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.