Cornice, Doors, Architraves!

Cornice, Doors, Architraves! Lock-up.

Downpipes are on!

Last weekend I saw some hanging downpipes. The watherboards were on too and I think they were being painted.

Pictures?

2nd floor roof complete

We have the 2nd floor roof on. The brickies have also come back to finish the rest of the bricks. Then the first floor roof and electrical. Yey!

Pictures coming!

Scaffolding complete!

Need to upload some photos. We have gutters in place. The roof tiles have arrived. And the scaffolds are in place for the tilers to do their job. The brickies will come after the tilers to finish the rest of the brickwork.

Bricking has progressed

I took some random pictues yesterday. Next step is the scaffoldings and roof :D
Good going foreman!

We had a serious discussion with our SS about the laundry side mistake. He was going to speak with the head supervisor and get back to us. Meanwhile the brickies have done a fantastic job. The bricks are Austral Witsunday's Brampton with off white mortar.

 

The alfresco :)

The butlar's pantry :D

 

Late but still!

Since we have not had a blog so far, this first blog will contain a lot of information. We are building our dream house in Sydney. We are building the Wisdom Manhattan 43. Floor plans can be downloaded from the Wisdom Homes website: http://www.wisdomhomes.com.au/double-storey/manhattan

We settled on our land in April 2011. It has been a long journey since then. Our dream home is under construction now.

We looked at various builders as we have a significant fall on our land. Our land falls front to back about 2 meters in the building area. Because of this fall of the land many builders (Allworths, Masterton) won't even touch our land. Others (Clarendon, Eden Brae, Allcastle) will build at a ridiculous site cost. After checking out about 10 builders very closely, and after five official tenders (each costing about $1000), we settled on Wisdom Manhattan 43. While we waited for these tenders to come through, we wasted considerable time (about 4 months). I still think we made the correct decision to take our time before we jumped in with Wisdom Manhattan 43.

Here are some pictures of the site before the demolition:

After we got our complying development certificate around mid November, it rained and rained and rained more in Sydney. So even though the sire was cleared and construction certificate issued by November, we had to wait until early Feb for slabs to be poured. Those were some frustrating 2 months.

Here are some pictures of the site after levelling and ready for slabs:

And some more pictures during boxing stage and after slab completion.

 

Slab is on. I can see the sunken home theatre on the left :)

Frames have arrived. It's been all timely since the slab. The rain had also settled to some extent, though raining almost everyday once or twice.

Between the slab and frame stage there was a minor hiccup.

Here are some approximate timelines:

Deposits: Eden Brae: Mar, Allcastle: Mar, Clarendon: Apr, Wisdom: Jun.
Land settled : 1/4.
Tender: Others: Jun.
Wisdom Tender: Jul.
Contract: Aug, 2011.
Demo: Nov, 2011
CDC: Nov, 2011.
Pegs: 01/12/2011.
Slab: Feb, 2012.
Frames: 10/03/ 2012.