Where is the love?

Guess we're located in a really muddy version of no-man's-land.  Land hasn't titled.  Hasn't even got a road for that matter.  We've selected everything there is to select (twice).  Our deposit is paid.  The plans have been drawn (almost correctly) and now we wait.......

Since contracts have been signed, we're not feeling the love from our CS chicky.  At contract meeting's end we had quite a list of errors / omissions / follow ups / questions that we are waiting on responses to.  

For me, the most pressing of these is clarifying the upstairs ceiling height in the display.  The sense of space in Marina made us fall head over heels in love, and clarifying the ceiling height at this point is kind of like signing a pre-nup.  I don't want any nasty surprises when we have that key-ring on our fingers.  It's not that I don't trust PD.  I do.  And I'm fully committed.  But I wouldn't have thought it was a tricky question to answer.  Perhaps a little sneak visit to the display armed with tape measure may be on the weekend's agenda.

So that'll take up 2 more days of brain space.  How am I going to fill the next xx months of waiting time??  Other than reading H1 to find more things to stress out about!

My turn to Post

This whole house building thing is new to me so it's both exciting and terrifying at the same time.  You've read my lady's doubts in the last post, mine are similar in some ways and it's probably fair to detail them.

I'm getting old.  Some of my work colleagues laughed today when I told them I'll be dead before we pay the mortgage off in 30 years time and whilst I come from a long lived family that could well be true.  Of course we'll be aiming to get it paid off earlier than that but who knows really.  One thing though, we'll be living in a beautiful home.


When we first saw this block in January it was literally a cow paddock and it's been fun watching how things have been taking shape.  We visit every weekend and houses are now starting to stick up like mushrooms with around 20 odd frames up across the estate.   There's going to be a 40 house display village and the first 5 of those are underway including the first two storey house on the estate, which I'm happy to see because I didn't want to think ours would be the only one.

The first houses beginning to emerge

Mountainview Boulevard and Fieldstone Crescent intersection

Fieldstone Crescent starting to take shape.

Mountainview Boulevard looking South

And looking North

Can't believe how low they cut the roads in.  This is Mountainview Boulevard again.  Couldn't get much further in towards our block as it's very wet underfoot and tyre.

Mountainview and Fieldstone again.  A park is planned just in front of the row of trees.

Mud, mud, and more mud.

Just put this one up because of the sky.

If you look REALLY closely you can see drainage pipes on the right - that's our block.

Decent progress along Mountainview Boulevard.

This is the leader of the pack.  First to slab, frame, roof and now almost bricked.

More activity in the earlier stages.  Six weeks ago there was nothing but questions about when the land would title.

Can't wait to get a street sign.  Even one that points downwards.

More progress.  There's very few blocks in those earlier stages that don't have some sign of activity.

Start of the display village.  These have literally gone up in 2 weeks.

North along William Thwaites Boulevard towards Eve estate.

Same - just zoomed a little.  Curb and channel plus footpaths has all been done in a little over a week.

CON-tract Today

I'm stupidly nervous about our contract meeting this afternoon;

Should we have stayed with Espresso bricks?

Is the colorbond roof worth the upgrade?

Should we have added anything extra?

Are the floor tiles too dark?

Is it the right floorplan?

Do we REALLY need 5 bedrooms?

Why didn't we put a spa in the ensuite?

We forgot to widen the fridge cavity!

Are there enough power points?

Should we have added cabinets doors inside the butlers pantry?

And a sink?

Does everyone go through this last minute mini-panic-attack when it really is the very last minute?

My Brown-eyed Girl

What do you do when you wake up one morning and just KNOW that your colours are wrong, wrong, wrong?  Or more specifically, when you proudly display your showroom full of samples to people you care about (read: people who believe their opinion is important to you), they ask you why on earth you would choose something so BROWN, and you although you try to duck out of it's way, screaming, pulsating, nauseating doubt comes and smacks you right on the bridge of your nose.

As prepared as you'd like to think you are (and we weren't), the reality of choosing the "clothes", the outer, street-presence, people who believe their opinion is important to you jealousy factor layer of your very expensive future home is seriously stressful - and doubt worthy.

So this person whose opinion...... asks why... I say, "Well, I liked this", pointing to a nifty little colour pallette sample courtesy of Boral.  "So why did you go with something different", I was asked.  "Well, they are Category 6 bricks" I say.  "And what are the ones you've chosen"? I'm asked.  Ummm... Category 6.

The reality is, or was - we didn't know how much Cat 6 bricks would cost.  It could have been $120 or $12,000.  Despite our best and most persistent efforts, PD were unable to sove the mystery of upgrade costings.  I won't bore you with detail, as everyone else who has built with them will know what I'm talking about, and everyone who hasn't wouldn't believe it anyway.  So we're a our colour appointment and we although we're lead to believe that our Hopetoun Interiors consultant doesn't have prices, we live on the edge and ask anyway.  Imagine our surprise when we're told Cat 6 will be roughly 6K on our house.  Quick weigh up - expensive house - percentage of brick upgrade to overall cost - dislike of pretty much Cat 1-5 bricks.  OK - we'll have that dark one.  Haven't done any of the home work checking out builds in progress with our preferred brick and other external combinations COZ WE DIDN'T KNOW HOW MUCH EACH CATEGORY WOULD BE.  Wow - it was weeks ago and I'm still kinda agitated about it.


I gotta say - from then on I was pretty dejected throughout the selection process.  Turns out our consultant knew the price of EVERYTHING and I'm thinking, why couldn't someone, ANYONE have told us this info before so we could rule things out and seriously consider upgrades that weren't as expensive as they might have been.


We push on through the process, accumulating browns to go with browns, and I'm not an anti-brown campaigner, but I do subscribe to their newsletter.  By the time we came to the end of the process, I may well have been sulking, but I'm entitled to write my own story here, so I'll say I was masking my frustration well.  Next we went to electricals, but thats a whole nuther post right there.

Quietly accepting that our house was going to look like the Brady Bunch pad resplendent in it's mission-brown-ness, I made peace with the fact that I could drive up the drive with my eyes shut each night and really, I'd never know what colour bricks, render, garage door, roof, fascia, gutter, blah blah blah that I had.  Good plan?

Was a good plan until someone whose opinion... had a look... "Hello Porter Davis - ummm - what's the last possible day we can change our colours?"