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!!