Catching up...

Ok... so I've been a very bad home blogger! It's been nearly three weeks since my last post and things are looking great!!! So as not to bore you all senseless I'll do up a quick time line:

April 29th = slab boxed
April 30th = slab poured
May 2-4th = retaining walls built ( by us not Plantation!)
May 7th = ground floor frame put up
May 11th = second storey frame put up
May 12th = roof trusses/frame put up
May 13th = guttering and fascia delivered
May 14th = gutter scaffold erected

May 18th - the heavens opened and it hasn't stopped pouring ever since...

Lights.... Camera .... Action...

Ok so maybe it's not a feature film production (despite feeling like one) but our house is finally under construction! I've taken some pictures of the 'action' to date - they delivered the bricks on monday (all 13 odd palates of them) as well as some of the plumbing supplies. Then on tuesday they dug the trenches and laid the plumbing! Unfortunately, the SS advised us that they hit rock so there goes our $3000 provisional sum in our contract for rock excavation!

The slab is being boxed today and then the concrete trucks are scheduled to arrive tomorrow to start pouring our slab!! We have to spend the long weekend building three retaining walls - we are short on willing bodies to help this time round so it looks like even I'm going to be helping! (hmmm I wonder if they make high heels for retaining wall building ;) ) We also discovered that the Polytank is going to cut off our side access - we enquired about changing to a Slimline but it was going to cost us over $2500 to do this as the plans needed redrafting, resubmitting to council etc etc... Oh well, I guess we just need to go on diets so we can fit round the water tank!





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Finally....

They started on our block! After not visiting since Friday Chris went up yesterday and they had started the site cut! It looks like it still needs to be compacted but it certainly looks very different! We will also need to build three retaining walls this weekend - by we I mean Chris :)

It's much higher than we anticipated so we've decided to retain the back and put some steps in the middle to take you down to the back yard. Chris took a ground level photo and you can see it's nearly as high as the 2.3m acoustic fence!

We rang Adam yesterday to find out when we can come in and start the retaining but he didn't call us back. Hopefully he will call us today as we also want to say thanks for starting!!!

Here's some pictures:

This is from the rear right corner:

From the rear centre:

Ground level (you should be able to see the top of the fence in the distance):

Front left hand corner (we need to put retaining walls in there):

Standing at the top of the block (in the centre) looking over to where the garage will be ( you can see the cut for the garage if you're looking closely):

From the driveway looking down the block:

Rain rain go away...

well things are moving along... slowly! Plantation are ready to go but mother nature hates us! Our Site Supervisor's name is Adam - he picked our file up last wednesday and has been trying to get the site scrape done but it hasn't stopped raining! The frame has been ordered and is scheduled to arrive on the 15.4.09 - I'm thinking this may need to be delayed otherwise the frame will sit on site for weeks!

Once the site scrape has taken place we need to go up and put in three retaining walls. We were hoping to do this on the easter long weekend but like most things building related - nothing ever seems to go your way!

At least the block is clear now - Chris, Gary, Jon and Steve removed about 14 tonnes of dirt and building rubble off our block! Kindly left by the builders who built the new houses around us!

Here's some pictures of how it looks now - they aren't the best quality as they were taken on a mobile but you get an idea:

The bank brings good news...

...for a change! We received confirmation yesterday that our loan to build had been approved by the CBA - yippeee!! So all going to plan we should see some action on our site the week starting the 30 March 09.

Dirt, dirt and more dirt....

So when does dirt become land and when does land become a block... or are they all the same? It appears that our block or land or dirt depending on how you look at it is taking more work than I first thought to get it "construction ready".

When we first saw the block it looked like this:

As you can see it's generally free from debris...

Only a few weeks later it looked like this:

and this...

and this...

It appears that the company building all the houses around us decided to use our "dirt" to dump their rubble. This makes for a very unhappy Maranda - several phone calls to the builder in question had the situation unresolved.

So fast forward a few weeks later and we come to last weekend where the troops i.e Chris, Chris' brother Jon, Chris' brother-in-law Steve and Chris' Dad decide to rid our block of said rubble. The day turned into a comedy of errors - the Kanga's hydrolic pin broke & then a tyre got a puncture from a nail & had to be returned, the dingo's chain came off and several trips to Bunning's for tools saw the chain fixed. Chris ran out of whipper snipper cord and Steve broke his new whipper snipper and then to top the day off Chris' dad accidently hit a car with the 2-tonne truck. But here's the kicker... they only managed to get half the rubble removed so there is still more work to be done before Plantation come out to cut the block just after the 30th March.

I hope this is not a sign of things to come...

To plan or not to plan...

that is the question... well actually we do have plans and we are pretty chuffed with them if I do say so myself! Check them out for yourselves!

And here are our elevations:

Give me a home...

amongst the gum trees... actually any trees would be nice! So herein starts the process of building our dream home. For the uninitiated, or those that chose to tune out everytime we've spoken about it, Chris and I are in the process of building Plantation Homes "Empire" design home. For those familiar with Plantation designs we are building the very original floor plan. Anyway our contract is due to be moved into "production" stage on the 30th April 2009 - we are just impatiently waiting for our mortgage documents to arrive!

Our block of land is at Narangba which is on the north side of brisbane. It's a 953m2 battle-axe block - here's our contour survey. It's the last block in the street and we were lucky to get it for a steal at $185,000. The fencing was already there from the houses around us which is great! The only down side to the block is the rail line which is after the street behind us. Fortunately they have built a 2.6m acoustic fence and in addition to the laminated windows we are installing we should be sound proof!