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

Hardwood Flooring

We will have hardwood flooring throughout the house, except for wet areas (bath, ensuite, powder room, laundry) which will be tiled. This is because 3 out of 4 family members of the Sasanqua household are allergy sufferers, and it's important to reduce their allergy load by eliminating dustmites from carpeting. Mrs Sasanqua likes the easy clean aspect of hardwood flooring, and timber is not as cold on the feet as tiles can be (we don't wear shoes in the house). But hardwood flooring comes with a big price tag. We are allocated $65 per m2 for the supply of flooring in our tender, so depending on the species and grade of timber we end up choosing, we may be up for some extra cost.

We are currently tossing between Blackbutt (Janka hardness rating 9.1) and Spotted Gum (11). We think Blackbutt might be just slightly too blond in colour (sports gym like?) and it's a softer species of hardwood timber. Spotted Gum is a harder wood but it may look too rustic because of its variation in the hues (although that's one of the attractions of this species too). Our mostly white kitchen and living will be a very open plan, north facing (we're in the southern hemisphere) area with 2 x 3 panel stacker doors leading out to al fresco area, so we need to keep in mind how light will affect the look of the timber floor.

We need to go to a timber display centre and have a look. Reading some forum posts, we found out that the wear on the floorboard will depend more on the surface treatment product used, than on the timber species (as long as it's a hardwood species). We will look at each species' different grades (Select, Standard, Feature/Natural), think about what width we want (60, 80, 130 mm etc), and the price of each, before we make our decision.

Blackbutt (it's a yellowish hay colour)

Spotted Gum (different hues of brown)

Bathrooms layout

The colour consultant also gave us some suggestions on our bathroom and ensuite designs. We hadn't thought much on the layout of our bathrooms and left them as the draftsman drew them. The colour consultant gave us a couple of suggestions for the layout for us to choose from, and we decided on:

Main Bathroom

Ensuite

We are a little concerned about the closeness of shower and toilet in our ensuite but until we can come up with something else we will go with this layout.

External Colours

We had to choose external colours (roof, brick, gutter, fascia, window) before council submission(*), but we were having such a hard time deciding on the right colours. The problem was we couldn't visualise what the combined colours would look like on a house. And because they tend to make or break the overall look of the house from the street, we just weren't confident enough to finalise our choice. We mentioned this to our builder and had a meeting with their colour consultant for some advice, even though it seemed that this was not included in the usual selection process any longer(*). But if you don't ask for help, you won't get any so we are glad that we did. We had made a scrapbook with our shortlisted colour swachtes of Colorbond roof, gutters, fascia, brick, and external paint colour for the weatherboard, so we took that along with us for the meeting.

* Our builder's colour consultant told us that they have recently changed the way they do colour selections. They used to offer an appointment with the colour consultant to choose internal and external colours and electricals all in one go before the council submission stage, but now apparently they are doing the main colour choice appointment after council submission. This means that the customers are left on their own devise for choosing external colours but our builder was happy to help us with this.

The external colours we chose are:

Window: Anodic Off White (Matt) by Trend 
The real colour looks a lot whiter especially when you see it in natural light.

Roof and gutter: Colorbond Woodland Grey

Fascia: Colorbond Evening Haze

Garage door: Colorbond Evening Haze

Brick: Boral Escura Smoothface brick in Jute

For some reason all the colours look like similar tones of brown on screen, but the real life colours have different depths and hopefully will go well together. Using a colour simulation tool at Colorbond.com, we've managed to put together the kind of look we are going for. Note: the house design is one of their default ones, and our house will be brick, not rendered.

The look we are going for.

Landscape design

While our builder is preparing documents for council submission, hydraulics engineer's report was organised by them, and we received the good news that we will not need a stormwater retention system burried in the back garden. However we will need to move the rainwater tank up to the side of the garage which makes the side access on the right hand side quite a bit narrower.

We decided to use our own landscape designer to do our landscaping for council submission. There was originally $1000 or so allocated for a landscape design in our builder's tender, but it would only get us a basic "lawn and shrubs" type of landscaping drawn up just to get the DA in. So prior to signing the contract, we asked to have the allocated landscaping cost taken out from the tender. By spending just a little more and going to a landscape designer we chose, we were able to have a really nice manicured front garden and low-maintenance but attractive side and back gardens designed. This designer happened to have worked with our builder before, so they will send the finished landscape design to the builder who will then submit it to council along with the house plan.

Our landscape design for front, side and back gardens are brilliant with great plants selection, and very nice features in the front garden to really dress up the house. We are advised of the rough cost for building and planting out the landscaping based on this design, so we will set aside a budget for it.

Side Garden

Front Garden