Week 7 Update

About time for an update I thought.

Progress since frame went up has felt slow, although I'm sure it hasn't been.  We now have a wrapped house, roof and most of the rough-in has been completed.

The developers are not going to do anything about raising the back fence (surprise!), they pretty much told us (and I'm paraphrasing here), they've done the bare minimum required by the council and if our house feels like it's too high, then that's our builders fault, not theirs. They also begrudgingly repaired the fence where required, but also blamed builders for the damage.

Our SS has also started to show me how unreliable he can be.  I've contacted him numerous times about when our retaining wall will be going in on the side of our property as our neighbours are keen to get the fence built.  First he told me "next week".  Then he was off sick for a week. Now he's back and tells me again "next week".....it's like that Seinfeld episode....."Ohhh, about 5-10 minutes".  Apparently the contractor building the wall said he can work around a fence if there is already one there.  That sounds to me like the retaining wall will be inside our boundary rather than directly under the fence.....not happy about that.  So I'm continuing to try and get an answer from our SS, who continues to not return texts or calls.  The neighbours have been understanding, but there's only so far you can push someone's patience.

Our weekly update from the Boutique office informs us that rough-in should be completed by early next week, with bricks delivered and bricklayer to follow (hopefully by the end of next week). We're a bit nervous about the bricks as this will be the first time we see a 'colour' choice :P

Fingers crossed we'll have some brick photos next week.



Family, Dining, Kitchen

Looking through to family



Front entry; theatre room to the right

Ensuite

Cheesy family shot :)

Starting to come together now

So it turns out I know nothing about site cuts and building a house generally :D  Who would have thought hey?

When I first saw our site cut I was sure our house was going to be so deep in the ground, I was quite disappointed about it. I thought that our neighbours had filled their site to build their house up.  Turns out none of this was the case.  Not only is our house not deep in the ground, I think we're actually going to have the opposite problem to what I had originally thought (at the rear of the house).

Took a drive to visit our block on Saturday and we were delighted to see that not only was our slab down, but our frame was up too.  We got to walk through our house for the fist time.  It was such a great feeling.

Now the front of the house is set down a little, but nothing like I thought it was going to be.  The issue I think we're facing now, is that the back of the house is suffering from the opposite problem in that it is set up so high (in relation to the back fence), that our backyard (tiny as it may be) will be on an extreme slope and the base of our slab is nearly level with the support beam mid way up the back fence.  Sitting on our alfresco or looking out the back bedroom windows you can see directly over our back fence. Likewise for people driving along the road, they can see directly in to our house.  If we wanted to level the back yard, then fill would have to be brought in and this would go halfway up the fence which is obviously not an option.

We met our neighbours who happened to be moving in whilst we were visiting (nice people too, bonus!).  They said they're currently trying to get the developer to raise the back fence by putting it up on a retaining wall, which probably should have been done in the first place.  We agreed that we would also get on their backs about it and hopefully they'll do something about it.  I doubt very much that they will, but it won't hurt to try.

It's not the end of the world if we're going to have a very high set house (at the back), we'll just have to get creative with retaining walls and screens.

Anyway, after wandering through our house for the first time (did I mention how great it felt?), we only picked up on one issue and that's that the builders have put a doorway in the wrong spot.  Not a huge deal, I'm sure they'll have it moved once I bring it up with them.


Front Portico



Study

Theatre - Lovely big window with a nice few of the neighbours overgrown block

Looking down hall towards front door

And looking back the other way



Nice big window in our master bedroom

Family (left), Dining (ahead), Kitchen (right) - looking out towards alfresco. Notice where the floor of the slab comes to on the back fence? - That's a bedroom in the back corner (behind the dining)

Kitchen - I'm surprised at how small it looks when there is nothing there

Nearly slabbed.....so close

We received a call from our SS on Wednesday introducing himself.  He seems like a nice bloke.

He told us that they plan to pour the slab on Friday, and start framing on Monday.  We were pretty excited to hear this, so you can imagine our disappointment when we arrived on Saturday arvo and saw that the concrete had not been poured. We'd even stopped at the bottle shop on our way so we could have a celebratory drink on our new slab :(

Oh well, at least the slab has been boxed out ready for the concrete so it was something to take pictures of at least.

 Our tiny little back yard

Just a quickie

Site works started 3 weeks ago now.  They've pretty much finished all the underground work and prepping for the slab. We've been told that the slab should be poured this week (weather permitting).

Haven't bothered posting any photos since my last update as all the work has been done underground with pipes and electrical and what not.  Hopefully should have some slab pictures to take this week.

Site works begin

So I did a drive by on Wednesday to find that site works had started.  I'll admit that I was a bit disappointed to see how deep in the ground our site cut was :(

I knew we had to be cut down, but it looks much worse than I was expecting. What has made it look even worse is I think the house next door to us brought in fill rather than cut and fill, so their house is level with the road.

Our house looks like it'll be about the same level as the house next door, but is definitely not level with the road.  I keep getting told it'll look much better when the house is complete, but I'll just have to wait and see because my imagination isn't working too well at the moment.

Site cut....

 

 

 

Swung by again on Saturday and they had started on the screw piles.....

 

 

 

 

Yep! Those screw piles are 'that' close to our back fence. No doubt some of you are thinking "That's an absolutely tiny backyard", and you'd be right!  We really don't have a back yard at all.  But as we're living across the road from this.....

 

 

 

 

 

.....we decided we didn't need a big backyard and could have more house instead.

Boutique continue to be helpful

Unsurprisingly the site supervisor of the Home Buyers Centre home has said that it's not their mess on our block.  I mentioned that there is left over iron on the block and the HBC home is the only house being constructed nearby that has an iron roof.  The builder next door (Burbank Homes) has also claimed it not to be theirs, although I don't believe this for a second, but what would they care?

This is the mess we're talking about.  It's not a huge amount and if we had a ute, we'd just clean it up ourselves.

Thankfully, the site supervisor has agreed to clean up the mess for us.  I'm extremely grateful for this as we have no means to cart away the rubbish ourselves and would have to pay someone to do it. So we've been advised we do not need to do anything now and that our site will be tidied up on Monday in preparation for a site start on Wednesday.

Have been extremely happy with the service from Boutique Homes this time around.

AAAAAAND......WE'RE OFF!

We were moved to construction on the 5th as we had hoped and just received a phone call from our Client Liaison Officer today to inform us that our site start date will be 12th August 2015.

It's been raining for days down here in Melbourne and it's forecast for more rain next week, so they may not actually start on the 12th, but we still see it as a reason to celebrate.

I've spoken to them about the rubbish on our block as I believe it's left over from the Home Buyers Centre house that is being built nearby.  Hopefully they continue to be very helpful and arrange for someone to clean it up, or they may just palm it off as not their mess :(

Photos to come in the coming weeks; watch this space.....