Builders!!

This is the state of our block courtesy of the builders next door. We have spoken to them and they will fix the crossover and remove the rubbish. All we have to do is to email them the pics and contact our builder to see when they would like the crossover to be done...before or after they build our place.....personally i'd opt for before.

We have Holes...!!!

Some of our lovely neighbours to be let us know that yesterday we had holes bored in our block....after all the hassles we had last week we just couldn't believe it.

So here Ladies and Gentlemen is a pic of one of our holes..ta dah... we have 3 holes approximately 1.8m deep. Yay!!!

Soil Update...

After numerous unreturned phone calls and unanswered emails, I went down to Porter Davis this morning to catch our CSC before she went into meetings.
Don't think she was too impressed to see me there at that time of the morning but stiff...told her i was there because she hadn't responded to us and that we had to resolve the issue of the soil or non soil testing.
Pointed out to her that the only real issue we had was with the report on what they had found in the soil cores.....how can you do a report when you haven't done the cores?...

And that we didn't want to be held up in getting our house started, that was when she dropped the bombshell that we weren't starting till mid February...Shit a brick...we had previously been told that we were starting in January...okay so its only two weeks later but that doesn't help Tony who when we move into our new house will now have finished his holidays....he cant change them again as there is now no time available the weeks have all been filled.

In the end we agreed to have a 3rd (2nd?) test done by a different company, if the results come in similar to the phantom test then we will have to pay for the testing but if they come in different then PD will pay for them. We wont be penalised for not starting in Jan...just as well as its not our fault.
So, come the New Year we will have a new soil test done, PD will finally order our building permit, final plans will be drawn up and maybe, just maybe we can get this house started.

Grrrrr....

According to our builder we have had our second soil test done...when was it done?...last Friday according to the report she has...funny thing is that there are NO holes bored into our land. Same thing has happened to another couple also building with our builder at our Estate.

The company contracted to do the holes have filed a report saying that we now will need piering as alot of fill has been put onto our block....hmmmmmmmm, think they are saying that cos when they did the first test there was alot of dirt sitting on top of our block, but our block was being used as a stockpile for the dirt before it was being distributed to other blocks.

Not happy!! If we need piering then good, but to say so when they haven't done the testing is rubbish. So it makes you wonder...how many times have they pulled this stunt before....we have to pay for the second test, our builder will be paying the company for the testing...who's getting money for nothing here???

Taps...

Yay!! We have taps........but our site start still isn't until late Jan 2010. We paid to have our taps moved to the other side of the block so they wouldn't end up under our driveway.

House

the block and house pegged out, taken from top of the dirt pile (Mt Berner) in the park.

Block with house shaded in. Looks sooo big.

Seeing the way the land lies.....

Today Tony & I went out to our block to peg our house out so we could have a look at how our house would sit on the block in 2D.
So out we went armed with string, twine, stakes, tape measures, set square, hammer, water and 2 dogs.

Firstly we used the string to outline our block, then started measuring where the house would sit, using the set square to hopefully get it to sit straight, after getting all the stakes in we proceeded to use the bright orange twine in between the pegs to get the outline of the house, we were doing fine until Mia decided to run right through the twine, then Sorcha ran through the top of the house taking the twine down...silly dogs.

Hmm...not as much yardage as we thought...funny thing that, you know how much area you have but physically seeing it puts a whole new perception on it. But this was the whole idea of doing what we did.

After restringing the house it was time to take pics of it...unfortunatly the orange string didn't stand out as much as we hoped it would so we couldnt get one pic of the whole house :( but we did take lots of sectional photos...

House Number

Well, things are starting to get a move on...be it ever so slowly...lol

Today we found out what our house number will be in 7 - 8 months time......

...wait for it....its #11...yep legs eleven, now i can go buy my numbers...yay......yes, i know it doesnt take much to excite me...lol

At Last...

Yes!!

It's official, we now own 725m2 of dirt!!


Went to see our dirt and had celebratery drinks with 4 other couples who have or are about to settle on their dirt.

The next two and a half months will drag before we start to build...bring on the build!!!!

Inch by inch...

Today it felt like we are finally getting somewhere.

1. we are definately poorer.
2. took our portion of the land settlement to our conveyencer
3. had to go have a look at our block...yep, it's still there and just begging to be built on :)

Monday will be the big day....settlement on our block...*sigh*

pity we have to wait until end of January for things to begin...can't wait for that day.

Title

OMG !!.......titles have FINALLY been released, so, in two weeks time it will be 'our' bit of dirt.
Pity that we now have to wait until Mid January 2010 to start building :( but at least we know when we are stating now :) :)

Land Update

Well....we are still waiting for our land to be released.

Apparently Australand have lodged compliance with the SRO last week, so now we are waiting for them to release titles.

However this is not going to help us start building before the end of the year. We heard from our CSC today, and we along with all the other Porter Davis clients from Wallara Waters will begin our builds in the middle of January when they get back from the Christmas break.....delays, delays....
...so at least we have a definate start date now (fingers crossed), this means that we will NOT be in our new house in time for me to celebrate my 50th birthday in June...bummer! so we have decided to celebrate it when we finally move it, even if its a few months after :)

House Plans

Tony very kindly informed me last night that I hadn't put the house plans on the blog yet, so, here they are.....

This is the Hayman 34 by Porter Davis (probably the last one to be built), structual changes we made include the removal of the 2nd WIR in the master bedroom/ensuite; voids in the study/master wall, master/ensuite x 2; family/rear hall, added a door to the rumpus room and removed the wardrobe and wall between bedrooms 3 & 4 ( this is to give our adult daughter her own sitting room/bedroom), in bedroom 2 we are putting taller doors onto the wardrobe as this will be my craft room.

We have about 95% of the upgrades that were in the display house, so therefore we have 9' ceilings, the fireplace in the lounge, french doors in the master bedroom leading to a sm verander at the front, bi-fold doors from the kitchen to Alfresco, French doors from the lounge to Alfresco and Sliding doors from the Dining to Alfresco...i know i know...3 different types of doors all leading out onto the one area.

We also have extra overhead cupboards in the kitchen, 2 pot drawers on one side of the oven and 3 graded drawers on the right side.

Nearly forgot...we have extended the Alfresco, so it doesnt finish flush with the house and we added a 3rd garage.

There are heaps more things but at this very moment I cannot think of things...

Porter Davis's Hayman 34.

Land...

This is a waiting game......we wait and wait and wait.....

When we made enquires in Jan 09 we were told that the land should title in June but was running about 6wks behind....that was okay. June came and went, and so did July.....and August...September...and we are still waiting.

According to whispers around the estate, the developers have lodged the compliance with the SRO...so things should be moving soon.

The longer the land takes the more $$ we have to pay to our builder to hold the contract price...it is getting ridiculous.

Feb...the first time we actually saw our block...even then we guessed which one was ours.

May...roads nearly done.

June 09

Begining of July....footpaths and crossover ready to be poured.

Early September...except for the street signs, nothing else has happened.

Banks...

Our Brokers did a real sweet deal for us with Westpac, overall we would start off with 3 loans but end up with just the 1 loan. Our first loan would be a refinance on our existing property along with a third of the money required for the land, the second loan would be soley for the remaining finance for the land whilst the last loan would be for construction and the absorbtion of the second loan.
While the deal was good, we are not too sure what to think about the bank itself....I think we have supplied Tony's income details about 4 times so far.
At the moment we actually have no loans running as we sold our townhouse and paid back loan 1 keeping the land portion aside and our land has not settled yet so obviously construction hasn't started.
In August we had to resubmit Tony's income details as it had been 6 months since approval was first granted, this was not a problem as since the original application he had gone full time and was therefore earning more money. Thankfully it went through without a hitch.

Post Contract Variation #1

Middle of June our Post Contract Variation came through......signed it and returned it to Porter Davis...now all we were waiting for was for the land to become ours and we would be well on our way to start building.

Contract

At the end of May it was time to front up for our Contract Appointment at Keilor.

Having already done both our colours and electrical we knew what our contract price would be, much better than having them done after contracts.

There were only a few adjustments to be made to the drawings and just a few more things we had thought about that would have to be added to our contract.

Time to pay the balance of the 5% of our original price. That has to hurt...now we were poor.

Also it was confirmed that we would have to pay an extra $3000 to hold the build price as we were definatly not going to start before the end of May...think that might have been obvious, so now we were locked in until the end of August.

Light Pics

Nope, can't show you any pics of our lights, you will have to wait until they are installed...like in about 9 months time...as they are pics off the website and i can't manage to get them installed onto the blog. Any ideas?

Let there be lights.....

So, if we couldn't have our squillions of downlights, we would have to have something pretty to look at, wouldn't we!

As i have said before, I love the internet, it makes it so easy to shop if you have some idea before hand what you are looking for.

I used Beacon.....my daughter and I were able to pick out what we thought would go in each room, write down the price add it all up....then die at the cost of it all, but at least it was still cheaper than the squillion downlights.

Off we trotted to out nearest Beacon store and started wandering around and around and around the store, made note of what we actually did like when we saw them in the flesh and what we didn't like, decided to try a different store....they actually had different stock, they all have the same basic items, but then it is up to the manager of each store as to what else they stock.

Went back to our local store...as it would be far easier to go there to make layby payments. The Manager there is so, so helpful. Explained what we were after and how long it would be before i required them, that wasn't a problem, I just had to let her know when my painting starts and then she will order all my lights for me.

We orginally planned just to get the pendants and wall sconces but ended up also getting our fan for the Alfresco and the standard lamps that we needed. Alot later on we went back and added Fluros for the garage as well as heating lamps for the bathrooms...to date i have nearly finished paying them off.

I love what we have chosen (otherwise I wouldn't be getting them now would I), we have opted for what I call a Provincial look, very old world, hopefully they will all go once they are up. I will see if I can find pics to put on the blog.....I know that not everyone will like my choices but then again they are my choices.

Electrical

After our Colour appointment it was time to do the electrical. In our Contract we had allowed $3000.
The good thing about doing the Electrical was that you had a running total of what you were spending on the board in front of you.

The biggest disappointment for us was the price of the downlights, $115 each, yep thats right, EACH. So there went the squillions of downlights that we were planning...we are big fans of them.

We had already planned our powerpoints so that did not take us long at all to plot, the only improvement was a 'powertainment' switch in the Theatre room....this has 6 powerpoints plus a TV point.

Back to the lights...

The only rooms we retained the downlights in were the bathrooms, some in the kitchen , the home theatre room and in my Craft room, for the rest we went with the standard Chinamens hat pendant.

The toughest part was deciding where the switches were to go and if we wanted two or three way switches on some, overall it didn't take us too long to do all this and in the end we only just went over our allowance, so we were happy with that.

Colours....

Today would be a big day, our Colour Selection and Electrical Appointment.

Colours came first, as I have said before, we had researched our items and had most of them all ready picked.

So we stuck with our choices, Lawson Bricks, Ironed natural mortar, Barramundi roof tiles, White Birch windows our Consultant helped us with some of the finer items, such as chosing Monument for the gutters/downpipes and Surfmist for the facias to go with the Garage door. She asked us what colour we wanted for the trim on the render, we just looked at her.....we hadn't realised that the render had trim...she got all the colour samples out, in the end we went with Dune for just a bit of contrast. The roof also has gables, we stuck to the colour scheme and went with Surfmist panels with Dune trim.

As we are having timber windows and French doors at the front we then had to pick a timber stain, which wasn't hard, we ended up picking Rosewood, the Front door would also be stained this colour, along with the doors leading out onto the Alfresco...(sliding door, Bi-fold doors and more French doors).

We had researched our own front door as I wasn't happy with any that PD had to offer....an upgrade...we opted for a Windsor with Jewel Zinclight glazing from Corinthian Doors and for the Laundry we chose an IBP also from Corinthian, this door had a internal blind in it...so i never have to try and clean it (unless the door breaks...lol).

In one of the previous posts I mentioned how we wanted to try and get the same colours or as close to as possible for the internal paintwork as we had in our home. After a few minor adjustments with the help of our Consultant we went with New Pale Cream for all the walls, the Architrave would be Koscuisko Pebble and as I didn't want the doors in that colour I had no choice but to go for an upgrade to have them painted White.

Picking the skirting boards/architraves was interesting as this is one of the items that they didn't have out on display at Hopetoun...had no idea what i wanted here, so i tried to match it up with the Cornicing...so it will be interesting to see how it comes out when its up. Oh yes, the cornicing we chose was the Symphony 75mm. We didn't realise until we have been reading peoples blogs and posts on Homeone that you could have two different sizes in the house...grrr we would have gone for a larger one in some of the rooms...never mind.

For us the Laminates were easy....the kitchen and bathrooms would all be in Vinyl Wrap Gloss in Polar White with white kickboards in Laminex. In the butlers pantry I went for Diamond Gloss in Starlight....which will tie in nicely with the Starlight Black Quantum Quartz on the benchtops. After picking our tiles for the laundry we took another trip down to Laminex to repick our colours, we chose Tuscan Marble for the benches while the trough doors would be in Moleskin...I am not having any other cupboards in the laundry as i only end up putting junk in them anyway.

As part of the promotion a glass splashback was included, it might sound boring but we went with white, originally we were going to have the upgraded glass but under the samples the white actually looked better with the normal glass, so normal it was! figured if we dont like it then we can do something about it later...like take it off and tile the area.

The handles for all our cupboards! This i think took the longest, ended up having the same handle on everything through out the house, a stainless steel bar handle.

All the external doors with the exception of the Bi-fold and slider are having the Durabrass Traditional Trilock lever handles, we had had these at a previous house and I absolutely loved them. The internal doors are all having Chrome lever handles.

The only other thing of interest would be our carpet. We have pets, currently one dog and two cats, we are definatley getting another dog once we have moved, so our choice of colour for our carpet is reflective of this, we upgraded to the next category to get the Oakley in a Cocoa colour...to me its like a milk chocolate

Tiles

This for me was going to be the hardest appointment, get it wrong and your house is...well, disappointing to say the least.

Least we had visited the showroom 3 times trying to decide what we wanted...the appointment didn't take long at all, our tile consultant gave us about 10 minutes to have a look at the tiles while she set up in readiness for us. We spent this time looking at accent tiles for the bathrooms and laundry.

I found the tiles for the laundry straight away - glass tiles in shades of brown. While we were searching with our adult daughter for tiles for her bathroom we came across the same accent tile that we had used 3yrs earlier on our current bathroom, so that was an easy pick for us. Kelly had alot more trouble picking out her tile, she is into purple and wanted something in that range.

We decided to wait until we had finalised the actual tiles for the bathrooms and get the consultant to help us.

As i posted earlier we chose Alexa Rosso 400mm x 400mm as our main tile through the house, this is a light brown tile with a fine white vein running through it, in the Entrance we turned the tiles to form a diamond pattern and added Alexa Grigio, this tile was also 400mm x 400mm but would be cut in half to form a border. This tile would also be used in the Laundry on the floor.

For the Ensuite, Bathroom and Toilet we picked Abitare Carrara a white marble looking tile with a very faint blue/grey vein running though it. This tile would also continue on into both showers forming the base and the walls, they would also continue on to become the splashbacks behind the vanities.

In our ensuite our accent tile would be the Oasis Border tile, this is a 100 x 300mm pale blue tile made up of 12 smaller rectangles with paler blue and darker blue vine silhouette on it, this is going to run across the splashback and continue on into the shower across both tiled walls, it should sit just under half way up the wall...i am now starting to worry about whether it will look okay or not, but have decided to check with the tiler when we get to that stage.

As for Kellys bathroom, she couldn't decided between two different colours in a pencil tile, a lavender one or a aubergine one, I asked her why not have both alternating them we also decided to go with two rows, offsetting the rows. She elected to put them across the top of the shower about head high and along the long side of the bath front.

Luckily we didnt need to pick tiles for the kitchen as we are getting a glass splashback as part of our promotion.

As we are putting a trough in the garage Tony just picked plain white tiles for there.

Pre Tender

Because our block had so much extra dirt piled on it PD were unable to do our soil tests, so our Tender Appointment in Mid March turned into a Pre Tender, we rescheduled our appointment to May hoping that the block would be okay by then and that they would have been able to get onto it to do the required soil test. Our consultant also rescheduled our Contract appointment to late May.

The Pre Tender gave us the opportunity to update our evergrowing list of add ons and to sort out some of the items that had been misunderstood from our Sales Consultant.

This also meant that by the time we got to do our Tender we would have been and finalized our Tiles, Electrical and Colours.

Standing on a huge pile of dirt in what will be the park looking at our block on the left, this is in April with nearly all the dirt pile gone.

External pics

Carpet for the Master bedroom, its an off white colour.


Carpet for the rest of the house- a milk chocolate colour.



Middle item is our tile colour "Barramundi" in the Elabana style.




Our render colour- 'White Duck"





Bricks, Austral 'Lawson".

The other external colours are in the previous post, Monument for the gutters and downpipes, surfmist for the facias and gable infil, and dune for the edging on the render and gable infils.

Pics...

On the right is the vinyl wrap for the kitchen cupboards and bathroom vanities. On the left is the tops of the vanities.


Our kitchen bench top, Quantum Quartz - starlight black.




The top colour is Surfmist, being used for the garage doors, facias and infil on the gable; the one underneath it is White Duck the Render colour while the darker colour is Dune being used on the trim for the render and the gables.


White Duck, Surfmist and Monument (which you can only just see) , Monument is for the Gutters and the downpipes.


The small tile is for both the Bathroom and the Ensuite for the floor and showers as well as the splashbacks. The larger blue tile is for the ensuite as our border tile. There are no pics of the purple shades for the bathroom borders.

The Main tile throughout the house.

The Laundry tiles, the large tile on the right is for the floor as well as a border tile in the front entrance. The top tile is the splashback in the laundry. The top Laminate chip is the bench tops in the laundry while the bottom laminate chip is for the trough doors.

Interior Colours...

We did a couple of trips out to Hopetoun Interiors to have a look at their wares.

We knew straight up what colour we wanted the internal walls to be painted, Hog Bristle 1/4 strength with the woodwork in the 1/2 strength, only trouble was that Hog Bristle is a Dulux paint and PD use Wattyl paints, trying to find paint samples for Wattyl was frustrating, in the end we took our colours with us to our Colour Appointment and matched them from there, so we ended up choosing New Pale Cream for the walls with the woodwork in Kosiosko Pebble, we upgraded the paint work as i wanted the doors to be white - later on we will change them to suit us.

Tiles

We also did a few trips to National Tiles, naturally all the tiles that I liked were NOT in catergory 1. I am definately a bower bird, i love shiney things and thats what i gravitated towards. We looked at a few that were 400mm x 400mm that came in 4 different colours; a fawn, a honey, a mocha and a chocolate all had white veins running thru them ( and yes, they were shiney).

Originally we were going to go with all of them bar the mocha but on a subsequent visit we deceided that the chocolate was too dark, the mocha would go much better as the main tile from the front door through to the kitchen/family room and dining room with the fawn as a border tile in the entry way, this tile would also go into the laundry as the floor tile.

When we had our Tile appointment we found our main tile for the Ensuite and Bathroom, a white 400mm x 400mm tile with a faint blue vein running through it. We took our daughter with us to the apppointment so she could pick out her border tiles for her bathroom she ended up picking out 2 different purple pencil tiles, one was a lavender colour while the other was more of a Aubergine colour. For the Ensuite we picked out a pale blue tile with a mushroom coloured flower ( description not very acurate). The only other room that needed tiles was the laundry, in here I chose a glass tile in differnt shades of brown, this was my favourite tile.

Laminates

I was very definate on what i wanted for our kitchen, white vinyl wrap for the cupboards with a black granite top, we had had this previously and it looked a treat, okay, so we opted for a black quantum quartz but it will still look awesome, we are going to be boring and have a white splashback but i figure we can tizz it up with coloured accents :)

The bathrooms will also have the white vinyl wrap cupboards. For the laundry the only cupboards in there will be the ones under the trough, these will be in moleskin with the benches in a tuscan marble.

Carpet

We chose a milk chocolate carpet for the rooms that were not tiled except for the Master where we chose a off white, the idea behind having brown tiles and carpet is for the animals to try and minimize the visible lmess especially during winter.

Sorry for the delay between postings....silly when I'm recapping everything thats happened upto the current time.
We sold our townhouse in July but settlement was depending on when the Insurance Company got their act together to repair the damage caused by next doors leaking hotwater service. We were always told that we would have a fortnights notice before work started, and did we?...no, we were notified at 4pm Friday 18th Sept that work was going to commence on the following Monday.

As you can imagine the S*#t hit the fan trying to organise everything, luckily we already had most things packed and put into storage, all that was left was the final pack, the daughter off to her Grandma's was first on the agenda, then moving what furniture we were taking with us to our son's place, before the removalists came on the Thursday to move the rest of our furniture into storage.....this left us a few days to remove everything else to our sons.
During all this the the insurance was repairing the house, so we had to be up or at the house by 7am.
Anyway, settlement went well, so we are now homeless and relying on our son :)

External Choices...

Not long after we had paid our desposit our CSC rang us to introduce herself and to let us know what would be happening in the near future in regards to Tender, Contracts, Colours etc, this is when we started to get excited.

Our Tender was booked in for Mid March and Contracts for not long after, Colour & Electrical appointments with Hopetoun were booked in for early April.

Not long after that we received a call from National Tiles to book in our appointment for tile selection which was scheduled for late March.

Using the guide that our Sales Consultant had given us we went and visited all the places listed to see what was available for us to pick for our house, eg bricks, roof tiles, floor tiles, laminates, carpet.

We also spent hours driving around looking at new houses for inspirations and colour combinations.

We were lucky that everything except for the carpet were located within a 20 minute drive from us and most of them were in a small area making it alot easier and convienient.

Also having most of the companies on-line made it easy to look at their products so at least you had some idea of what you wanted before getting there, I'm not sure about anyone else but we started with our bricks, since really this is the first thing you see....

...this for us was an easy choice, we opted for the "Lawson" a cat 2 brick from Austral Bricks, we liked the redish colour with its touches of grey and fawn through it. On the other hand we kept changing our mind on what colour mortar to go with...Natural or White...the style of mortar was not a problem...Ironed, in the end we decided to go with the Natural coloured mortar.

Roof tiles were next on the list, originally we were going to go with Sambucca a black tile and thought to have the black windows to go with it but thought it maybe too dark so we changed our tiles to Barramudi a grey colour. So, sofar the only upgrade was going to be the bricks.

We had already decided on the garage door...the Caprice, which has long rectangle shapes on the front panel in the colour Surfmist, which to me always looks like a pale green colour.

Because of the garage door we elected to have our facias in the same colour but have the gutters and downpipes in Monument a dark grey colour which we thought should pick up the dark bits in the bricks.

Our windows now were going to be in White Birch, a total contrast to the earlier black we had thought to have. As we had elected to go with French doors leading out from our Master bedroom we thought it would be nice if the study windows were also wood instead of the aluminium, again an upgrade, so to keep to the theme the front door would also have to be stained to give a nice co-hesive look to the front of the house.

External doors...well i didn't like any of the doors that Porter Davis had to offer so we went looking for our own. We found a really really nice one at Doors Plus but we were a bit dubious about the workmanship on it so we gave it a miss, we ended up finding one at Corinthian Doors along with one for the Laundry which had an internal blind in it.

Probably the hardest item for us to finalise was the render, we had a list of the Dulux render colours to choose from but when you go looking for them it was very hard to find them as most of them we had no idea what colour they were let alone what shade, we ended up going to a Dulux Inspirations store where the lovely man went to his computer and numbered them all for us to find, it took him a long time to try and find them all, mind you some of the colours listed were nearly 10 years old and not current. After spending a couple of hours in the store we chose "White Duck" or as i kept calling it wild duck, this colour is very similar to the Surfmist on the Garage door.

While at the store Tony noticed that they had some durethane on sale, this is a 2 part polyurethene suitable for garage floors. Apparently someone had ordered it in bulk and then didn't pick it up so it was going cheap, why not we thought the colour was 'Lily Green' which as it would happen would go nicely with the surfmist and white duck.

I will try and organise colour samples later for you to see.

...Now for the house

After finding our block it was time to go back to the Sales Consultant and discuss the "K*ching" end of things.

Early Feb 09

We had a private walkthrough with him to discuss what was included and what would cost us extra....since we had already discussed this between ouselves we had a really good idea on what we wanted, which of course was just about everything that was in the display home. Our absolutley must have for our home was going to be the fireplace in the lounge..we were even prepared to go without other items just to keep it.

Where do I start.......hmmmm lets see, changes;
maximum ceiling heights of 2740mm through out the whole of the house; extended garage; extended alfresco; eaves to the front of the house only; taller doors to the master bedroom, alfresco doors, robes in bedroom 2, opening to study made taller, door added to rumpus; moved the external door in the garage to the entry hall; raised ceiling in the entry hall and kitchen/family room; fridge niche in the kitchen; removed 1 WIR to enlarge the ensuite; had niches put into the following walls; study/master; master/ensuite x 2; family/ rear hallway x 3.....and still the list goes on....

.....windows inserted into garage doors; roller door to rear of garage; island bench in kitchen raised; overhead cupboards in kitchen; re-arranged cabinetry in kitchen; center dining rm window; replace front window in master with french doors; replace alfresco/lounge window with french doors; replace alfresco/dining rm window with sliding door.......

.....and on; delete all shelving in wardrobes; open up wall between bedrooms 3 & 4 ( to allow Kelly to have her own sitting room attached to her bedroom); extra bench in laundry; trough in garage; evap air through out house; ducted vacuuming; enlarge ensuite shower; colourbond facias, gutters and downpipes.

I'm exhusted just typing all that..hope its all clear...might not mean much to some but it makes a whole heap of difference to us.

So, we got nearly all of this on paper (some of it came later), and thought...*gee, not as much as we thought it would cost...still a whole lot of $$ tho*

The next step was to find a way to pay for it all....we used the broker recommended by Porter Davis, this was a painless process....the young chap came out to our place in the middle of the heat wave just before Black Saturday, we went through everything...the land...the house...refinancing our existing house and he came up with a very sweet offer! one as they say "was too good to refuse", so we didn't, we took up the offer.

Now all we had to wait for was the Pre Approval from the broker and then the bank.

In the meantime we decided to go visit 'our block' on a Sunday...okay, so it was the day after the big disaster with the bushfires, there was no-one out at the Sales office, so we took a stab in the dark and found what we thought was our block...and hey presto, we were right :) there was not much to see out there...the roads had only just been scrapped, nothing was marked but having the park opposite our block made it a lot easier to find.

...and then there was land..

After finding our 'dream home' the hunt was on yet again, this time for a block of land.

Not sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to have the house first...all we knew was that we needed a wide block to fit our house on, plus it needed to have some length in it for Mia to romp in.

Our Sales Consultant suggested Wallan as they had some House/Land package up there in a new Estate. He wasn't kidding when he said 'new'.

We showed us the subdivision plan for Stage 1 and let us know which blocks would be available through them. Originally we rejected the block we ended up chosing as it was on a "T intersection", unfortunately all the other blocks they had available were not big enough. So we hummed and harred and then thought about it some more and decided that 'yep' it would be okay.

Took a drive down to the Estate to talk turkey with the Land Sales Agent. At this stage in the game we could not take a look at the block, as it wasn't there yet....thats right it was non existant, all she said was.."it's over in that direction, somewhere".

She told us what was planned for the Estate...class A recycled water, shopping center, schools (not that we need them), a off/on ramp to the Hume Hwy (eventually), etc.

We went home and had a big think on it....what really sold it for us was the fact that we would have a park over the road from us....somewhere to take Mia for a run .

We went back a few days later and paid a holding deposit on our chosen block...Yay!!

Next step.....house

In the beginning.....

In the beginning(April '08).......our son got a new puppy, a Bernese Mountain Dog. They are soooo lovable, that in the end we decided to get one as well.

January '09 we took possession of our own puppy; Mia. Within a few short weeks we realised we had a problem.

Question; What does a small townhouse + a rapidly growing large dog equal?
Answer; Moving!!! or Mia's Folly.

You guessed it, there just was not going to be enough room for her as she grew, so as any sensible/responsible owner does, we started looking for a new abode.

We first thought about buying established but we couldn't find exactly what we wanted in both the house or the land. So let the hunt begin.....it was a very short hunt!

Love the internet, so much easier to hunt via the web than trapsing all around the countryside, we took a leap of faith from our sister-in-law and checked out Porter Davis who she had built with in the last 3 years and had no complaints at all.

Had our eye on a magnificent 2 storey house, the Windsor, so off we choofed to Mernda Village to have a look. As I said, the house was magnificent, but who wants to clean 5 bathrooms every week...certainly not I! So while we were there, as you do we went through the other 3 houses they had on display, and there she was......Mia's Folly...more commonly known as the Hayman 34. It was love at first sight for both my hubby (Tony) and myself, everything about it suited us down to the ground.

Off to talk to the Sales Consultant...got prices for a standard build and a "all bells and whistles" version.

Yes, we thought, this is it, now, where to build! Decisions, decisions.....land cost would play a big part on what "bell' or what "whistle" we could indulge ourselves with. Most of the land we looked at was just not big enough or perched on the side of a mountain......so, where did we end up buying land...Wallara Waters at Wallan.