Week 7

 Brickies were scheduled to start this week and what does it do......rain, rain, rain. Perfect weather for the bricklayers......not! But, it didn't last and by the middle of the week our home started to grow walls =)

Our bricks- Austral Orange Grove

Our window frames

Theatre window and garage

Garage again with access door to the entry

The living room and bedrooms

From the back

From the front

Stacker door from living room to the alfresco

Double slider door off living room

Week 6

This week brings us some very exciting deliveries. I promise even more exciting than the portaloo and shed!!

Our Charcoal Lustre window frames (not that you can see the colour, they have a film protecting them)......

and our bricks =)

                                                   

Celebration Homes also sent a nice little gift in the mail......a framed photo of hubby and I wetting (toasting) the slab. Cheers Celebration Homes for all the awesome deliveries this week =)

Week 5

With the slab needing time to cure, it's time to talk "business"......of the toilet kind! This week we had our septics installed. Being an older established area meant the block did not have connection to sewrage.

First up the septic system was delivered

The holes were dug

 

Then in the ground they went

Lastly they are all covered up and the job is done!

After looking at our drawings......again lol, I decided some of the cabinets would look and function better if we changed the direction in which they opened. I sent a request through to our construction coordinator not thinking I will have much luck since construction had already started. A big thankyou to our CC and our SS for a prompt reply basically saying no problem! =)

May 2011 - Week 4

This week the all important essentials you need on a building site were delivered

Exciting stuff you say?

Well yes, but......

not as exciting as getting a floor!! That's right we have a slab!!

This was taken the day they poured it =)

From the back (they JUST finished)

YAY!! WOOHOO!!

Definitely a milestone to celebrate, and that we did with a little family slab party. Us with our party beverages and the littlies with their dancing feet we headed out to our new cement floor. After a few drinks and a slab dance we headed home very happy =)

My drink resting on our future kitchen bench

Week 3

Siteworks continued and by the end of the week our block looked all set to get slabbed =)

Week 2

After our hiccup last week, siteworks resumed. Out went the mountain of "contaminated" dirt and in went the nice clean soil

A little bit of rubish was still there and so was a nice big toy for the littlies to play on. The block looked so much bigger all cleared.

April 2011 - Week 1

We received a final copy of our floorplan early this month and we are pleased with how they turned out. After making some changes to the original plan, this is our modified version......

Celebration Homes gave us a contruction time of 26 weeks. We are pretty excited at the prospect of being in our new home within 6 months of siteworks starting. Even more exciting is that we have a start date......13th April! YAY! The countdown begins......

Week 1
The clearing of our block has begun and there is a lot to clean up. You may remember how it looked pre-construction, lots of shrubs, some big, some small and it had been used as a bit of a dumping ground for some time.

Here is how it looks now......

That's one big pile of rubish and an even bigger mountain of dirt!! There was even a gate buried on the block!! Can you see it sticking out of the ground in the pic?

We were very excited to see some action happening on our block, but our excitement soon turned to disappointment and confusion. We received an email Friday afternoon from a Construction Manager informing us that the big mountain of dirt was in fact "contaminated" soil and had to be removed along with that big pile of rubish. They also needed to bring in 300m3 of cleanfill. This was all going to cost us a little over double our original earthwork cost. What a way to start our building journey! It's no surprise we sent an email back immmediately with many questions. After an agonising wait over the weekend we got an email back Monday afternoon. It seems the Director of the Earthworks company chose this week to go away and the fill-in had different ideas. The Construction Manager apologised for causing any anguish and after some negotiating with the Earthworks company, he had sorted it all out and there will be no additional cost to us. We were so relieved and ever so thankful of his efforts to acheive this outcome.

Back to being excited and back to business with a delivery of those metal thingies for the slab =)

March 2011

The start of this month brings us our prestart appointment. After a month of looking at mountains of laminate, tile, paint, brick, roof etc samples......we were ready and organised. We had studied our electrical plan, marked all our intended changes on a copy of our plans, visited suppliers for larger samples we could take home, jotted down a zillion notes, filled in our prestart folder and along the way seemed to have all of a sudden noticed what every house on our street (and many other streets) used for their selections on their front facade.

All I can say is thank goodness we were organised!! A traffic accident on the freeway delayed our arrival at the office by about two hours, giving us around two and a half hours to go over everything......eeek! Our consultant was fantastic and obviously was very experienced. We were happy with how it went, but would have liked a bit more time. Our fantastic consultant was happy to help by giving us an extra week to go over all our variations and selections. All in all, I enjoyed the experience of looking at all the colour options, but very glad that part is over!!

I intended to take lots of pics while I was there, but there was just no time. So our selections will just have to be revealed as we go ;) But.....here is a pic of some of the many laminate samples we chose from. It's enough to send anyone's head spinning......

Anything else happen this month??......Oh yeah!!
Woohoo...we are officially the owners of our little slice of paradise =)

And we have a tap!

February 2011

Not much happened this month......paperwork and waiting!

Since there is nothing to read, I will give you something to look at......

The gorgeous golden bay just a short stroll away =)

January 2011

After a few years of moving here and there, the time was finally right to settle in one place and have a home of our own again. We decided we would like to build and started searching for land. It only took a couple of weeks of looking before instantly knowing we wanted this block.

836m2 of sand and scrub, 600m to a gorgeous bay, located in a quiet and small established beachside suburb.

 

This is also the month we signed a preliminary contract with Celebration Homes. They had a great plan with a layout we could work with, a few adjustments here and there, it will become a perfect little home for all 6 of us.
Here is the original plan (the before pic)......