Update on pics......

We only went out today as Adrian wanted to go visit his estate...which is going ahead in leaps and bounds.

Painters were once again on site, doing what painters do, paint!

At least this time we could walk around the outside of the house without getting 6inches of mud on our shoes.  So we took the opportunity to take some more pics of the fence and the painting in the garage.

Garage walls, the first one with the door is on the left in the garage while the bottom pic is the end wall, both walls have some paint on them but the bottom one looks darker.(although its not, its just the amount of light shining on it)

fence in the daylight from the rear of the property

standing in the garage looking towards the rear of the house....the back fence will be started this week.

Now we have some idea of our yardage.

Painting....

As mentioned in the last post our painting has started.

Went out this morning to have a look to find that the painters were on site today...talk about dedicated.

From what we could see, it looks like all the ceilings and cornicings have been done, the door frames have a lick of colour on them.  They were busy rolling away in the master  bedroom when we were there, they have also given the french doors in the master bedroom a coat of stain.....I like the colour, but it will be nice to see them with the proper trim colour cos at the mo i'm not to sure about it.

Fence at night, looking towards the alfresco, rumpus rm in the foreground.

garage door into the house

French doors off the master bedroom with the Rosewood stain on them

fence, the rails are actually on our side but we elected to have palings put on this side all the way

Roof Inusulation

On Wednesday when walking through our house we noticed all this grey wool like stuff on the floor between the bathroom and the toilet.....right under the manhole.....hmmmmm we thinks, what is that.....cant be insulation as we upgraded to 3.5 batts, walked around the outside of the house and there was even some caught in the window sill of the bathroom.
So, Tony messages our SS.....no, he says, insulation doesn't get put in until just before handover....okay, what in the hell is it then, thinks to ourselves...mmm we'll come down on Sunday with the ladder and poke our head up into the roof and take a look.
Today...being Friday, our SS gives us a ring.....guess what!...you do have the blow in insul wool in your roof, the insulators put it into the wrong house.  Now, we can do one of two things, either have the insul wool vacuumed out and then lay the batts OR we can leave the wool there and just lay the batts on top.  Decisions, decisions....Tony opted to leave the wool there and put the batts on top, giving us extra toasty warm ceilings.
They are also chasing up the deadlocks in the gold colour to match the lever handles.
He has our CSC chasing up the extra drop on the kitchen benches.
Painters are supposed to start today...that i'll believe when i see it.

Footnote:  Yaaaayyyyyy, our neighbour tells us that they DID start painting today.  Whoo Hoo.

Fence.....

Adrian called in at the house on Tuesday after visiting his block at Mandalay, the fence between us and our right hand neighbour has been started....well the posts were in the ground, for some reason our neighbours had deceided that they would have the fence finishing two meters short of where it should....sorry girls but when we sent you the quote it said it was going to the building line, so, to the building line it is going.......done!
We popped out on Wednesday before going to Ballan and it was nice to see that our fencer had been back and put the extra posts in.
Went out last night to see if the painters had started.....No!  :(    AND!!!.... we are actually locked out...Oh No!...someone wised up...bugger!!  Anyway the palings are up on 90% of the fence, the rails are on our side but we are paying extra to have palings on our side as well to help get passed the council regulations for having a spa in the back yard.   Did have pics of the fence but somehow i managed to lose them between viewing them off the card and putting them into the computer, so looks like i will have to go back out and take some more.
Our broken roof tiles have now been replaced.....finally :)

More tidying up....

Went to have a look in the daylight at our benchtops.....besides being extremly dusty they are gorgeous.

Also found that the bulk heads in the kitchen now have cornicing, also the alfresco has its beading around the inside of the ceiling, the garage also has its cornicing up.

The firebox now has a cover on it, and the downpipe outside the lounge window has been installed.  speaking of downpipes, our half downpipe on the alfresco pillar is now a whole one...not sure how the external power point is going to fit there but we'll wait and see.

Otherwise nothing else has been done, lets see what tomorrow will bring :)

Downpipe and firebox cover.

The now 'whole' downpipe

Kitchen....with the cornicing above the bulkheads

Island bench

Reconstituted stone benchtop

edged alfresco

Bench top....

We called into the house tonight to see if the painters had started yet......no such luck but they have cleaned the floor even more than when we were there on Wednesday.

We have had a couple of deliveries in the last few days.........more roof tiles have been delivered so now maybe they can replace the tiles that the crane driver broke putting the lintel up.

...they have also installed our kitchen benchtops...we weren't expecting those for a while...well not until after painting at least.  We are going up on the weekend so will try and get a better pic in the daylight.

Our reconstituted stone benchtop....colour...Starlight

Clean House....

Went to the house tonight to see if anything had been done to her.

We are pleased to report that the cornicing has been repaired in all rooms, the floors had been cleaned...it was nice to finally see the kitchen/family room floor in its entirity for a change.....
Outside the external doors have been finished with their wooden infils between the door and lintel, while the grounds have once again been scraped clean.
So we are assuming that painting will start shortly...yay!!

Down pipe

We finally remembered to take a pic of the downpipe/power point on the Alfresco pillar.

On the far pillar you can see the half downpipe

Closer view of the half down pipe with the wire for the external power point underneath it.

Going backwards??...

Kell wanted to go have a look at the house since the weekend is the only time she gets to go have a look.

We were able to get in as one of the doors was unlocked...tsk tsk.

What we did find was that the fix carpenter had been doing more work, our SS on Thursday had written a list of walls that had a bow in the cornicing, so he had been busy making an awful mess do hope he's going to clean it all up.

Forgot again to take a pic of the down pipe, trouble is its on the side that you don't see...especially as the area behind it is a mud hole.

The mess

The culprit

Lights...

On our way back from the house yesterday we got a call from Oz Design telling us that my chair for the Ensuite was in...they could have told me earlier as we had been there that morning.

So, today we took both cars so we could pick up the chair and our lights that had come in at Beacon.

The chair was gorgeous, being an Australian made chair I could pick any fabric or leather that they had in the store...good grief...decisions, decisions...too many for me to think clearly.  I had narrowed it down to a choice of two fabrics, a white with navy lattice design or a oatmeal coloured one with alternating gold and blue in a lattice pattern.  I liked both, changed my mind on numerous occasions before finally settling on the oatmeal coloured.  Am sooooo happy with it, it looks a treat.....and before you ask, no, I don't have pics as its covered in plastic and has gone into storage for the next few months.
Once we have moved I will post pics of all the lovely new furniture, especially those that i had made to order.

We had put all the lights for the house on layby in April 2009 and I had been paying them off until about christmas time. the manager at the DFO store is so great, she didn't order them for me until i asked her too, which was about 3-4 wks ago.
90% of the lights, lamps, fans & globes had come in, so to clear space in the shop we packed the back of the  Santa Fe with the lights and took them to the storage unit as well.
Just as well all the lights hadn't come in yet cos i don't think they would have fitted into the car as it was full to the brim.  Once at the storage unit we had to open each box to check that nothing was broken, time consuming and it was raining so we could only take a few at a time in there.  Luckily everything was fine.
There is only a handful of them left to come in, but as there's no rush we are not worried, the only worry is the two wall sconces that Tony ordered for the Home Theatre room, 6 weeks ago they were available but now they are a deleted item, the manager did a look at other stores and has found some at Watergardens, so hopefully we can get them cos it took Tony so long to find something that he liked for the room.

Fix walkthrough...

Well.... today is day 98 of 222 days allowed for our build.

We had arranged with our SS to go through the house today at 1pm for a 'fix' walkthrough.
We arrived about 7minutes late due to roadworks everywhere.
Any hoose our SS told us to just go in and look where ever we wanted..whoo hoo....fancy telling us that, as he had/was going through the house writing up small things for the fix carpenter to finish off.
After we had gone through and taken the obligitory millions of photos we got together with our SS to discuss items we weren't sure about.....mind you most or nearly all of this list we had compiled at home.
The list wasn't long...things like the missing tiles above the garage...the crane driver had broken them getting the garage lintel into place........
Deadlocks,  the french doors were supposed to have them installed on both doors, but for some reason only the one in the master bedroom had them, and then in the wrong colour (well it was wrong according to us)... the door handles on the french doors are both in a gold colour while the deadbolt that was installed was in a antique brass colour.....hmmm, doesn't really look that good together, as for the door in the lounge, according to the paper work it wasn't supposed to have one...I think not, someone has goofed.
As yet our 2 external taps at the rear of the garage haven't been installed...that apparently will be done when the plumber comes through.....also they will get the plumber to straighten up the two water meters out the front, the bobcat keep knocking them askew.
On one of the Alfresco pillars, it has both a downpipe and an external power point, when we went in to sign off on the final drawings we bought this to the attention of our CSC....she went off to check and said that is should be okay...we were prepared to move the power point.....at this stage we only have half a downpipe cos, yep, you guessed it, the power point is going to be in the way.
Spoke about how handover is conducted etc etc...

At this stage we are on target give or take a fortnight (this will depend on when the remaining tradies are available to start)....can't wait..... we realised the other day that our stuff has been in storage for so long that we are having trouble remembering what exactly we have in there...sad :(

We went to the pub for lunch...not impressed, over priced and not that nice, but, we got to sit beside the open fire....yummmo.....it was heavenly :))
While there we realised that the carpenter had the ladder up against the front of the garage.....'ooh....did he do the gables?....so we just had to go back and check....yep he had, awww...now she looks soooo cool....

Will take a pic of the half downpipe next time i'm out at the house...went to find a pic to show you and found that i hadn't taken one...sorry, very slack of me i know.

the new vision of loveliness...lol

Closer view of the filled gables

Alfresco french doors minus their deadlock

Bedroom french doors...notice the difference in colour between the deadlock and the door handle

Shiney door handles....

We had spoken to our SS yesterday to arrange a walkthrough, he informed us that we would be having our 'fix' walkthrough very soon as soon as the carpenter had finished in our house which should be either today (monday) or tomorrow.

Since Tony had today off we thought we would venture up to the house to see if the carpenter had finished.

Alas, no he hadn't but he was busy installing our door handles on the outer doors.

The eaves had been finished as well.

Eaves over the garage...only thing wrong with this is the fact that two of the tiles above the garage lintel have been removed and thus far not replaced...hope it doesn't rain

Eaves on the Verander...if you look carefully you can see the new handle on the door :)

Alfresco french door with its new handle

Laundry door....the laundry, front and garage doors all have the same type of handle on them...while the french doors both have lever handles

Close up of the front door

Pic taken 9-6-10 as we couldn't get a decent shot yesterday

Close up of the french doors in the Master bedroom...only thing we are not happy with is the fact that the colour of the lever handle and the colour of the deadbolt don't match....will see about that.

Odds n Ends....

SATURDAY, JUNE 5TH

Popped out today to see what was happening as Adrian had gone out on his way home from work (yes, yes we know its along way out of  his way) and had rung us to say that the carpenter was there along with who he thought was the brickie. 

At the time we were in Werribee with Kell picking up her new car....she had to come home straight away as she had a hot date that night...hehe, so we decided to continue on upto Wallan to check out the house.

Adee thought that the mouldings had been painted but as he hadn't actually seen them he wasnt to know that that was the colour they came in.

What did we find....lets see.....

We found this...

Kelly's bathtub in our ensuite

we also found these....

The decorative parts of the columns flanking the lounge room

Laundry door with its blind up

front door

A shot of the kitchen...

Eaves...

The fitting carpenter was at the house today when we got there....we thought that all the tradies would have gone by the time we got out there, but no, not ours.

There was someone working inside of the house that we couldn't see but we assume he was finishing off the skirting boards and doorframes in the front of the house.  While the other guy was cutting lengths of skirting boards....i think.
What they had done was to start putting the eaves up at the front of the house...my oh my...she looks so sexy with her eaves on.

Sitting in the middle of our ensuite was the bath for the bathroom....not that you can see much as it is covered in cardboard.

Our sexy eaves

and again

excuse the crappy pic but its taken through the small ensuite window at a difficult angle

the bathroom bath sitting in our ensuite

Oh Wow....

On the spur of the moment we went to visit the house.

Oh WOW!!  she now has her scarf on........we totally didn't expect to get the moulding on the render so soon, we thought it would go on closer to handover, once everything had been done.

Not only did she have her scarf on, she also has her proper front door on as well as the proper laundry door.

We had a quick peek through the windows and saw that the rumpus room finally has its door on.  From what we could see it looks like the top end of the house has the skirting boards on.  The garage also has its architrave on as well as the base board on the house side.
Today we also contacted a moving company that we had previously used to get a quote to move all our household items from storage in Strathmore and to collect what we have here at Adrian's and move it all up to Wallan.....the quote came in like we thought it would...after all we will be having 2 trucks and 4 men.....will we accept the quote....Yes, as they do a very very good job of handling your bit and pieces and are very professional.

Our beautiful, as yet unstained front door

Laundry door

front view, complete with render and moulding

Close up of the render at the front porch

Garage door complete with door frame and base board

Hmmm, progress

We told ourselves that we were not going out to the house until Wednesday...but, if you know us...we didn't make it....had to go out on Tuesday.....yes! I know, we're addicted.

What did we expect to find?.....our remaining doors on, and the architraves going on.

So, what did we find?....windows all have their architraves on, most of the doorways have their architraves, my french doors in the master bedroom have been installed correctly (YaaaaY) but the two doors have still not been installed.

Got a chance to have a good look at the basin in the bathroom, as we found a way in....as all homeowners will....the basin is definately not what was on offer when we did our colours...we actually didn't get a choice for the bathroom, we were just told that it had to be an in the bench basin, this one is much nicer.

We found our fixing guy back at the house across the park, looks like he's alternating between the houses.

Front on shot of the bathroom vanity, what was a suprise for us was the length of the vanaity, usually these are alot smaller, but then Kelly is estatic with it.

bathroom basin....its different.

Ensuite basin, we have 2 of these, and these ones we did pick

the new french doors in the master bedroom, so now they will open in the correct direction

bi-folds with the architraves on

loungeroom with the architraves on both the windows and the french doors

lounge frenchdoors with their architraves