The last one to arrive home...

Hi, as you may already guess, We have already moved to our new house, we haven't been updating the blog as it has been a really busy period of time. No only because the house, and the almost 5 times we needed to call the air conditioner guys, 4 times the garage door company, and 3 times the plumber to fix the same issue; but because the last family member has arrived.. and he is...an earthquake...

Fence is gone and driveway is ready

Hi guys, seems like the building is finally coming to a end. No sure we will miss the 4 times a week trip to check what was new in the house. However, there are still plenty of things yet to start, but the main thing, the house is almost finished. Two weeks ago was our PCI, we thought it was just a informal walkthrough until a day before when WH sent us an email saying that our PCI was in the following days :-).

The PCI was around 3 hours, we brought to the meeting a list of observations that we compiled over our last visits, most of the items were still valid. Then we went through the house checking imperfections in painting, mortar in general, scratched windows and small details mostly. The meeting was at 7am and the SS was there before us, so he had already put some blue tape in several things to fix.

After the meeting the SS told us that he was able to accommodate all fixes and pending things in the next two weeks, so we can have the house ready before Easter. We were a little bit sceptic about the date, but after one week, it seems we may be able to get all things done. 

The biggest issue highlighted in the PCI was that the kitchen bench (or the tiles under it) were a little bit misaligned. We were told that it may be possible to play around with them to hide the misalignment. It is not a big issue, I didn't even notice, but my wife found it.. and as the SS told us, once you saw that kind of thing, it will bother you forever. 

Pending for this week are: fix this misalignment I mentioned, finishing the water tank installation, driveway sealing, carpet installation, replace damaged windows, mortar fixing, painting fixing and some gyprock repairs, main door painting. It sounds a lot now that I'm writing down the list, but we trust we will make it. The settlement day is  scheduled for this Thursday. Let see how things unfold...

Some photos from the last week:

The inspection certificate of our driveway.

The driveway was poured on Wednesday.

Yesterday, we went again to the house and we found that the fence is gone.. also the preparation works for the landscape were done. We are planning to to the landscape ourselves, so yesterday was the first time we can appreciate the magnitude of the work that is coming for us... :-)

Some dirt is still to be removed.

Now, the house feels a little bit .. how to say it... naked.. haha.. Anyway we will have the blinds installed this week, and the side fence is scheduled for the week after, so we can have a little bit or privacy. 

Tiling almost finished...

Tilling is almost finished, a/c vents and splash-back have been installed.  How do you think the house is looking?

Some internals

Hi all, here some pictures of today's visit:

Our ground floors tiles are in the garage ready to be laid. 

The garage door mechanism... it seems to be small for the door :-)

Cabinets in the main bedroom

Main bathroom

Tab of the bathtub in the main bathroom, no happy with it, it is too short and water falls outside the bathtub.

The towel rail was placed in an incorrect place, we requested explicitly to be placed close to the spa, as we were planning to put something else in that place. I wonder if houses would be less expensive if builders do less errors. Now in order to move it, they will need to remove the shower glass, remove the mirror and replace 3 tiles.

   

Dinning room, with lights :-)

Small bits and pieces...

We are waiting for the tiling to start, but in the meantime some bit and pieces have been happening. Yesterday the bathtub, toilets, spa and door handles were delivered. We also realised that the shelves in the pantry were already installed.. no sure when though. Today we found that the Garage door was installed, it was really quick. We were discussing why we didn't have the Wisdom Ad in our house and today it was finally place in the fence... haha it is funny as we are really close to completion.. (well at least it seems like it). Enjoy the photos.

Façade is almost finished

Sorry for the car photobombing.. but I liked this picture, the sky was just so full of colours... The façade is almost finished and now we can see the colours in real life. We think now that the combination was a little bit risky, but I think the final product is looking good, now we need to think about the colour of the fence, so it matches the same palette. Our garage door will be surfmist, close to the colour of the fence with our neighbours and to the first floor cladding. The balcony is missing the rail bars yet and also a privacy screen in the right side, which was required by CDC. 

For the fence we are thinking in using modular walls system but we are still trying to decide if we should go all around the corner until the driveway (1.8m decreasing to 1.2m high in the corner and front) or whether we should just put some retaining walls with some shrubs (like a raised garden bed) for the delimiting the land.

We have been growing some Lilly Pilly Acmena var minor (28 of them) in the balcony of the place we are living now, and we have also some English Box (around 60). 

Our idea is to use the English boxes to create a path towards the door and put the Lilly Pillies behind the modular wall (in case we decide to go all round the corner), or put them in top of the raised bed garden (if we decide to go for that).. decisions... decisions... :-)  

Getting closer.. slow but closer

Some photos of the progress done during the last weeks. The house is taking shape and  finally we feel close to the end. Last week I've received a call from the Site Supervisor saying that he was leaving WH and that he will hand over to another person. We will have a meeting with him tomorrow morning, we hope we can get an approx. date of completion. Our previous supervisor told us some months ago that the house will be finished on February, however we see that very unlikely. We hope we still on time to finish in March, we'll update you as soon as we know. The house is looking beautiful, we are really happy with the options we took, with exception of small details such the mirror in the ensuite.. when we realised that having only one mirror was an upgrade, it was already late to do any change. Anyways, enjoy the photos :-)

Tiling has started

First thing.. We hope you have enjoyed a nice time over the end of the year break and with your families and friends during Christmas.

We were lucky to finally do a lifetime-delayed travel to Europe, it was really nice time [and freaking cold too :-) ], it was almost a month so we came back with a lot of expectations about what would be the construction progress... Well it wasn't bad at all... tiles have been installed through all the wet areas (main bathroom, en-suite, powder room, laundry and porch). There were also some work done to open cavities in the gyprock for electrical and a/c installations. Additionally, the ground floor bricks have been cleaned up and the balcony cladding is finished.  Here some pics:

Ensuite shower

Ensuite cabinets

Ensuite cavity for SPA

Balcony Cladding

Main Bathroom

Ground floor from living room

Laundry

Powder Room

Cleaned bricks

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 :-)