Stairs and cabinetry

Last week our SS told us that the stairs will be installed on Wednesday, so today we went to the house to check out the stairs, however we found a surprise... the people from Knebel Kitchens have been there, in fact they were working when we arrived.. so we went to walk around the neighbourhood. They left a little bit late, so we didn't have much time to actually see things with sun light. Here are some pictures:

Cabinets in main bathroom

Stairs

Cabinets in en-suite 

Main door

Cabinets in powder room

Kitchen as seen from Living Room

Upper and lower cabinets

Main door

If you are interested, there is one last chance to buy a piece of land in Heartwood - Voyager Point :-)

Tiles out of stock... but we can't complain :-)

Last week we received an email from DiLorenzo saying that we will need to chose a different tile for the wall of the ensuite. Obviously we weren't happy with that, as It took us a long time to make the decision the first time and then another bit to convince the kitchen provider to use different colour of Caesar Stone.
Anyway we went there today and we weren't convinced by the other available options. We couldn't find some of the others tiles we picked the first time for the other bathrooms, apparently they  have been removed from the prestige package as they are more expensive now. The girl that was helping us proposed us to have a look into a lower category, we almost decided to pick one of those, but them we asked to another person in the reception and (apparently she is kind of a manager) she told us that, as it was their fault we can choose one from the upgrade options :-) yay!!!.. we saw this other tile from the beginning, but were reticent to spend more money.. at the end we got the upgrade for free and we also changed the floor tile too to match this new wall tile. The only thing we didn't change was the featured tile, as we like the one we choose months ago.  So this is the new tiles for wall and floor of the ensuite.

Internal linings

Some people say that an image is worth thousand words... I wonder how many words are these videos :-)

Cladding, Insulation and some other things

Hi, we had some progress during the past week. Ground floor roof tiles were installed, insulation and cladding were started. Also cornices and gyprock were delivered. Some additional work has been done to fix some observations found by a builder inspector we hired to check that everything was in order. Most of the observations were related to some missing and lose noggins. Only 3 from the whole report were classified as defects, and there was an additional observation about seeking the engineer certification for a post that is supporting one of the blue steel bars (the one close to the stairs). Last Friday I've received a call from our SS letting us know that someone will be working on fixing those issues and everything should be done by Monday.

We were to the site on Friday and Saturday, we noticed that they were actually working on Saturday morning.

Here some pics:

Cladding in front of the house was installed on Friday,  Saturday there was some work done for the sides and the rear of the house.

The door frame was delivered weeks ago but it is still just sitting in the studio.

Two types of cornices were delivered on Friday.

Gyprock was delivered on Friday and was distributed between the first and ground floor.

 There is a new pipe, it says Telstra... we imaging it is for the NBN.

Ceiling insulation

Ceiling insulation

Can you see the blue thing under the insulation? It is a damage to the membrane that goes underneath the roof tiles.We mentioned this to the SS weeks ago, he told us that they will fix it. Yesterday, we moved a little bit that part of the insulation and we realised that nothing has been done and it is still broken.We reckon that can create leaks and we are not happy that we need to highlight the same issue several times. We found in the floor a section of this membrane which apparently was supposed to be used to fix this, however it wasn't used and the problem was just hidden under the insulation.

Bedroom 3

Bedroom 4

Bedroom 4

This is how our backyard looks at the moment.

Looks like the order of bricks was too generous (these are the remaining bricks).

Some noggins for a TV in the upper family room

Porche

The view in the path in front of the house :-)

We are back...

Hi everyone, apologies for the long pause. These last week have been a little bit full on. I'm currently doing a master degree and I was finishing assignments and final exams. It is really hard to juggle the full time job, the master and the building of our house, however I've just finished my final exam and now I'm officially on holidays (only from the univ.).. well at least for the next 3 months :-)

There has been some progress in our house during the last weeks, it is still a little bit slow with some days with no activity at all, but the days where the tradies are working... man they are quick.

So, this happen since the last post:

1. Brick work has been finished.
2. Upper gutter and fascia.
3. Air conditioned conducts and electrical connections were done.
4. Roof Tiles for ground floor roof were delivered.
5. Upper eaves.
6. Some small carpentry works have been done inside the house and some damaged timber have been replaced.
7. Scaffolding was removed 
8. Gutter and fascia in ground floor.
9. Electrical works
10. Some ducts in powder room and kitchen.
11. Building materials for balcony has been delivered.

I had a chat with our SS, he told me that the roof was supposed to be installed today but it was too hot. He also mentioned that next week the roof will be finished, the insulation will be delivered and installed and gyprock will be delivered on Friday. It is possible that plastered will start working the same day. Looking forward to next week.

Q&A time

Hi all,I have been receiving some questions which I would like to answer here. 

Can we know beforehand the range of selections available for your house?

• Yes, depending on your house, you have the smart, metro or prestige range. As we choose the Majestic, we have the prestige range. On WH website one can download the pdf file for any of the ranges available.
• Now if you are still on tender stage (not accepted the tender yet), details about colours sometimes seem difficult to get, but in websites such as home one, one can find people who share what standard is, also reading some blogs can help. You can see in the right side of my blog links to many blog building right now, each of them are a very valuable source of information.
• Once you accept the tender, you will receive a USB with an amazing quantity of information about what is included in your range (smart/metro/prestige) and you have to do your homework and familiarise yourself with all this. It really seems a lot, but since you receive the usb until the moment you start to choose, it could be 3 months. So...you will have time.
• Flooring, you can go to DiLorenzo and ask the staff about the inclusion for WH. It is really easy to explore your options. And also, for what I know, you can ask maybe for different tiles than maybe are not being shown at the moment. We stayed to the standard.
• Carpets, this is really easy, as they have (at DiLorenzo) a builder range and the rest. There are beautiful carpets, but at least for me, the really nice ones were really expensive for us, so we kept the standard and upgraded the underlay. They have 3 types of underlays, we choose the  blue, that is the more expensive.
• Kitchen, you can see what is included in the pdf from the website, and the materials/colours in the USB. Basically here, everything that is not laminate is an upgrade. We haven't wrote an post about kitchen, so maybe that will be my next. We have close to 3k value of upgrades: waterfalls edge to the benchtop, 2 colours in the cupboards, kickboards and polyurethane in upper cupboards.
• In the USB you will have all the info except from electrical, but I can tell that in regards of electrical basically you have a powerpoint and light throughout. In the kitchen all the powerpoint for appliances are included (I was worried about this at the beginning). Also, powerpoint for all the things that are included with your house (HWS, aircon, etc). We upgraded our bathtub to spa, and that included the powerpoint for that.
• If you are still deciding about going with them, you also can visit the display and ask  for the list price, so you can see the prices for upgrades, and even better you can ask to the consultant to show you the display, so they can mention what is included and what is not (sometimes the lists do not mention everything, especially little things).

What is included in electrical:

- Previous to the electrical appointment you will receive  a list with all the items included as standard (for your house) i.e. you will have 'X' number of power points and so on. Then you can play with them,  if you decide you can put for example more in a room and left a room without powerpoint (just an example). The same with the other items. You can see in my electrical post other details. The list that you will receive will have the prices of any extra, so you can know before your appointment how much you will need to pay.

I will try to write a post with details about Kitchen. I hope this can help you.

Upper Roof Tiling

We are having a busy week in our block!! Finally!!!

We have been on site this Tuesday, Wednesday and today(Thursday)

• On Tuesday, we saw the delivery of the roof tiles. Our roof tiles are Palladium from Bristile. We took some pictures and we left the site just in time because as you maybe know we had the worse storm in Sydney of the last decade. However, as we learnt later, the rain wasn't too heavy at Voyager Point. We currently live in Sutherland Shire and we were really worry as in this part of Sydney the storm had really strong winds and heavy rain.
• On Wednesday, we went again to assess the damage (that we thought we had) and for our surprise, we had a upper roof :) so happy. At least we will be less worried in the next rain, storm etc... I don't care anymore about the weather lol
• Today, we went again, but with daylight to appreciate in more detail the roof. We are really happy with the colour, it looks like different colours in one. The clouds reflect nicely at dusk, and I have noticed that in my estate nice houses have light roof colour.

Here some picture:

Facade now with a roof. At 7pm

Close up to the tiles. 7pm

Another one, have no idea of the appropriate name for the joint.

A different colour depending on the sky, like a mirror.

Tomorrow, we have to receive a call from our SS, so we will know the next steps.

Cheers
Raquel

Scaffolding

Today, Saturday, the scaffolding installation was finished. Quite some progress in comparison with previous weeks. I hope progress keeps going even though the weather seems to be adverse next week.

Gutter and fascia were delivered yesterday.

Brick Laying has started ... a month late

Hi, finally last week the brick laying has started, almost one month after it was expected, apparently WH can't cope with the demand and they are short of brick layers. Well, what should I care about it? We are paying for a house to be build, we are not getting it done for free, so as a minimum we were expecting the builder will have the personnel to accomplish its core business activity (build houses).

It has been very frustrating, first the weather and then in top of that the additional delay for the shortage of brick layers... WH seems to be taking more businesses that they can do or they don't care much about their customers. I hope they can make up for this delay, it is not just that we may get the house a month late, but any delay means lost money in extra weeks of rent from our current apartment.

This is how the house is looking today, the off-white doesn't look off-white, but as my neighbour told me, it may be that we need to wait a little bit and once is dry it may look different.