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.
I completely understand your story! We also were on the lookout for a big block to accommodate big dogs! :)
ReplyDeleteAnd we also ended up in Wallan, (Hidden Valley) and also ended up building with Porter Davis (Bridgeport 38) and also did a lot of your upgrades/changes. lol
We have a fantastic site supervisor, my guess is that you will have the same one as he does all of the Wallan builds, and we have had a really great build so far. We are currently being fixed and painting starts next week. There's lots of pics on my blog.
We are so thrilled with Wallan, it was a big leap for us being originally from the outer east and currently living in Footscray. But every time we go up there, we are more convinced it has been the perfect choice for us.
I'm looking forward to following your build. :)