Retainer walls completed -Tick - 29 July 2013

Well after having such a quick site cut we were in for a few days of retaining wall building. The guys were great and very professional. As our site fill had a retaining height of 1.4m at the highest point it meant that the galvanised steel bars were in a 2.5m deep hole 450mm diameter (big !!). As the concrete was setting they had to move quickly and all was done over a three day period.

After a few nervous moments where we thought the heavens would open, it stayed nice and dry for the whole exercise, so now we have a good flat block to start with the next phase... bring on our piering !! 66 holes. Yeah they could be doing that for a while we think.

Anyway the attached photos give you a nice look at the new flat block we have. Again great job so far, fingers crossed the weather stays good for another dry Melbourne winter (ha ha), one can only hope.

SITE CUT - Tick - 24 July 2013

Well, it's all smiles around here... very happy to report activity on site, they have started as promised on the 23rd July (yesterday).

Site cut was started and finished by the afternoon! To our surprise, we noted that the cut was a little deeper than we expected. Our land is approx 47 meters long (15.27m wide) and due to the fall of the land and the length of the house (27 metres) the cut line was moved in the 2nd revision of construction drawings. (probably due to the 2nd soil test results, after demolition of the old house).

We are sitting lower than we would have liked on the block, but we accept that not much can be done about it as the block is sloping. The upside of this is that we have a nice elevated aspect from the rear, which is where all our living spaces are. Will definitely have to re-do our back fence.., just a little higher we think...

so this is before the cut when it was pegged out...



a little problem, it was discovered (a little late) that our neighbours phone, internet cables etc ran alongside where our old driveway was and along the inside of our land.... they were damaged and the lines stripped and cut, it was reported straight away and should get fixed up today. The pic shows the white conduit.


and this is during the cut....

and after...


We are informed that next thing will be to erect the retainer walls..... soon.....

Colour Selections

While we wait for next week.... here are our colour selections choices...Cant wait to report some action on site!

Start date set and ready to go!

Wooo Hooo !!! After much to-ing and fro-ing with construction drawing amendments, we are finally on our way now...

Got confirmation of start date to be 23rd July for site cut and a 10th August for slab pour.
We recommend checking over every part of your drawings. Pay attention to the detail; things like the location of waste drains, extraction venting from bathrooms and door heights.

We learned that we needed to check 'standard inclusions' like the hot water system (only 175 litres), which they say is adequate for the size of your 5 bedroom home but not when compared to the Rinnai spec sheet. I think we will upgrade to 270L with an S26 booster. We also added two extra heating vents to the upstairs bathrooms. They can add them to the upper floor but not to the downstairs, we also zoned the heating between the upper and ground floor, well worth it we think.

We also think we need an extra down pipe for our garage.... roof area is in excess of 50msq with only one down pipe; the spreader from the second storey flows onto that roof as well, so I think we will be looking at trying to convince PD to provide a better solution. Slotted gutters or not, we don't want a water problem later. They did !!... we have an extra gutter.

Now we just need to hope for some dry weather, a dry winter, about the 10th of August for the slab pour. Time is ticking, at least with the start of the build now provided, the pressure is on PD to build in the time frame. Thirty eight weeks with 28 days over Christmas and 10 days inclement weather; should be a breeze. Now with a site start date in sight, we are getting very excited that all our hard work and patience will finally materialise and become our dream come true. Stay tuned...

HOUSE PLANS

So while we are waiting...(insert elevator music here) ...
these are our plans ... we wanted the house to be just the same as was displayed (not the standard plans), this meant that we had to upgrade just about everything in it, size of windows/doors, ceiling heights etc...   We've chosen the Sterling facade and we are rendering the whole front and the pillars at the back to the alfresco (the rest is all bricked). We will be installing a fireplace in the family room post handover but PD is building the brick fire box so it's ready to go. We added the extra dining room which allowed us to spread out across the kitchen area by extending the island bench (to 4.6 metres) Just for the record it is not PD's normal practice to custom design...,it took alot of going back and forth etc but in the end we got mostly what we asked for, so thank you PD.

IN THE BEGINING...

Where to start?
We will spare you the long story leading up to how/why? We are here now and there's no going back!  It's an exciting time embarking on finally building our new home.  We are doing a knock down & rebuild in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne.  Yes, we are Zone 4.

After much research and spending numerous weekends dragging our poor kids around display homes all over Melbourne (Ipad's underarm) we finally decided on Porter Davis as our builder. It mostly came down to design choice so the Sandringham 45 with a sterling rendered facade was the house that best suited us and ticked all of our boxes. Our favourite part is the void of the family/kitchen area and the views it affords to the backyard. 

We did however, make some modifications such as 2 Alfresco's: one which is just that, an alfresco and the other enclosed as a dining room adjacent to the kitchen/meals.  We felt that the space in the standard plan was not enough for providing a dining room big enough for our large busy family of 6 plus friends.  We have also extended the garage by 1 metre to the boundary; dad's man cave !  This triggered off the need for a dispensation application etc, which has since been approved. These extensions account for the 'and some' making it more like a Sandringham 51 approx. oh... and we also tinkered with the master en-suite (no bath, a 2100 x 1200 shower instead). We chose the shared ensuite option upstairs between beds 4 & 5 and we extended the kitchen island bench, just a little bit.

The purpose of this blog is so that all of our friends and family who have shown so much interest in our building experience can follow us on our journey through the process and to anyone else that may be interested in building a new house, perhaps they can draw something useful as we have in following others doing the same. Thanks go to all who have been brave enough to blog as it has given us the courage to also move forward in the new home experience.  

So far to date....

As I said this is a knock down rebuild and PD take over after the demolition is  complete. OK so now we needed a demolition approval from council (which took about 10 days).  Disconnection and removal of electricity and gas meters (around 4-5 weeks) oh... and an electrical pit $$. Then we independently sourced four different quotes with various demolition companies and decided on Victoria Wide Demolition (they competed for our business) and I have to say they did a fantastic job!  In 3 days the house was completely gone and land levelled. In the meantime, application for dispensation was submitted by PD and approval granted after about 4 weeks, we re-did some fencing and now the land is all ready to go.

11th December 2012 1st tender appointment;

20th December 2012: 1st site/soil survey done;

21st January 2013: colour selections;

13th February 2013: Tiles selections appointment;

6th March 2013; Contract signing.

Pause... and take breath... 

13th May 2013 demolition complete site cleared;

21st May 2013 dispensation application approved;

29th May 2013 our BC has taken leave (for 6wks) and another person has taken over our file to help get us across the line to construction;

Unfortunately, we still have a lot of items outstanding for drawing corrections etc and in the past month we have been waiting for PD to complete our post contract variation and request the construction drawings.... we don't have a site start date or site supervisor yet? ..........Sigh, we will get there.

We are looking forward to posting good news about the site start, so stay tuned...