Site Scrape - The House Begins

Building Permit and Rock
The building permit is issued 16th January 2014, for 29th January start date.
28th January, we get a phone call from our site supervisor giving us estimations of time for different stages, so things are finally moving. Slab will be down soon, and frame is due early March.
While on the phone, I ask him: What are the chances of hitting rock? He replies "I have 13 houses out there at the moment, and we haven't hit rock on one of them, so you would have to be unlucky.

30/1/2014 - Here's a picture of the block with the scrape done, and a porta-toilet.

Colour Selection

Colour Selection & Tile Selection
This was done in June 2013, so the experience may be different now.
My first advice here. Be vary prepared, and have a lot of pictures for when you go in for colour selection. It is not as I thought it would be.  You would think they have some sort of set layout, or at least some examples. But you literally have to pick every colour individually from small sample swatches. As our house is not an ordinary design of JG Kings, there was no display home we could look at and say: Copy That. The brick colour choice is a tab with 3 bricks on it. The colours are just 40mm colour swatches, and they have no pictures of anything. There is no computer program to help you see how the colours work together, just placing swatches on swatches.

External Bricks - Selkirk Ironstone

Roof Tiles - Monier Elebana Sambuca

Garage Door, Gutters, Metrebox etc - Colorbond Monument

Front Render and Door Colour - Render on Left, Door on Right

Internal Wall and Door Colours - Haymes Worn White

Kitchen Layout of colours - From left to right: Kickboard, Cupboards, Benchtop and Overhead Cupboards

We also get curtains included in our house. I don't have a photo of these.  As the colour selection was done over 6 months ago, the colour we chose has actually been discontinued. So we had to go back into the colour room and pick a new one.  2 weeks later we got a phone call to say the colour we chose is not available in the vertical blinds for the back door. This really annoyed me, as I could not be bothered going back out there again, and I made this known. I got a phone call back about an hour later saying they are going to upgrade the vertical blinds to panel glide blinds at no cost to us. If you don't know what panel glide blinds are, they look like this: Video

Tiles - Como Black. Tile selection was done about 6 months after colour selection. They was very few tile choices available to us, and the colour we had wanted was not available. We had plenty of white and creams, but no grey, except this one. Hopefully it turns out ok.

House Design - Clunes BBRC

This is the design of our house. It is not our ideal house, but we are sick of renting.  This is one of the few house designs we had available to choose from, as we got a BBRC grant to build. This was a $38,800 grant for young families to build their first house, and you could still get the $7,000 FHOG. It was a great opportunity, and although we don't get our ideal house, this gets us into the housing market, and to keep our savings as the BBRC grant is counted as capital.

The Facade - Zest

The Original Floorplan

The Final Floorplan

We were never given a digital copy of this floorplan,  so I had to scan it.  There was a lot of issues in getting the changes made as the original salesperson we had did not hand in a lot of the changes we made.  The only thing I don't really like about the house is where the laundry is situated, but it wont get used that often anyway(by me anyway). Also, the entry hallway is quite narrow, but as it's a small house it is probably a good idea as it allows the rooms to be slightly bigger.

Introduction

First of all, I have never 'blogged' before, so this is a first for me.  I will be talking about the experience my partner and I have had with building our first home together. It has been almost 12 months since we started the building process, and I have not really considered doing a blog before this day. Therefore the last 12 months of mayhem will be summarized into one long, not so eloquently worded, rant. I will post that at the end of the build, as not one part of the prebuilding process actually went right for us.

Our build has just gone to site, so from now on, the posts will be more frequent, and should include some nice progress pictures, from Pre-Slab to the finished product.

Anyway, I hope that this helps at least one person out, and if you have any questions, please feel free to leave comments.

Finally get the Title to our block

The block of land we were supposed to own in August 2013 is finally ours, 5 months later. The developers took a lot longer than expected. It has taken so long to get this block that when we started there was no natural gas in the area, now we have Natural Gas and NBN