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.