Grrrrrrrrrrr and Sigh

We're not almost in. We now wont be in until 2010 (I could have said next year or after christmas but 2010 sounds far more dramatic!). Anyway I will write what is undoubtedly going to be a very long post later this week, so check back =)

Two updates in less than a month....we must be almost in!

Our nougat bricks up close (unstained- more to come on that).

Butlers pantry/ entertaining side.

Our freshly poured driveway, we're very happy with it.

Main bathroom, which will really be a guest bathroom for us.

Our bath, which will really be for Humphrey who loves his baths!

Guest bedroom/ my bedroom when Paul is snoring. This is still one of our favourite rooms in the whole house, when there's no guests around I think I'll be spending a lot of time in here.

Looking up the hallway(laundry and bathroom on left) from the guest bedroom in to the leisure room and study/spare room through door beyond that. Kitchen/dining/family through doorway on right.

Kitchen again.

From the outdoor room looking in on our lovely new floor! Picture our 3 square matt s/s pendant lights in place of those temporary white shades over the kitchen bench.

We love it, it's even more colourful than it appears here.

Dining, family room and outdoor room.

Family room, tv alcove and outdoor room.

Butlers pantry, a butler would go nice in here!

Bushland (slightly dilapidated at the moment) that is to become the hilltop park- I can't remember how many hectares it is.

It's a real house!

Well it's been some time since we updated our building blog, but not much has been missed in the lead up to now. But it's truly a working house now and we can't wait until we can finally call it our own and stop feeling like intruders and spys! We're not going to go on to much about what we've been through to get to here, maybe once our house is finished we'll go back and summarize the whole building process with all our lessons learnt, so here's just a very brief update of where we're at.

Lets see, the roof tiling was finally finished (after we pointed out it wasn't complete), the bricking was done with some delays on bricks as there were hairline fractures on over 50% of them, then some bright spark forgot to neutralise them after the acid wash and they turned green (this has mostly been fixed now). The plastering, painting, insulation and rendering are all complete. Lights, heating/cooling, tiling, cabinetry and carpets all finished. Garage door is on but has a dent so some panels will need to be replaced which probably wont be complete till after we've moved in. Our much awaited spotted gum floor is going in on Monday and the driveway should be going in soon also.

So here's the really exciting part- we're about 3 weeks off moving in!! We'll have our final walk through somewhere around the 15th of November and then all being well handover will be one week later! We've been looking for furniture and things and have found lots of lovely items we'll get over time. We've found a letterbox ready for handover and have big plans for the rear yard to most maximize on the space. We deliberately kept the front facade of our house very simple and neutral so we could bring in colour and interest through the front garden, we're going to do this by using indigenous plant species (from local seed where possible) and mulch and give lawn a big miss. We're firming up plant lists and design for this right now, but there is lots to choose from.

Anyway I'll let the following pictures do most of the talking (we took these photos at our last site meeting and the carpet was getting installed so we couldn't get in to a lot of the rooms unfortunately).

Our front-scape thus far. We don't love our bricks, but we can certainly live with them and they are a nice break from the reds on either side of us.

Bedroom windows at front of house. Those planks of wood around the room are from the carpet installation taking place that day.

Ensuite vanity. It's a shame we couldn't get down to the other bathroom to take pictures (as carpet in the hallway was getting installed) it shows more of the tiles and colours as it's a larger room.

Another angle on the vanity. For some reason the tiling is looking a little pink in these pictures, when it's not pink at all, also the vanity colour doesn't look nearly as exciting as it does in real life, but you get the idea.

Ensuite shower. One word for Paul- "Duck!"- Oh well at the risk of continually banging his head and arching his neck maybe he'll finally cut down on his shower times and frequency!

I haven't taken too many pictures of toilets in my time, but thought this one was worthy.

Walk-in-robe rails..... it's the little things in life that keep us happy!

Dining/Family room windows.

It's nice to see our kitchen colours coming to life, we're very happy with how everything is tying together thus far, although the photos do not do it justice. We really really love our orange-red splashback.

It's so glossy it'll be like having eyes in the back of my head.

My little kitchen hideaway- mess today gone tomorrow. Love the sink, love the tiles, love the doors that seal it all off!

So much bench space and one fabulous deep square sink.

The spotted gum floors (once installed) will flow beautifully with the kitchen colours and bring out all those earthy tones.

We bought these handmade glass plates quite a while back, they were some of the inspiration for our colour choices throughout the house.

We really do love these plates!

A quick progress update.

Our roof tiles are going on and our bricks have been delivered, just waiting for the roofing to be finished and then the brickies will start.

We're a little unsure of how the colours are going to come together, we know they wont be offensive, but we may not 100% love them. Straight away we notice our roof looks very brown. We initially were going to go with a more greeny/grey/brown colour tile but when our brick choices got changed at the last minute, we kind of got swept along with all the other choices too. I will say though, driving down through the estate, so many of the roof colours are variations on the colour grey, so it is nice to see something different. Seriously though, how much time do you spend staring at your roof anyhow?

The bricks could absolutely be hit or miss. We'll just need to wait and see.

So the word on the street is...... lock up should be complete in 2 weeks and plastering should be starting in a month. We're still waiting on delivery of our bi-fold door and butlers pantry window (the gap was cut the wrong size and height in our frame, but has already been picked up by the site manager and will be fixed when the window arrives). Other than that we asked a few questions about the build and raised some issues we had, and were told, not surprisingly, not to worry none of it matters the house will still stand! No, there was nothing major we needed to address and our site manager said he will continue (I think he meant start) to call us once a week for updates.

No guesstimate on when the house will be finished- fair enough- but we wait with bated breath.

Oh and......rain rain go away come again another day....preferably when we're in lock-up.

It's a wrap!

Here are the photos from the weekend. We're wrapped up and ready for bricking. We've both been too busy and sick to get out to the site this week, but are heading out there tomorrow morning to meet with our site manager. Can't wait to see if our roof tiles and bricks have arrived.

Still a little foggy in the head, so I'll keep this post nice and short and let the photos speak for themselves. As there are so many photos I've made them smaller on this post, you can click them if you want to view them any larger (I think).

Street scape.

Looking up the lovely large entrance way towards the front door.

Walk-in robe on left (hers, his can maybe have a drawer or two), ensuite on right.

Lounge/Dining room. We've got 2.9m ceilings in here and are now a little worried that the two windows are perhaps a bit low and should have been raised slightly higher. Oh well too late now.

Our 2.9m ceilings and bulkhead in the kitchen- looking pretty.

Our laundry and a door Humphrey will get to know well.

Fancy a bath?

Looking down hallway to bedroom 3.

Outdoor room.

Highlight window in bedroom 3. For some reason I really like this room, I think it's going to be my favourite.

From the outdoor room, looking at Paul in the lounge (always so serious when he's on site!).

Roof roof.

Our eaves, we love eaves.

Gutter and fascia- very happy with our choices.

Locks for our door. Not sure why we have two when we've paid for one?

A few too many wines perhaps.

The trials and tribulations of life as a nail.

Our neighbours house is also going up and construction is just slightly behind ours. The race is on!

A Correction.

Firstly- I have to post a brief correction. In our last post we stated that we had learnt budgeting and goal setting from my brother and sister in law. This was incorrect. My brother has taught us nothing! My sister in law (yes I am still going to call you that!), is completely responsible for that way of thinking, and has taught my brother and us, everything we know!

Slightly off track for a moment.

We've been formulating a list, that seems never ending, of things we want to purchase or finish once we move in to our house. Some things like fence and fridge are obviously higher on the priority list, than say decorative cushions, but nonetheless we are keeping our eyes open for anything that fulfills our brief so we can get prices and have goals to work towards (I've learnt this lesson from my brother and sister in law).

Anyway my point of all this is to show you the pendant lights we have found. We want to have 3 pendant lights hanging over the kitchen bench. These are by far the best we've found and reasonably priced too.

We thought the square shape would work with the square sink and the satin chrome finish matches the finish of our cupboard handles. They are also not too obtrusive or too much of a statement and should blend nicely.

Just thought we'd take another brief moment out of the build to show you more of our decorating ideas.

Drive by.

I did a quick drive by yesterday, and can tell you that the frame is complete, the windows are in and the gutters and fascia is up! I am very happy with the colours of these so far, hope everything else keeps falling in to line this nicely.

We've also spoken to our Site Manager and he said that roof tiles were arriving today and bricks were due onsite next week! We've got an appointment with our site manager on Thursday morning, just to have a look at everything and talk about the build and stuff. We'll ask then when he thinks we may be finished, of course we know it'll only be a guesstimate, as so many things can still hold us up before completion.

We'll head out there tomorrow for a sticky so expect some photos to go up over the weekend.

Red and yellow and pink and green...purple and orange and blue....

A brief moment out to show some of the interior and exterior colours we chose. They haven't shown up too fabulously and we don't have samples of everything, but they give an idea nonetheless.

The majority of our selections were done at Studio M, a HUGE studio at Metricons headquarters, full of samples and displays. We tried to arm ourselves with as much information as possible before hand, spending days going from supplier to supplier and weekends flicking through magazines. Needless to say though, it was fairly gruelling having to make so many decisions all at once, giving thought to dollar values and good taste.

We were very definite on the floor boards and benchtop, so the rest began to formulate around that. The bricks caused some angst. We originally saw some lovely oversized bricks called "Calais" from Boral, but were told we couldn't have them because of the variation in size and the difficulty to the pre measured wall/window size. So second choice was "Mist" at Boral, which, probably fortunately given their extra cost, were discontinued when it came time to make the final selection. So we settled on "Nougat" and chose our exteriors based on that.

A little frightening not knowing how it will all pan out, but ultimately I don't think we've chosen anything too offensive.

The last thing selected were the tiles for the wet areas and butlers pantry splashback. We completed these at Beaumont last Tuesday. They were really difficult to choose, so we kept them fairly neutral and classic, as tiles are probably the first thing to date in a home.

We've got a lot to thank Fiona at Studio M for, she was a godsend during our major colour appointment and certainly aided us in making our decisions.

Floating Floorboards: Spotted Gum (Corymbia maculata)

Kitchen/Pantry Bench: Caesarstone "Cashmere"

Kitchen/Pantry Cupboards: Laminex "Pumice"

Kitchen Overhead Cupboards: Laminex " Pesto Linea"

Kitchen Splashback: Glass "MAC" (indicated by the dulux colour, it's slightly more orange though)

Bathroom/Ensuite Vanities: Laminex "Pesto Linea"

Walls and Ceilings: Dulux "Natural White"

Cornices and Skirtings etc: Dulux "Hog Bristle 1/2 strength"

Carpet: Cosmopolitian 26

Roof Tile (not shown): Walnut

Brick (not shown): Austral "Nougat"

Gutters/Windows/Garage: Jasper

Fascia and Downpipes: Dune

Facade Render: Pearl Ash