Wall and roof frame up

Home slab in

Excavation and piering completed

Excavation for house still going

It's also been affected by all the rain we have been getting, in this "rainiest summer in 50 years".

Rock excavation

After the long Christmas and New Years break, the excavator machine came in and started to dig quite a bit of sandstone out of the ground to match the pitch and slope of the site to the house design. As the main part of our old house was build right on top of sandstone foundation, the rock excavation is expected to take a good few days even with the huge driller, digger, and huge circular saw.

Rock excavation cost is separate to our build tender, but it was within our expectation so there was not too much of a big surprise.

The huge circular saw to cut through the rocks (round thing at top of photo).

Concrete pool shell completed

Our pool people built framework out of wood panels and some sort of foam to pour the concrete into. After the concrete was poured they took the frame away so now we have grey, rectangle hole with some edging around it plus a vertical section at the far side for the waterfall feature wall. Mr Sasanqua had to go to the site everyday for the first 10 days to water the concrete so that it won't dry too quickly and crack.

Pool excavation done and formwork started

Swimming pool excavation is done, and we had to hire fencing to secure the pool site (it's a requirement). It's about $80 per month for hire, and we need to have this in place until we finish our pool and install our frameless glass fence. 

Pool Excavation

A digger for our pool came in to dig the huge hole in the ground.
We have hired a separate pool company to do our pool, and they are project managed by our landscape people. Doing the pool at the same time as our new house is stretching our budget a bit, but we rationalised that if we don't do the pool now and leave it after the house is built, there will be quite a bit of extra cost associated with the difficult access to the pool site in the future. If we really can't stretch our budget to have our dream luxury pool finished by the time our house is done, we will just leave the hole in the ground as it is and work on it later as our finances allow.

Anyway, we have a huge hole in our back yard!

Demolition fences are gone

All remnants of our old house is gone. The main part of our house was built on top of huge sandstone slab, so we assume that they will have to dig out all the rocks out of the ground next.

Empty Plot

Demolition continues

Our neighbour sent me an SMS to let me know that a big excavator came in today to bulldoze our house down. They have done the front room (which used to be our bedroom) and will work again tomorrow to get the house down to brick foundation.

Our old house is finally disappearing! It feels more exciting than sad to see that it is going. The old house was falling apart around us as we lived in it for the last 5 1/2 years, and it was about time it's bulldozed!

However I did feel just a little sentimental when I saw the lavender blue colour of our older son's bedroom wall paint. This was the room that we brought him home from the hospital. Memories of all the late night feedings and sleepless nights came flashing by but they went away quickly too. We are in a new chapter of our lives.

Start of Demolition

Our neighbour called me yesterday and told me that the demolition company came around to take a look at the house and would start demolition work today.

We went to take a look on the way home from our son's daycare pickup and took some photos. They have taken the roof tiles off first, and then will work their way down.

Some updates missing

Need to add events for September and October. Been a bit lazy. Will get to it later.

Council Notification period ended

It's been about a month since all our documents were submitted to the council. The notification period has ended now so if there are not many complaints or concerns submitted by our neighbours, hopefully the council will start working on our DA and get ours approved fairly quickly.

Our pool DA went in a few days after the main house DA, so that one should be out of notification period now too.

Bathroom fittings

After thinking about if for a while, we have decided to change our ensuite bathroom layout. Originally we chose to go with Option 2 of what the colour consultant suggested, but we have gone back to her and told her that we would like Option 1 instead now.

Our original choice: Option 2

Now changed our mind to: Option 1

Now the bath will be at the end of the room taking up the whole east wall, and the vanity (although it had to be shrunk back from 180cm to 150cm length) will be in the middle of the room, which will have more natural light when you look at yourself in the mirror. Sadly we can't increase the window size back to 150cm now, as we submitted documents to council with a 90cm window. We'll probably put a few glass shelves to the left of the window to balance out that wall. Shower will be slightly bigger (120x90cm before, 130x100cm now) too.

Part of the reason we went with option 2 originally was because we didn't want to reduce the walk-in-robe space. Now that we are going with option 1 we have less WIR, but with that sacrifice we hope we gained more useable layout in the ensuite. The shower is noticeably bigger which is great, and the bath and its surround will be a nice spot to place decorative objects and orchids.

Ensuite Bathroom Fittings

150cm bathtub with tile surround

150cm caeserstone vanity top with darker laminate doors

Floating vanity

130 x 100 cm shower (semi-frameless)

Family (Kids') Bathroom Fittings

170cm bathtub with tile surround

120cm caeserstone vanity top with darker laminate doors

Floating vanity

110 x 90 cm shower (semi-frameless)

Bathroom tiles are to be chosen later, but we are thinking white large wall tiles and brown/grey 30 x 30 cm floor tiles (budget permitting).

Colour and Material Selection appointment

We had another appointment with the builder's colour consultant today. We have decided on the internal colours and fittings for doors, trims, and bathrooms.

Colours
Entry foyer with raked ceiling: Taubmans "Princess Bling" (3 coats) - It's white, but not clinical white. Should brighten up the foyer and emphasise the tall ceiling and the feeling of open space in our entry hallway.

Walls throughout the house: Taubmans "Ocean Pebble" - It's a neutral, mushroomy beige.

Feature 5m wall in vestibule: Taubmans "Colonial P196-N4" - It's darker than Ocean Pebble but in the same tone. We plan to light up this wall with spotlight, and dress it with lots of black & white photos in white picture frames.

Skirting, architrave, window frame: Taubmans "Stoney Brook" - It's  an off-white colour, and is a lighter version of Ocean Pebble.

Ceilings and cornices: White

Fittings
Front door: Corinthian Infinity INFWS8G Pivot Door (1200 x 2340 mm) and side lights. Glass glazing is "Translucent" which is not transparent.

Front door lock: Gainsborough Angular Trilock BC in Bright Chrome finish.

Laundry door: Corinthian Backdoor Style TH7 (standard height). Glass glazing is "Obscure". Painted.

All internal doors are plain hollow core doors, which we are not completely happy about, as we wanted solid core doors for minimising sound. We will need to install taller doors for our Ground and Lower Ground floors, and we would have had to custom order the style of doors we liked to make them taller. So we've decided to go with standard hollow core doors at this time, to keep the budget blowup to a reasonable level. Doors are relatively easy to change later by ourselves if we really can't live with noise coming through doors.

Internal door handles: Gainsborough Carla Lever in Satin Chrome finish.

Kitchen appointment next week!

We have our kitchen appointment next week. Mrs Sasanqua has been doing research on the colours and materials, as well as placement of appliances in our new kitchen. We will see how much upgrade we can afford. Our kitchen is not very big (about 4m by 3.2m) but we will have the butler's pantry (about 2.1m by 4.5m) off our main kitchen, so storage should not be a problem we hope.

Here are a few sketches we did with our 3D mockup program.

Kitchen viewed from living entry.

Kitchen viewed from TV area. That pillar on island bench is structural and need to be there, but we don't like it!

Kitchen island viewed from dining area, doorway to the right is butler's pantry.

Kitchen island viewed from buttler's pantry entry.

Inside butler's pantry. Window, full cupboards, and large sink.

Swimming pool

Mr Sasanqua wanted a swimming pool in the back garden ever since we started talking about rebuilding the house. Our landscape designer recommended a few pool companies to give us a quote on the pool and we had a meeting with one of them. Pools are expensive. We are considering the option at this stage (until we can afford it in a couple of years' time) of only having a hole for the pool dug by a big digger when the old house is demolished and while site access is easy. This is because accessing the back garden after the new house is built will be hard. If they need to use a very small excavation equipment that can go through a 90cm gap on the side of the house, and wheelbarrow the dirt and sandstone out, the additional cost would be ridiculous (roughly $20,000 just for hard access). We can fence off the dug hole, and finish the pool when we can afford it.

We would like to have for our pool: glass fence, feature rock wall at the far side, water feature down the rock wall, underwater lights, solar/gas heated water, integration into back garden landscaping. We will see how many out of this list we can afford.

We need to submit DA for the pool soon now that the house DA has gone in to council, because once DA approval for house comes through the demolition and building starts fairly quickly and we don't want to miss the window of site access for digging the pool.

Renting

Now that DA has gone to council, we need to start thinking about finding a rental accommodation while our house is being built. We don't know how long the council is going to take to approve our DA but 1-3 months is what we are told by our builder.

We will need a house with at least 3 bedrooms with secure back yard for our dog. The house also needs to be either tiled or with timber floorboard throughout (allergy sufferers). We are budgeting $50K for a year of renting, including moving costs. It may be difficult to find a rental that meet our criteria near where we currently are, so we are expanding our search area slightly.

Council submission

We heard from our contract coordinator that they have couriered documents to our council yesterday so things are starting to move!

Front of the house

Back of the house