Frame complete

Thursday 16th and Friday 17th February bought new life and new faith...

On Thursday our family welcomed a new baby girl, our niece, into the world, Miss Josephine born at 10:55am :-)

And on our way to meet her, on Friday, we stopped into shell cove to check see what was happening. As we drove over the rise that leads to our street we were passed by a crane and truck. As we drove down the decline we were greeted by this...

Doesn't that look special!

I couldn't believe my eyes when I jumped out of the car. (OK so, the car had almost stopped when I jumped out, I was soooo excited.)

I really was shocked by how emotional I was about finally seeing our house. After years of looking at display homes & 12 months of paperwork to get to this point. Awesome!!!

Overall the size of the house is as we expected. We knew it was going to be smaller than most of the displays we had seen. However I am kicking myself a little that I didn't try make the house wider, when we are restricted by the depth (thanks to the Asset protection zone)

But we don't have oooooooodlles of cash so we have been smart. The best thing is that it will be ours at the end and that makes me verrrrry happy!

Here are some more shots.

Rain... Rain...GO AWAY!!!

Husband spoke to our SS today and apparently there was a framer scheduled to arrive on Tuesday but due to the 'lovely weather' we are all experiencing, he was cancelled. And it appears they have other jobs and everyone is getting pushed back and rescheduled...blah...blah...blah!

"Just build my house".... wow that sounded spoilt! anyway looks as though the weather from Wednesday may give us a small reprieve.

And then there was........... NOTHING!!!

 I think this is our builders to-do-list for this week!

Sunday has been the most highly anticipated day of our build to date. I have been super excited to visit our block allllll week. We arrived on site at approximately 9:45am this morning. And you read correctly, there has been sweet F.A done on site. I was absolutely gob smacked! I expected there to be either big piles of frames lying all over the slab or even some of the ground floor completed. But there was nothing...

Needless to say we will be on the phone to the builder first thing in the morning and asking W.T.F!!

I'll let you know how that goes tomorrow...

And then there was concrete!

Craig did a drive by on Monday 30th January and was able to see the tradies laying the waffle pods and reinforcements for the slab.

We visited on site at 10 am Saturday, 4th February to the site of fresh concrete.... Yippee! We did the usual walk around our area and met 2 lovely couples who will soon be our neighbours (everyone is just sooooo friendly) and apparently we missed the big concrete truck by only half an hour. Oh well.... we still enjoyed watching the men smoothing and drying the concrete for our slab. Here are some photos...

 The following photo was taken by our lovely neighbour on Sunday!

On monday we received a stop work notice for the 2nd and 3rd due to rain.... its times like these we wonder what happened to the drought ;-(

Woohooooooo.... we have a hole in the ground.

Work started on site on Monday 16th and Craig rang the SS to check in and touch base. He advised us that the fence is up and the excavation would start by the end of the week. We took a real quick trip to the land on Friday 20th and we were like a pair of kids in a toys shop window. We were so excited to see after 12mths of planing, we finally had our house underway!

Craig did a very quick drive by on Wednesday the 25th and said nothing much had changed in a week. Then on Friday 27th we received a lovely email, which included the below photos, from our neighbour. THANKS!!

So it looks like they are getting ready to lay concrete!

We had a deflating moment at 3:45 Friday afternoon. We received an email from masterton advising us of our first variation to our contract. Apparently there was a little more spoil to be removed than first thought. :-(

Sooooo long between post...

It seems the pre-construction process is a very long process. We have not posted since November because there has been not much to talk about.

As we live in the Sutherland shire we cant just 'drop by' the land very easily so we had an issue when it came to the grass needing to be below ankle height. The lady from the Shell Cove sales office dropped by the land to check if it had been cleared (as the council has from time to time mowed our lawn for us). So she drove passed and the lawn was quite long, we then purchased a lawn mower and packed our 2 yr old off for a trip to mow our lawn. When we arrived we were greeted by a beautifully mowed lawn.... thanks to the council!

So we lost a week stuffing around with the lawn then it took another 10 days for the peg out survey to be completed, then there was some more paper work and some bank related delays.

Finally on the 21st of December we received a letter advising we had "officially entered the construction phase" yippee!!

Then 2 days later we received another letter saying 'oh and by the way we have a shut down period over Xmas that normally goes for 5 weeks but yours is only 3 weeks and we'll be back with bells on 16th January 2012.' We knew this would happen but at least we got to enjoy the 'Construction phase' for 2 days before Xmas.

Our site supervisor (SS) is now back to work and as we had hoped, he has hit the ground running! We have our temp fence up (the porta-loo arrived before Xmas) and excavation should be starting by the end of the week!

Colour Appointment - 26th October 2011

We managed to complete our colour selection on the 26th October and didn't require the second half of the appointment scheduled for the 31st October. Here are a few of our selections -

Interior Door handles

Front Door Trilock

 

The front door but it will be painted white.

We are getting our carpet through masterton. We figured the builders margin was worth paying so that we can move straight in and we worked the builders margin to be about 1 weeks mortgage payment so it was worth it!

We will later lay bamboo flooring to the downstairs and stairs. Like this -

Our balustrades will be standard and pained white like this -

As I find more piccies I'll add them here!