Met with electrician on site #3

I was asked to come on site again to confirm the positioning and height of our front foyer wall lighting, and this time saw a lot of cables criss-crossing in wall and ceiling cavities throughout the house already. The frames for switchplates are installed on the wall, as well as frames for powerpoint faceplates, and I could almost visualise the inside of our new house and how we would place our furniture.

Met with electrician on site #2

I met with a couple of workers for our electrician to go over finer details of the placements of switches, power points, data cables, etc.

Met electrician on site to go over electrical plan

We had an on-site meeting with the electrician who is subcontracting for our builder. They can also install light fixtures and connect up data cables after hand over from the builder (we didn't have that included in the contract with builder as they will charge a premium for that), so I have asked them to give us a quote on those bits that are not included in the contract with our builder. If the same electrician can do the wiring and the connection/fitting of lighting and data cables it would save us the hassle of hiring and explaining things twice. 

We have decided to go with LED down lights all throughout the house. The initial cost will be more than with regular down lights but we had to have our front foyer down lights in energy efficient light fitting for BASIX compliance anyway, so we thought we might as well go the whole hog and have LED down lights throughout the house. The light cast by LED and regular down lights are different visually, so we didn't want part of the house to have different look to the other parts. 

We will also have fairly extensive data cable network throughout the house for TV, Foxtel, video/audio files stored on NAS devices, as well as phone and internet which will all be connected up to a Hub that we will place under the staircase in the centre of the house. To that end we have four data cables each going into our lounge room, kids' playroom, home theatre, and master bedroom. The minor bedrooms (kids' and guests') will have two Cat6 data cables going in to each room. We are planning to have a video feed coming from the security camera placed at the front of the house to go through the hub and be accessible to each room (just so we can see who is out at the front of the house without having us actually walk up to the front window).

Click to view larger image of electrical plan.

House design revisions

February, March, & April 2011 - We revised and fine-tuned the house plan, sometimes changing things based on our sales consultant's advise or on costing, sometimes based on what we read on internet forums.

We were originally going to have the house rendered, and have hardwood flooring throughout the house. But due to cost blowout we had to make a compromise somewhere and choose between (a) have tiles instead of floorboard downstairs, or (b) have smoothfaced bricks (sales consultant's suggestion) instead of render. In the end we decided to keep the hardwood flooring throughout (tiles are so cold and we take shoes off in the house), and give up the render. Hopefully the smoothfaced bricks will look streamlined and smooth as we were told, but if we are very unhappy about the bricks we can always have them rendered 5 or 10 years later when we can.

Another thing we had to give up was the skylight in the pitched roof in the foyer. Because of the direction the roof is facing, if we were to put a skylight in it would have been visible from the street on the roof above the front door. We really liked the idea of having a very high pitched ceiling filled with natural light in the entrance foyer, but instead we will have to put in lots of lights there, and hope that will still give us the WOW factor.

We went back and forth, did a lot of research because we didn't want to change anything major further down the build process. During this time a new survey report and bushfire report were done. Our sales consultant was helpful and communication was very good on email and phone, we also had a meeting at our house and picked his brain for ideas and recommendations. We took our time in getting the house plan the way we wanted, and quite enjoyed this process.

What the house will have:

• Nice open entry hall with high racked ceiling
• Large butler's pantry off the kitchen with window and sink
• High ceiling on lower levels
• Open plan living leading out to alfresco area at the back
• 4 bedrooms, study, media room, open plan kitchen/living/dining room, play room
• Main bathroom, ensuite bathroom, powder room
• 2.5-car garage (storage/workshop)
• Landscaped garden
• Swimming pool
• Polished floorboard throughout except wet areas