Project Regent

Well we signed and delivered our final mortgage documents today.  Settlement for the land is still on track for Monday!

I also had to drop off some paperwork to Porter Davis today and had a chat with our administrator.  Our current official start date is the 28th August .  They are going to push for an earlier start seeing that our file is complete (28th July would be fab!).  Fingers crossed!

Well thats another major milestone completed.  This afternoon we spent just over 3 hours at Porter Davis going through, altering and signing the construction contract.  Now I need to goto the bank and get yet another large cheque!

The process was actually quite pain free, just a lot of reading and digesting of information.  The good news is that with all our upgrades, alterations and additions we’re still under budget (just).  There were some good things and bad things we discovered.

Good things:

• Render for the portico columns at the front are $250 less then budgeted
• We’re under budget generally
• Passed our 5 star energy rating with flying colours
• Thats it really!

Bad things:

• Slab for the alfresco came in at $1681 when we were told it’d be around $600
• The dumper shower head for the ensuite was quoted as $407 via email, came in at $593 (they originally quoted the wrong one).  This is actually $93 over what I was prepared to pay, but oh well, its a great shower head
• Still not happy about paying $350 for translucent glazing in the front door when its only $210 extra on the Corinthian Doors website
• The window for bedroom 4 was randomly moved to the wrong wall.  We left it as standard but someone decided it was to be moved.  Its going back.
• There was a charge of $1026 for 2 random brick columns to the portico.  “Um excuse me, but arn’t the pillars included with the Ormond Facade?”. Yes they are!  That cost has been removed.

So we should still be on target for a pre-christmas moving date.  We need to chase up a date for land titling - once that has happened we can have our start date allocated and off we go.  So long as we can start building no later then the middle of August we’re on track.

Oh!  one other thing we had to get altered.  The draftsman decided to sit out house on the land so that the minimum space possible was between the garage wall and fence, with a larger gap between the other side of the house that that fence.  Now all our outdoor living space is on the garage side of the house and the other side is just wasted space.  We got them push the house across the block a bit giving us an extra half meter of outdoor living.  Sometimes you have wonder what people are thinking!

Thought I’d do a quick update as we’re getting closer to the final tick of approval from the bank.  On Monday we’re signing the construction contact with PD which will then goto the bank so they can do their valuation and give us formal approval!  That will aparently still take them 2 weeks but at least now we have some kind of timeframe.

Also, I went past the block today.  The fence is still up so we can’t actually step foot on our land, but it looks pretty much ready for building.  All the blocks in our release have now been flattened off.  They’ve also painted the markings on the road, put those little reflective things on the road and have started to build the little fence on the nature strip that divides Wylie Way from Sneydes Road.

I also popped into the land sales office to see how the sales of release 19b were going.  19b went on sale last weekend.  Strangely enough there are still about half the blocks available. When we put the deposit on our land it was a week after 19a went on sale and there were only about 4 blocks left.  I wonder if it is because the people who build in stage 19b will miss the deadline for getting the $26K from K Rudd (unless they extend it).

It’s been almost 2 weeks now since we had official contact from Porter Davis and we found out who our Administrator will be, and almost 2 weeks with no word from her.  Today I emailed a list of questions that we need answers for before our contract signing on Tuesday (20th April).

The issue with all builders seems to be lack of communication.  There are a heap of posts on the Internet about that issue.  She will probably hate me by the end of the process as I’ll be on her case constantly - after all WE ARE THE CUSTOMER and spending a lot of money with them….

Stay tuned!

So what better way to spend a wet, cold and windy Sunday than by an afternoon of window shopping. The expensive kind. And one that involves driving to the other side of Melbourne. Really really the other side. We headed off today to see the Regent 23 at Mariott Waters at Lyndhurst. Now, with our base in West Footscray at the moment, I do hear you ask “why so far for a house?”. Well, there’s actually a pretty reasonable reason (as there always is)…

Sliding Doors at Lyndhurst

The Regent 23 up at Point Cook is great, except it has the excellent (yet overpriced) bi-fold doors. And, well, if we had a spare $4k, we’d probably go for them (they do rock after all), but it’s a large amount of money for doors. We wanted to see the sliding doors that are standard - it’s a hard task to visualise given the kickass doors at Point Cook. And that’s what we can see on the left. Instead of the four-panel bi-fold doors that open up the entire width of the frame, the standard includes a four panel section with two fixed windows (far left and far right) with two sliding doors (middle two panels). And while the bi-fold doors will be great, their absence is not a deal breaker.

Dorf Round Tiber Shower Rose

Given we were out and about, we thought we would take a look at the other Porter Davis Access homes, as well as the competition, to get ideas for interiors, bathrooms, tiles, colours, and of course, the things not to do (textured fake pleather walls I think not). So the bathroom is something where we have some pretty cool thoughts - one of which is a really flash-flood-looking showerhead (as seen on the right). On our home journey to Hopetoun Interiors, we had a chat to one of their interior designers who said that even though it looks very monsoonal, it still is water efficient (sort of - we’ve found on the Dorf website it’s 2-star rated, while their others are 3-star). And if Mikey didn’t get threatened by being drowned in a display home would have turned it on to see it go. But ah well, February next year we can try it out.

Current inclusion - dual vanity and upgrades basins

So still in the bathroom, one of our upgrades is to a dual vanity as well as the inclusion of some pretty sweet hand basins. We first saw these at Point Cook and just absolutely loved them - and then during our first quotation meeting with Fiona, she informed us that they are an inclusion with one of the specials. Woo. So here’s what they look like. Our current query is whether we should have a stand-alone tap neck, or a head that comes out of the splashback wall. So the jury’s still out there.

And, guess what, we’re still in the bathroom. We saw this concept in the Stanford 24 at Lyndhurst and both thought it was really interesting - subtle, smart, yet classy. We were thinking that a subtle “feature” in the shower would be great to include, but some of the ones we had seen while looking around were rather, um, yeah (we had seen pebbles, multi-coloured tiles, and so on) - but then we saw this one - the way the light was at that time really caught our attention as we saw that it wasn’t just a brown tile, but actually a glassy tile (i.e. transparent).

Tile Trim

Close up of the glassy tiles

So we’ll see what the quote for that is, but it looks pretty funky - very Mikey and Marty - and the glassy tiles just make it that little bit different. The other inclusion we get in the bathroom is a small square niche inset into the wall - we’ve seen some pretty nice ones (and some equally as foul) but we did see one today that was longer horizontally (rather than square) that would be nice - so we’ll have to see about that too.

We spent about two hours wandering around the display homes: thinking, counting downlights, doing scary maths sums, but also now’s the time for us to think about the finer details - where will Hamish’s cat door go? Can the washing machine still go there too? How many downlights do we need here? Should we add on addition X? What furniture fits here? And so on… so physically easy, but mentally challenging especially with all of the mental imagination of where all of our furniture will go. And a lesson learnt - always take a pad and paper with you.

On the journey home, we stopped off at the interior decorators for Porter Davis, Hopetoun Interiors, where we will spend some time picking colour combinations for bricks, benches, cupboards, paints, argh, yes, it’s all there. Oh and the funky bowls and monsoonal shower head. We learnt another leason here too - avoid the place on weekends. I would assume the best time to visit would be during school hours. Enough said there. But anyway, we looked around and tried to visualise what a 30cm x 30cm sample of brick would look like on a whole wall, and that mental challenge along with sunlight streaming directly into our visual mud map and the aural pleasures of screaming children, yeah too hard basket. We need to find out more information about the brick and tile ranges we have to start with, as that’s another factor to consider, but we’re at least seeing what options are around.

So we’re leaning towards a dark roof tile, and the Ormond Facade (with render to the front pillars), with a darkish (yet not too dark) brick, and a light (not white) render. Inside, we were thinking of a neutral faint grey (think rotten eggshell), that adds some visual interest without being too dark, and using a few feature walls to add contrast. But again, without more information on budgets for bricks and tiles, as well as without our own Hopetoun consultant, we’ll continue looking at houses and thinking about what we would like to achieve. But at least we’re thinking to at least get our head in the game.