Kitchen & Bathroom Cabinets Installed

As scheduled the Kitchen and Bathroom Cabinetery has been installed today.

Hopefully the tiler should be in next week to begin on the floor tiles.

Brickwork Begun - Week 12 , Wednesday - (Day 80)

The brickies have finally begun onsite today by laying the bottom layer of bricks right the way around the slab.

The fixing has been going on through the week. The internal doors have been hung and the skirting has been put installed most of the way through the house.

Plaster Complete - Week 11, Thursday - (Day 74)

Last night on our visit to the visit to the house, we noticed that the plaster has all been completed including all of the cornices and edges and everything.

The brickies are yet to turn up. Apparently they have been delayed at another job, but they are continuing the work inside so we should not be delayed by it.

Roof Completed, Electrical Rough In & Plaster Started - Week 10, Sunday - (Day 70)

There has been quite a bit of activity this week. On monday, the electrician came and did the electrical rough-in. The plasterers began on wednesday and by friday had all of the plaster nailed in. They are still yet complete the edges and sanding etc but hopefully they should be finished doing that this week.

The bricks got delivered on friday so hopefully wont be too long until they start all of the brickwork.

The roof has also been completely finished.

Here are a few of the pictures that I have taken this week...

Obviously this is the front of the house as it stands right now. You can see the bricks sititng in front and to the sides of the house ready for the brickies to come and start the bricklaying!

This is looking from the open front door into the house. As in the previous post, the study, then the lounge then the kitchen and family room areas are all on the left as you look down.


This is looking from the edge of the kitchen archway looking into a dining area and then into the family / TV open area followed by the alfresco doors at the back.

This photo is looking down the hallway towards the two bedrooms on the right of the hallway and then the master bedroom at the end of the hallway.

This is one of the bedrooms, the third bedroom is exactly the same just mirrored the other way.

This is a view of the master taken from the alfresco sliding door. The ensuite is to the left and the Walk In Robe is to the right.

Roof Nearly Complete & Plumbing Rough In - Week 9 - Sunday - (Day 63)

I went up to the house today to check on the progress of the house. I arrived to see that the Colorbond Roof is basically completed and the plumber has been to do the plumbing rough-in.

Here are a few photos of the progress so far...

This obviously is the front of the house as it stands at the moment.

Looking in through the imaginary front door down past the study immediately to the left, lounge on the left and then into the kitchen and family room areas and out to the alfresco.

This is looking from the hallway opening into the family area and again looking out onto the alfresco.

This is looking from the hallway opening into the kitchen and beyond

This is looking down the side of the house. You can see the two bedrooms where windows are supposed to be.

This is from one front corner of the house. Room on the corner is the study.

This is the view from the other front corner of the house...

Guttering Done and Roof Started - Week 9 Thursday (Day 60)

We had our first meeting with our supervisor on Tuesday morning. The meeting went well our quesitons we had were answered and everything is looking really good.

While we were there, the guys were finishing off the frame, plus the roofing guy had come and was installing the guttering and fascia.

The Colourbond roof began yesterday morning. I met a landscaper onsite yesterday at lunchtime for a quote and the roof was coming along well.

During our meeting with the supervisor, he indicated that the brickies and plasterers have been booked in for the 11th September and the kitchen should be going in around the end of September.

Pictures of Frame Stage So Far - Week 8, Saturday - (Day 55)

Here are a few pictures of our Frame so far. We have scheduled our first meeting with our Supervisor for this coming Tuesday. Will be good to have a couple of questions answered and have a good look around!

This is the front of the house so far. Garage on the right, entry in the middle with the front porch and the study on the left.

This is taken from the rear corner of the block, you are looking at the main bedroom ensuite on the corner, then the two bedrooms down the side of the house. The main bedroom is to the right of the ensuite.

This is taken from the rear of the block, looking at the alfresco and in to the family, dining and kitchen areas. Main Bedroom door to the alfresco is on the left hand wall of the alfresco area.

This is taken looking down the left hand side of the house when looking from the street. We have about 1.3M from the side boundary to the edge of the wall of the house. We are looking at putting stepping pavers along with river pebbles down this side. This path leads to the alfresco at the back of the block. We will have a gate at the front of the house.

You can also see here that the block retaining wall on the side boundary has been replaced by the timber sleeper retaining wall.

Frame Construction Begun - Week 7, Wednesday - (Day 45)

During our ritualistic drive by the block today, we discovered that the builders have begun putting the frame up. It is all pre-fabricated so hopefully it should not take too long to put up! Will post pictures this weekend.

Slab Poured! - Week 5 Thursday - (Day 32)

Dropped by on my lunch break today and the slab was poured yesterday. We are very happy with the progress so far. Hopefully the weather holds good for a while so that this sort of progress continues!

This is the slab taken from the front corner of the house (where the garage entrance is) looking over to the rear of the block

This from the Eastern corner from the same location of previous posts. In the foreground will be the study with the main entrance in the middle and then the garage front

This is the view from the south looking north. In the foreground is the Alfresco. The main bedroom will have a door to the Alfresco to the left as you look at it here. The other door to the Alfresco is from the living / TV area to the front.

This is a view from the block behind us looking over the fence. Here you can see the whole slab.

Apparently the frame will be delivered by tomorrow, so they should make a start on the frame next week after the Show Holiday on monday.

Waffle Pods & Formwork Mostly Complete - Week 5, Tuesday - (Day 30)

Dropped by after work today to check on what has happened.

Looks like the waffle pods got delivered on monday and the workers have been busy doing up the formwork and putting in the reinforcement and Waffle Pods. Most of it looks complete apart from a few of the plastic holders holding up the re-inforcement at the back still to be hooked up. Looks like slab might be poured by the end of the week!

This is the same view from the previous post from the East looking West.

This is from the rear of the block

Survey, Piering & Plumbing - Week 4, Saturday - (Day 27)

We went for a walk up to the block today for a bit of a look.

The Surveyor was onsite on Wednesday setting out the pegs on the site.

The piering was done on Thursday. As far as I can tell, they dig holes through the fill to a depth where there is solidity in the land and fill the holes with concrete. I think this basically helps the slab out if there is alot of movement in the land. Dont have any photos to show of this however.

The underground plumbing was all done and completed yesterday, Friday. We have some pictures below of how the site looks so far...

This is just a shot looking over the block from the East looking to the West.

This shot is looking from the back South Western Corner of the block. The pipes in the foreground are for the Ensuite.

This is a view of the whole block from the rear wall.

Site Scrape & Level!!! - Week 3, Sunday - (Day 21)

We went for a drive past the block today on the way to pick up my car from a mate's place and were greeted by a wonderful sight...there has been progress on our block!!!

The site has been scraped and leveled out ready for layout and plumbing to take place. Didnt have the camera so will post photos on our next drive past next weekend.

Developers have added a Fence! - Week 1 - Saturday (Day 6)

Although not the progress we have been hoping for (ie builders have not started yet), there has been a little progress at the block.

The developers have erected the fence along the rear retaining wall. Its quite nice for a wooden fence, not the usual wood paling fence you normally see.

We also had contact from the developers in the form of a letter too. The block retaining wall along the side boundaries was changed from its original design to one without footings during construction. Apparently because of the narrow blocks, if they put concrete footings under the surface, it would have reduced the building envelope on the already narrow blocks. There is a block behind ours that has already began construction where the block retaining walls have been pushed out from the heavy machinery on there.

They have written a letter advising that they are going to remove the block retaining wall and replace it with a wooden sleeper retaining wall. Im not sure if I like this as much as the block wall, but thought they may as well do it because it will give us 300mm - 500mm more area along that boundary, and if we declined for them to fix it and the wall gave way in the future, we would have to pay for replacement or fixing it up.

We are still waiting with baited breath for some signs of construction on the block!

Authority to Commence Construction! - Week 1 - Monday (Day 1)

Well we have final bank approval today and they have authorised construction to begin. The bank have sent the builders authority so all is good to go.

Builders have passed our file on to their ordering department, so our journey can officially begin I guess!

Building Permit Issued!!!

We had a call from Stylemaster yesterday to say the the building permit has been issued.

Now that we have council approval, we just have to get the contract documents from the bank for the construction portion of the loan and we are all set to begin the actual build process.

Colour Selections

Yesterday we had our colour selection appointment with Stylemaster Homes at their head office in Milton.

It went really quick as we knew pretty much everything we wanted.


This is the wall of the brick that we ended up choosing. We went for the Boral Girraween brick. We have also opted for the off-white mortar as displayed on the top half of the wall.


This is a close up of the brick we have chosen.

You will have to wait to see the colours of everything else as we dont have photos.

Basically we are going for a beigy light chocolate colour scheme which will match in the the tiles that we have selected.

The only thing we are waiting on now is the building permit / council approval to come through. We signed the contract about a week and a half ago so here is hoping that we are only 2 -3 weeks away from that...cant wait!!

Tile Selections

We drove to Beaumont tiles yesterday. Once we got there, we decided to ask if there had been an appointment cancel, and luckily there had been a cancellation about 1/2 an hour after we asked, so that was good.

Anyway, we did our selections during the appointment. We had a fair idea of what we wanted based on the display house of Stylemaster Homes in Warner.

We are looking forward to getting the colour selections out of the way on tuesday. Again, we have a good idea of what we want based on the display house.


This is the Alfrecso Tile that we have selected.


This is the floor tile that we have chosen. This picture is of the display home at Warner.


This is the feature tile in the main bathroom along with the white shower wall tile.


This is the tile selections that we have made for the Ensuite. The chocolate floor tile, along with a creamier shower wall tile and the thin feature tile. The smaller square tile is the floor tile of the shower.


This is the colour selections for the main bathroom. The floor tile will be the same as the rest of the house. The shower floor tile is the same as the ensuite, and the feature tile and shower wall tile with be as displayed in the picture above.


This final picture shows the colour of the Kitchen Cupboards (Cappucino) ialong with the Kitchen benchtop (CaesarStone) white colour.

Contract Signed and Colour Selections

After a little period of waiting patiently since our land registration, we have finally finalised our variations with the builder and they have drawn up the contracts. We looked them over and have signed on the dotted lines yesterday!

We have our colour selections on the 11th June and apparently you need to have your tile selections with you then. However, we were not told of this and now we cant book in an appointment for tiles before the colour appointment, so we will go there on Saturday and just choose ourselves and get the samples and complete the appointment when we can after the colour selections.

Our Land

This is the block of land that we have bought. These pictures have been taken immediately after the machinery had left. It still is a bit dusty but its ours!!

The block is not quite rectangle but close enough.

It is 430 sqm and has a 16m frontage closing to an 11m back boundary length. The side boundarys are 32m.

The boundary edges are on the upper side of the side retaining walls and the rear boundary is the retaining wall itself.

Here are the photos...

This photo show the front of the block from the road.




This photo shows the upper (Eastern) side boundary




This photo shows the lower side (Western) side boundary






This photo shows the estate looking up to the East.

This is the photo looking down on our block out over the road. No houses will be built opposite...its all parkland.

The Beginnings

Well, What better way to start by updating you from the beginning...sorry in advance for this long first blog!

Bernie and I started this process of attempting to build a house for us to live in back in August 2007. Saw a house and land package advertised through a property developer and enquired.

Lucky enough to succeed in that regard to next thing we know we are checking finances and then we sit down to sign up land contracts. The developer basically secured the land and provided quotes etc to put a finished house package on the block, but basically we were not locked into anything regarding his builder choice, etc.

The builder he chose was one that Bernie and I liked the look of anyway so things looked really good.

From there we signed the contract for the land with the land developer and paid our deposit! How exciting...

We then basically locked in the house by paying their deposit and organised our bank finance.

So from there we were all locked in, we basically sourced our own quoted for driveways, airconditioning, alfresco, turfing, the list goes on. All we had to do was wait until the land was registered. The expected date of registration was meant for late October.

Well being the eternally pessimestic one, I said to Bernie when we signed the land contract that "you watch, I bet you we will break the drought now that this is done". Obviously not believing it. Sure enough down came the rains for Brissie in September and October, which quite substantially delayed the project. Well after numerous calls to developer and checking their website to be told "a couple of weeks away", we eventually arrived into late March and was told that hey presto the land will be registered in early april and builders can do soil tests mid april...Woooo Hooooo.

Not five minutes later, we get a call from Mortgage Broker saying that the bank would like us to re-submit the loan because they had not drawn down on the loan for 6 months and of course interest rates had risen by 0.75% (bet they would not have made us re-apply if the rates had of decreased, they would have been happy to keep us on the higher rate - but I guess they are responsible ultimately to their shareholders!).

So then, wow what do we do, we have settlement booked in for 3 weeks time and now no finance...eek. Found another lender and after frantic back and forth, we delayed settlement by two weeks and got all of the paper work done and got it back to the bank's solicitors and settled two days later. I must make special mention to our broker, they did a fantastic job and we dont know where we would be withour them. If ever you need someone to help in that regard, give them a go... Access One based on the Gold Coast (if you want their details leave me a message and I'll give you the contact of the consultant I used...fantastic).

Well we are now settled on the land and look forward to getting knee deep into the muck to get the house started now!