our colour selections as I am sure there will be many more upgrades to come! 

For our home we are going for grey tones throughout. We are hoping our facade turns out a little something like this: 

We have selected the brick Austral Whitsunday "Keswick" and our roof will be Colorbond "Monument". I can even begin to describe how nerve racking it is choosing your colours and not knowing if it will all go together. Fingers crossed it turns out to what we have been imagining. 

M.I.A - I'm back!

I have been M.I.A on here so here I go on giving you guys a big update on what has been happening this last few months. (This is of course any body is actually reading this in which case I am just talking to myself)

Since my last post a little bit has happened. We have impatiently waiting for registration to happen for our land which took longer than expected however I am delighted to announce it was finally given the big green tick and registered on August 1st 2014 after 6 long months after we paid our deposit! 

I have no doubt been a little stressed as our loan for the land expired on the 1st August which clearly was too late as settlement isn't due to take place till Wednesday 13th August 2014 (HOORAY). We were lucky enough to get the extension for the loan which meant a lot less stress as we really didn't want to go through the whole process again! 

After visiting the display homes for countless weekends we decided that we 
would arrange tenders through Beechwood and Allworth Homes. 
The design we liked best by Beechwood was the Verdelho Twist Four and the design we loved by Allworth was the Altona. These two designs are very similar however the Altona was slightly large by about 4sqm in total. 

After comparing the two tenders, the Verdelho was slightly smaller and fitted on our block perfectly. We got more bang for our buck and way more inclusions  with beechwood than we would of been getting from Allworth, so we decided that we would proceed with beechwood tender and paid our deposit on the 09/02/2014. 

We finally received our first drawn plans on 26/04/2014. The unfortunate delay was due to the block of land not allowing access to anyone and it was to our delight that the surveyor was actually allowed onsite at this time as they still weren't allowing access. 

After 3 tender varations we were finally happy with all our changes that it was now time to sign off on the plans and get them ready to submit to council 
(I will talk about our plans in another post) as soon as settlement has been completed. I could not be happier that things seem to be finally happening after waiting what seemed like an eternity. 

Planning 2 major life events within a year and a half of each other is definitely expensive. Building our first home, planning a wedding, working full time and running a small business really does not leave me much time for anything else, I am one busy woman and loving it! Bring on the next 12 months!! 

Deposit on land PAID!

I had always had a dream since I was a little girl, that by the time I turn 21 I want to of either purchased my first home or block of land.
So this journey all started back in January 2014, I was doing what I do best.. Googling and daydreaming. It was about 6 weeks before my 21st birthday when I was looking on realestate.com.au, I found what looked to be a great opportunity, flat land for sale in Blue Haven, Central Coast for an affordable price, I showed my partner and he seemed eager to check it out.
So on Saturday the 25th January we hoped in the car with my parents and had a look at the block of land. The sole purpose of the trip was to check out the area and see what the value for money was like, we had no intention of purchasing a block of land that day. We turned up and it was all gated off, it is currently under construction to get ready to be sub-divided. I instantly fell in love! I love the fact we were going to be around all new homes, the cute little street that was already evolved, the area and how close it was to amenities. We decided to go check out the display homes at Woongarrah and wanted to see how a house plan that we liked would fit on the land - it was perfect! The sales consultant said, if I were you I would go put a deposit down on the land, it is a great buy!
At this point we were so excited and all we wanted to do was to say that little patch of dirt is ours! We went to have lunch talked it over with my parents and before I knew it we were walking into the real estate office and signing contracts!
We were told that it is currently under development to get ready to get council approved, once it has registered through council we could settle, it was going to be a delayed settlement which we should expect around April - May at the latest. This did not bother us as it gives as time to save and get our head around the fact we just bought a block of land!