Another Big Day

Fence Posts!

Here's today's surprise. Fence posts! When you do your fencing, you put in half the fence and the neighbours put in half. That means if your neighbours don't build for a while you can be stuck with a half fence for some time. A funny look and no good if you have a run-away dog.

Clothes Line

 Obviously the cement and hole specialist has been to visit the house as not only are the fence posts in, the clothes line frame has been cemented in too.
Do not ask me why the spare piece of roof truss is there and you will see a bit of wood on the ground to remind the cement guys to make the path longer.

Shelves in Walk In

 While I have been only able to peep through windows, the carpenter has put shelves into the cupboards. The walk in one gets a unit of them at one end and the bedrooms have just the upper shelf.

En-suite

 And the tiler seems to have finished all the tiles except the laundry and the kitchen splashbacks.

Kate in the kids' bathroom

 Tiles in the kids' bathroom are in too. In the store they looked more cream than they do here but I am very satisfied. I think maybe they were called ivory. I had forgotten what I had chosen to tell the truth. I thought there was texture in the colour. Now that I see them up, I remember this is what I decided on!

Kate in the Bathroom

 Kate and I looked at the paint colours I had chosen and I am more and more convinced that Handmade Linen is the one I will choose. It has the faintest green tinge which means it goes with both the whites and the creams I have chosen. I think.

The Laundry!

Look at that! The laundry is looking like a laundry! Beneath the overhead cupboards is a hanging rail so that I can hang clothes to dry in there rather than have to put everything through the dryer or have clothes ponies all through the house.

The laundry sink and my paint charts

Impossible to tell much but the cupboard doors are the same colour as the kitchen but the top is different. The handles are the same.
 

Almost a kitchen

 And here is the work in progress kitchen. Exciting! Exciting Exciting!

(See the waterfall bench?)

Progress Report

Lots of news today!

My visit to the house revealed the tiling has commenced. My immediate question then was 'When will they need my huge tiles?'

Note: Tiles on ensuite floor

Also noticed the path to the clothes line was not going to make it to the clothes line. The boxing stops a bit more then a metre short of the end of the house and the clothes line is against the fence beyond the house.

Path to ...?

I went home and simultaneously logged into gmail and rang Cheryl at Solid Constructions.
Low and behold as Cheryl picks up the phone I see that she has emailed me. She needs the paint colours. Cripes. I thought I had decided but straight away I start to second guess myself. Nothing like a final decision to undo all my resolve.
I ask her about the tiles and she says I need to contact Pete the tiler.
I mentioned the path as well. Cheryl will follow it up for me. There has been a lot of to and fro on how much cement is included so I feel a degree of tension over this.

There may be a good reason. There often are that mere non-builder mortals like me don't know!

It turned out the base to the pergola had to be lowered to ensure that it sat below the pest barrier of the house. That strikes me as a very good reason.

Anyhow, I rang Pete-the-tiler and he says he needs them tomorrow morning which means I will have to leave home very early indeed to drop them off before work. I have had Bill help me load them into the car as they are way too heavy for me to lift on my own - no matter how stubborn I am about such things!

I happened to ask Pete why he needed the kitchen tiles so soon and he has told me that the kitchen is going in tomorrow!

Sigh
I know I should be saying woohoo....
But Cheryl says the painters can't get there for a fortnight and then it will take about 4 weeks to finish after that.
I guess it is one of those things there is no point getting upset over but when I signed up for this I was told August was the move in date. Then October. Then early November. And now it looks like early December.
It's just one of those things with building. Stuff happens and the chain gets broken and the delays snowball.

My promise to myself is no knickers in a knot over this! I am not going to build up a head of steam- I am going to enjoy this as much as possible!

P.S Anyone been watching the Renovators in channel 10? I have absolutely loved the series but what a horrible ending? All the hard work and the stunning presentation left unrecognised by the market. I suspect that serious shoppers do not buy houses at auction with TVs and celebrities. If it was me, I would be expecting the sale to go out of control and I wouldn't even bother.

I have a sneaking suspicion the houses were bought at a premium. Or perhaps it is just over capitalising.

When they put in all the soft furnishing, people won't pay you for them. I suspect in resale you won't necessarily even get the value back of better branded appliances. And when you install a $2000 bath tub, will you actually increase your resale by $2K? Or will the home buyer simply go... 'lovely bathroom'.
'Lovely bathroom' will sell the house when there is a decision to be made between two but will it sell it for $1900 more?

The contestants would surely have been counting their chickens well before they were hatched. I would expect they were all expecting the winner to take home several hundred thousand with each house yielding $50k or so profit. And yet the winner ended up lucky they didn't subtract the loss amounts from the small profits or he would have ended up with next to nothing.

I was very disappointed for them all.

Progress Payments

Today I received an invoice for my next progress payment. It's the frame stage one, and definitely looking at it, I have a frame! I still don't have a receipt for the slab payment so I sent off an email reminder tonight.

I also received a call from the kitchen company, About Kitchens to say that they had commenced construction of my cabinets and asked for the sum that I will be paying over and above the allowance in my contract. The contract allowed for $8k for the kitchen. Before I signed the contracts, I needed to make sure that I could actually get a kitchen for that much. The allowance is worked out based on the cost of the house, not necessarily the kitchen that the architect sketches into the space shown as kitchen.

I went to About Kitchens which is the one that my builder, Solid Constructions use. I explained that my budget had no budge in it! The kitchen they drew up for me came in at about $10 under. Then I added the waterfall edges and that pushed it over a little.

The Kitchen. The island is in two shades of Mocha and the cupboard doors are just off white. No doubt it will date badly. The bench top around the stove is also in the mocha colour.

The laundry on the other hand, had a budget of just $1500 and I blew that by as much as the kitchen! All the cupboards and the hanging rail over the bench were over the budget. But a house must have cupboards!

The Laundry. Space for washing machine on right and under bench space for dryer on left. My current dryer is wall hung and I can't actually reach the things in it! To the right of the cabinetry will be the linen press.