For those not sure what they're looking at and wanting to know...
The house will basically have no internal load bearing walls, so all the weight of the roof is on the external ones. So they have dug big holes where the weight will go and filled them with concrete.
On top of this surface, on each side of the starter bars (the steel bars sticking up) will be built a brick wall, basically like a double brick wall with the starter bars in a gap between the two.
The very inside will be filled with dirt and then a concrete slab will be poured over the top. On top of that will be where our frame etc is built.

Kind of like this picture, but with the double wall section.

These were taken on a camera phone, hence the quality.

Drawn to scale

The builder has started marking out the ground.... it looks TINY to me! A little bit concerning.

^^A young lady that works with my wife.

It's a date... well, sorta

Proper start date scheduled for somewhere between the 21st and 25th of Sept.

Kitchen Appliances Ordered

Paid a deposit on some kitchen items today.
We're getting a 900 gas cooktop
a 900 range
and 2 x 600 wall ovens.

Premature Baldness

Nothing's approved yet or anything, but for the first time since we've owned it, someone other than us has been on the block and done something to it.... the building has started.

This post is more for my own record keeping - so in the future I can take a stroll down memory lane and remember what happened.

Yesterday we met the private certifier and signed to confirm that we wanted to use his services. He gave us a list of items that need to be taken care of before he can proceed.

One was that the BASIX certificate was done with the wrong DP number on it. The draft/engineering people that prepared it went to great lengths to make sure we knew it was the council that told them the wrong number, but that's all sorted now.

We also had to give him another copy of the engineering plans. I had another lot in reserve, so that's sorted too.

Additional items to be taken care of: Council sewer main location plan, “Cost Summary Report” form, drainage permit issued by Council & a diagram showing how we propose to provide the minimum 160 m² of roof area to feed the rainwater tank as required by the BASIX certificate. All of these will need to be taken care of by the builder.

Are you sure?

It's so hard being certain of a choice, particularly one you can never change, like bricks.
But given that the bricks are to be ordered on Tues, this is where we're at:



Ironstone roof, and gutters; Escura smoothface red bricks with white mortar; Surfmist facia, windows and garage door; downpipes painted to blend into bricks.

So yes, all that voting you all did was a waste of time. We picked the one no one voted for, including us! :)

The best de-fence...

Our 2 jobs for this weekend were to:
1. Confirm our brick choice.
2. Remove the front fence mentioned in the last post, ready for Thursday when the bob cat arrives to prepare a clean slate.

The result of job number 2:

My finger is blocking out the sun glare :)



We've had a bit of a weed growth explosion over the last couple of months!

Maybe sooner than we thought

Our builder is planning to run our plans through a private certifier* to speed up the whole council thing, so we might be starting pretty soon...

* We're not in Nth Sydney, but that site explains what a private certifier is.

Update via email from my wife:
builder has asked that we take down the fence this weekend - he will start clearing next week. Has Home warranty now - will give me an invoice tomorrow morning when I drop off the other stuff and he will get the plans into the certifier person on Mon - should take 10 working days, scary!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That front fence is a dodgy little wire thing that kept a horse in for the previous owners. We just have to undo the tie wire etc.

Signed....

We ended up signing the contract last night after a long discussion on what was going to happen etc. So now the builder is organising the certificate of insurance, while we get a deposit cheque together and then, hopefully next week, everything's submitted to council.

Time to get serious picking exterior colours!

Contractions have started

We meet with the builder again this afternoon to pick up the contract and I plan to go through the plan a room at a time to discuss all the fine details. I want to make sure his plan matches our imagination so there's no discrepancy later on.
The contract is just a standard MBA one, but I'll still be going through it carefully...