Framing and Roof

Slab poured

We have a slab now!!!

Land cleared

It's been a long time between posts.  It has taken a very long time to get our plans approved by the estate and council and also for the bank to finalise our finance.

On Monday our land was scraped and we are off and away on our build. We were in a unique position where PD was pushing us to start but the bank took seven weeks to approve our finance.  So as soon as it was approved and signed, they started.  Fingers crossed that the weather stays good and a slab will be poored on the 23rd of November.

Finance approved

After seven weeks of negotiation, the bank has finally allowed us to keep and rent our current house and start our build. 
I think that this has been the most stressful stage but at least we are moving forward.
Porter Davis now can forward our file to the building stage.

Planning approval

We received planning approval today!  Unfortunately we have had to give up a bit of our back yard because the council wanted us to be 7.5 metres from the road and also to have over two metres from the house and back fence.  But we can't really argue with them without slowing everything down.

Colour selection

Tiles

I had a lot of fun going to National Tiles to choose all the tiles for our house.
- Powder Room
- Main Bathroom
- Laundry
- Toilet
- Balcony (which is just the bottom tiles)

 

We added another feature into the Ensuite.  We have put in a niche in our shower for the shampoo's etc.  The tiles will be all of the bottom tiles, but on the wall of the niche is the rock pebbles.  Not sure what it will look like but thought it was a good opportunity to do something different.



 

I found the process and the service provided was excelent. The woman who help us had a great idea of what we wanted and what would work in the areas we have.  The main thing was that we didn't want a white bathroom.

 

 

That was the easy part...

We have added a window on our kitchen splashback to let in outside light.  But the problem was that we were unable to put in the glass splashback as offered by Porter Davis.  So we had to choose a tile.  Our kitchen will be white stone bench, white cupboards, so we wanted a vibrant red spashback.  This is the tiles we chose. They will be recangle but the sample came in squares.  Hope it looks good!!!

National tiles had a great piece of software that could put the tiles you chose onto a picture of a kitchen to get an idea what it would look like. 



 

 

 

Tender Signed

After a lot of work, we finally received a tender document that was correct!  Hopefully the contract signing will be a lot easier (well it has to since we are going overseas to London the day after!).

The Sandarah

Land settlement

Today should have been a big day but because we were in the midst of cleaning up our build, it became a non-event.
At 12.30, James missed a call saying that our land has been settled and we are now the proud owner of our land by the beach.  Then he forgot to ring them back - Oops.  So different from settling on a house where you rush down to the real estate to grab your new keys. 
But still very exciting, no turning back now!!!

Tender

We had our tender for the Porter Davis build today and it didn't go so well.  It is a bit of a worry that the first proper meeting was such a shambles.  They were late by half and hour and as soon as we started going through the tender, we realised there was a lot of mistakes.  They had put the wrong estate in the system and so all the covernance for that estate wrong.
- Set back was wrong
- Facade was wrong (they had fully rendered, when our estate needs three textures)
- Fibre Optic as per estate
- Our estate needs a water tank, which had dropped off

After four hours sitting in their little office, they realised that the plans were so wrong, that they needed to re-do them entirely.  Frustrating to say the lest. 

Thankfully we were then assigned to another tender person on Friday, and he has worked very hard to rectify the mistakes.  We are now waiting for our tender after four days.  Fingers Crossed.........

The house

James and I had very specific ideas regarding what type of house we would like to build.  It had to be double story to make the most of the view (which also meant that the top story had to have a living area at the front of the house. 
Being part of a family of four kids, with lots of nieces and nephews, we had to make sure it had plenty of room for family and friends to stay over for a couple of days.  If we were moving away from Melbourne, we might as well make it inviting for people to travel to us.
There also had to be room for the grandparents to stay - since we were taking their precious grand children away from them.
After looking at lots of layouts on various builders sites, we decided on one design from Porter Davis.  That weekend we went to the display home and loved the layout.  So instead of looking at hundreds of display homes, we ended up just looking at one over and over again to make sure it would fit our needs.
On the 18th of July we put down a deposit for a Porter Davis home - the Sandarah.

The land

The story so far.  My husband was given the opportunity to apply for a job at Deakin University in Geelong.  After a bit of discussion, we decided that if we were going to do the move, why not move to the beach.  After a few months of looking around (and a bit of stalking of our friends who did the same thing a year ago), we decided that Torquay had everything that we needed.  We found some land that would be perfect for us, with a great view of the ocean.  On the 21st of June I casually rang up the real estate agent to find if it was still available and after a bit of a conversation, I put in a cheeky low offer.

After a flurry of phone calls my offer was excepted.  Oops, I better get in contact with James to tell him that I might have bought us some land while he was working.