REVERSE GEAR

So our house is coming along well. Despite being promised bricklayers by Thursday (today), they haven't shown up. We do however have internal plaster boards up and the joins are ready for sanding. Should have the kitchen installed next week. Thanks to the plasterers, everyone has access to our house tonight. Not too happy about that. The laundry and back sliding doors were left ajar, I suppose to vent the plaster smell. The lock-up stage is turning out to be a reverse-lock-up. Please brick my house before we see real rain.

 Our lounge/dining area windows.

 The space for our kitchen to please be "inserted" next week.

 The corridor down to the kids/spare bedrooms, guest bath and toilet.

 Another shot of the kitchen and dining areas.

The front corridor leading to our "green" front door. Hehe, loving the undercoat :)

We are still hopeful for a quick settlement, if the pace remains this steady. It is a pretty easy build and this house build is guaranteed to be complete in 14 weeks in QLD. Why not here? In saying this, I have my heart set on an early August settlement.

Colour in...

These are our chosen colour schemes, the only variation is that we will be having light oak as the laminate flooring in lieu of blackwood and the benchtop, as it will be ceasarstone, will be ice snow. A few of the suppliers have changed, mostly because they had us sign a very dated contract.

TV: to hide or not to hide?

I am lost as to where we place the TV. We have a wood heater that we need to install between the lounge room windows. The only option for the TV is on the opposite wall, above the fireplace, next to the sliding doors or fixed to the wall in the far corner of the room on a swivel mount.
Open to suggestions for where to place this well used piece of technology. Our TV is a 42inch and we normally have a pay tv box and the wii/playstation hooked up.

This image shows the layout of the room, not including our 3.5 seater lounge (2.5m in length) and pair of arm chairs (0.7m wide each).

 

The lounge/dining area is 4880 X 9520, of which 4690 is allocated to the lounge area. 

This is what my instinct is saying, yet having my couch in front of such a large window is not quite ideal, as it's leather.

What about a TV above the fireplace? I am undecided and indecisive. This decision may drag on.

PROGRESS FINALLY....and surprisingly quick too :)

So after the land settling later than expected; 30 Jan. It took Metricon quite some time to get all the required plans together and sent to council for approval.
The site cut commenced on the 17th of April and since then, it has been go, go, go!
invoice was sent.
We visited the site today, and were suprised to see a slab, frame complete, electricity meters, switchboard, all of the windows installed and roof tiles delivered ready to go up with roof scaffolding already in place.
I had some great shots of the lounge area, the size which I am extremely happy with. My daughter kindly deleted them for us on the car ride home.
I am somewhat disappointed with the size of the outdoor room, hopefully hubby will extend the decking out and around the side of the property to compensate for such a small area.

A rough guide for timing of the progesss:
week 1: site cut
week 2: slab poured
week 3-4: framing and windows 

I have found a great building timeline http://www.safewise.com/blog/home-building-timeline-keep-sane/

Our house seems to be almost bang on track with this guide, so we are hopeful for a 14-16 week build time. Metricon have advised us that the 2nd of October is our completion date, yet I am quietly praying for August.

Our Opinion of Metricon

We are overall quite happy with the quality of build so far, we have looked at other builds nearby and their sites are messy, concrete slurry has been left to set everywhere and their slab does not have clean edges, which will make gardening very difficult in the future. Our site is clean, and progress has pushed past some of the homes that were started before ours. 

Our site supervisor has changed since the completion of base stage, and he has already called twice to inform us of the works booked in and completed.

We can only hope that the pace is kept steady and that we will be in soon. At this stage of the build, patience is vital, yet I cannot help getting excited. 

Excitement

I am so excited that I purchased these two chair to sit alongside our Arthur G sofa from the factory sale in Huntingdale. They will later be paired with out leather sofa which is a modern take on a chesterfield. 

You will have to wait, as will I, to see them sitting pretty in the lounge area when our house is completed.

Dull Excitement

So we are eagerly awaiting settlement on our lot of land. We were previously advised that this would take place between xmas and New Years. Now they have said that due to weather conditions, we are looking at Jan/Feb for settlement date.

We hope that once settlement occurs the build process can start almost straight away, provided all the council approvals are not held up. We anticipate the build to take around 5 months, after talking with some friends who have build Metricon twice now. All we can do is cross our fingers and toes and wish to be moved in by July to celebrate our youngest daughters' first birthday. This is a distant dream, that I hope may become reality, but there can be soo many things that will try and make this impossible. This, and the combination of a slack conveyancer and builder consultant may just make this next year hell.

One Million Signatures

Hi, I'm Emma, and my husband and I have recently purchased land on which we will be building our first family home. We currently have two girls, under two years of age and desperately want to live in a new, open plan home together.

With a small 400 square metre patch of dirt now ours. We dream of moving during winter of 2014, in time for our eldest girl's first birthday, if we are lucky.

We decided to go with Metricon for the build, simply because they are not the best, but they are reasonable and we don't wish to be guinea pigs for the loads of new building firms that have popped up recently.

We will be building a basic Metricon house, entitled Kyton 24. It will give us a four-bedroom house, double garage, open living/dining, leisure room (toy room), kitchen, laundry, outdoor room and enough yard for the kids to enjoy.

It would've been fabulous to have a guide for going through the process of contracting a build a few months back. So here I will try to help future readers to breeze through the process with a few helpful pointers.

Millions of signatures have been signed and all the pages of the build contract initialed.  Now we sit back and wait for land settlement and the commencement of the build.

When shopping around we were on the look-out for a house layout that included 4 bedrooms, master with ensuite/WIR, leisure room/toy room for the kids, open plan style kitchen/dining/lounge, outdoor room, double car garage and enough space for the kids to run around out the back. The facade of this home is not that fancy, but this can be altered later. The floorplan was THE biggest seller for us.