Waiting, waiting, waiting

Thought I would throw up a quick update on where we are at.  Council has approved us.  That came through last week and I'm pretty happy with that result.  They turned our application around in 3 weeks, 1 week quicker than the 4-6 weeks they predict.  The private certifier should be taking the remaining of their work to Coral today.

Last week we also got the variations for the extra things we selected at our finishes meeting.  I was pretty happy with those prices, although I'm not looking forward to our electrical extras!

So now we're just waiting on a start date.  Vicki, our CSO at Coral made a guesstimate last week that if all things fall in to place we could have a start date issued by this Friday.  We;re not getting our hopes up, but hopefully that's a good indication that it will in face be sooner rather than later.  If we get do get it by Friday, that should translate into getting started around the 20th July or definitely in that last week of July.  So maybe, we will be in around the end of October??!! We'll see!

Lock it in Eddie!

It's been a long time between posts, but really there hasn't been all that much happening.  Plans have been with the private certifier, and are now with council and we went and did our final tile selection a couple of weekends ago.  We already knew what we wanted tile wise, but we did change the size of our floor tile for the wet areas from a 400x400 to a 300x300 to avoid additional charges and issues with creating the fall for the roll in ensuite shower.

Last Thursday we had our finishes meeting and finalised the last of what we wanted.  We made a couple of small changes while we were there, upgrading to Wash and Wear paint, adding mirrored sliding doors to bedrooms 2, 3 and 4, chrome wastes etc.

So here is a run down of what has been selected.

PAINT - Interior

Ceiling - Ceiling White

Walls - Stowe White
 

 






Doors and trim - Vivid White

Feature walls (These have not been selected but we will probably organise these with the painter directly, or do them ourselves after handover)

Living room wall behind TV - Grass Sands

Activity Room (back wall with bathroom on other side) - Bay's Water

Theatre/Lounge (yet to decide, but I want a dark grey perhaps on the wall where the fixed screen will be mounted, between lounge and alfresco)

EXTERIOR

Tiles - Monier Elabana - Kava (below pic shows it up a little dark)

Render colour - Limed White Half (the colour painted on the wall to the left)

   

Gutter and Fascia - Colourbond Ironstone

Garage Doors - Contemporary profile - Colourbond Ironstone

Front door (and laundry door) -Hume XS24 1200mm with Africana Glass - Dulux - Colourbond Ironstone

Fittings

Front door handle (top left)

Interior door handle (bottom)

Towel Rails and toilet roll holders

Shower and Bath mixers and Bath Spout

Bathroom and Ensuite basin swivel mixer tap

Shower set for ensuite (doubles as a grab rail)

Wardrobe doors - Mirrored with polished framing, except for in laundry where we chose Altlantis Chalk vinyl.

Atlantis Chalk

Kitchen and Bathrooms


We have the same bench tops and cabinet colours in the bathrooms and kitchen.

Bench tops - Laminex Diamond Gloss - Lunar Stone
Cabinets - Parchment (not in Diamond Gloss)

Flooring

The entire house will be timber laminate, except for the ensuite, and bathroom/WC/laundry area at the back of the house.

We ended up choosing the Maple Block Wood Texture laminate.

Our tiles have also been in a previous post.

Dark for the floor, light for bathroom showers and splashbacks.

Light tile below is for kitchen splashback.

There is probably more stuff that we chose the other day, but this is the bulk of it.


As I mentioned at the start of the post, our plans were submitted to council on the 30th May, so hopefully they can turn those around in 4 weeks by the end of June!! Fingers crossed!!

Flooring....check

One of the biggest elements we've had to choose for the house is the flooring.  We decided that we like Timber Laminate, and we are having that throughout the entire house, except for tiling in the wet areas.

We had a choice of around 15 or so styles and narrowed it down to three from that.  One that Stacey liked, and two that I liked.  As with all of the other elements, it is so hard to visualise from a fairly small sample.  Thankfully Parador has a pretty good website, that provides pictures of an identical scene with the different flooring options.


The three we short listed were Natural Wild-Cherry, Natural Maple, and Limed Oak.  For some reason the exact Wild Cherry doesn't appear on the Parador website.  The other two do, and we also looked at a Natural Maple wideplank, which I don't think is available to us, but we had a look at it anyway.

Here are those three...

First, Natural Maple

Second, Natural Maple wideplank

And lastly, Limed Oak

What would you choose???

It's the weekend, so that means.....

...time to change our minds again!!!  We were talking paint again this morning, talking about perhaps either going to Beige Royal Half, or maybe even a white.  This idea came about talking about this lounge we like and what colour we would get.  We like the idea of tan, but talking to Mum last night, she pointed out that we may want to be careful having too many tan/beige/wood tones all in the one space.  We have the oak dining table, timber laminate flooring and at that stage, Beige Royal Half on the walls, with a tan lounge to go in there too! 

So, long story short, we decided that perhaps white is the way to go, to kind of freshen it all up, and then adding colour with accessories and decorations.  Off to Bunnings with the initial thought that we liked Antique USA, or what ever it is called.  When we got there, we had a bit of a look and we both really like, and have decided on Stowe White, with interior woodwork and doors being done in Fair Bianca Half.

As per usual the colours don't look quite the same on screen, but you get the idea.

Now as far as feature colours go, Stowe White was recommended to be accompanied by...

Grass Sands

And, Bay's Water

We're thinking that we'll put the Grass Sands in the living room on the wall that the TV will go on, between living and activity room/bedroom 3, then put Bay's Water in the Activity Room on the wall between Activity and Bathroom.

We're both really happy with this, and think that it's finally come together.  We've just been refining it right!?

So then off to Harvey Norman to check out this couch and have some lunch.  The couch is REALLY nice, and REALLY REALLY comfortable.  It's not exactly Tan.  They call the colour Pebble.  Here it is, although it's a little lighter than it looks here (iphone camera).

So deposit is down on the lounge suite and they'll call next week to let us know when we can be expecting it.  I also want to raise the suite up a bit to make it easier to jump on and off.  Thinking about 10cm, so they are looking into that with some contacts of theirs, but adding some spacers between the existing legs and the base shouldn't be too difficult at all.

Colouring In

I did a little bit of a reproduction of our front elevation so that I could bring all of our colours together and play around with some different combinations too.

I was able to find swatches online for the wall colour "Dulux Limed White" and the gutter and fascia, "Colourbond Ironstone", but had to do a bit of a guesstimate on the Kava roof tiles.  The roof colour here is pretty close I think, but they might be a touch darker.  On screen never looks quite right though.

The original plan was to have Ironstone gutters and Dune fascias, but it looks a bit busy that way and we've both decided to keep it all Ironstone.

Here it is.

When the Dune was still the fascia colour I also played about making the uprights for the portico Dune too.  Again, a bit too busy, and if we ever decide to make a feature of those in the future it's not too difficult anyway.

UPDATES:

Covenent approval has come back

Contracts in and received and countersigned by Coral

Waiting on some contract variations which we should see by the end of next week

TO DO:

Organise final tile selection appointment

Organise finishes meeting

I think we are pretty much sorted on the finishes.  I know which timber laminate floor I like the best, need to go over that again this weekend with Stace.  We are thinking Beige Royal Half for the walls inside, but I saw a few pics online of Beige Royal Quarter and am wondering if the half is a little too dark.  Anyway, will most likely be one of those two.  Everything else I think we have sorted.

Stacey found a lounge suite she liked.  She told me it's called the Alyssa from Harvey Norman...

Here's what I can find....

This is the first time I have seen it and I'm a fan.  She said the one she saw though was in a tan leather.  From memory I think she said $1999 for the 3 and 2 seater which is pretty good!  Looks super comfy, and good legs, that I'm sure could be easily replaced with taller ones to jack the height of the couch up a little so that it's nice and easy to get on and off!

Preliminary Plans

Now that I have found the HomeOne forum and there has been some more interest in our build, I thought I would throw up a copy of our first set of drawings for the house.  These plans are pretty much spot on.  There are just a few little tweaks in the ensuite, WIR, and entry to be done.

I've been playing around with exterior colour schemes the last few days and will get a few of those up here soon.  It's so hard to get the colours looking right on screen.  I source the paint swatches from the Dulux website, but some of the colours look nothing like they do actually painted on the boards and canvasses we have prepared here.  I guess it's just a bit of a guide and that there is going to have to be a certain element of blind faith involved at the end!

Tiles Tiles Tiles

Saturday just past we decided it would be more productive to go to Beaumont Tiles on a day they were open, so we headed down for pre-selection to see what was on offer.  I didn't want to vary from whatever range was included in our package, and went in fearing the worst.  Luckily the range available to us was pretty extensive.  Yvette at Beaumont's in Oxenford was really helpful.

In the end we walked out knowing what we wanted.... and this involved changing our whole idea of what our kitchen was going to look like, and our interior wall colour (which I half expected, as this is probably the last piece of the puzzle).

I can't remember the names of all three tiles that we picked, but I do know the one for the ensuite and bathroom floors is called Savvy Latte.

The darker tile is Savvy Latte, and the lighter one is for the walls in the bathrooms.

And a close up.

For the kitchen splashback we have a plainer light tile, which will have the dark Savvy Latte, halved and used as feature tile in some way.  Going away from our white and black kitchen, we will have Laminex Diamond Gloss Lunar Stone for the benchtops and Parchment for the cabinets.