Landscaping I

It’s been a crazy time since we took handover of the house. Building the house now seems like the easy part!

We seriously underestimated the amount of landscaping that would be required. Our block is 800sqm and we have to find something to do with the remaining ~550sqm. An absolute legion of earthwork crews have totally decimated the hard work that previous owners have put into the land over the past 60 or so years.

We set off to prioritise the many projects that would be required and ended up with the following list (to start with):

1. Construct backyard fence, with 1m high retaining wall to reduce slope in backyard
2. Construct concrete steps to access backyard and finish retaining wall
3. Construct retaining wall fence and a gate for pool and general safety
   (Reason: retaining walls up to 2m in height, pool regulations)
4. Swimming Pool
   (Reason: only access to backyard via neighbours driveway will not be available for much longer)
5. Turf the backyard
6. Piers for 60sqm deck
   (Reason: machinery access will be problematic once we have a driveway)
7. Front boundary fence and retaining walls
   (Reason: security and should be done before driveway)
8. Driveway
   (Reason: we’re on a slope that’s slippery at the best of times and with the rainy season fast approaching access into our house will become an issue)
9. Fence side boundary

Project 1

<whinge>We’ve had dealings with two landscapers and both were very difficult to work with and produced substandard work for a small fortune. First landscaping lesson learnt, don’t use landscapers. They tend to try their hands at everything and aren’t really master of anything in particular. Disclaimer: There’s a chance that we were really unfortunate with the landscapers we ended up with. Regardless, in future I’ll DIY or get specialists in to do bits and pieces.</whinge>

Decommissioning of chain wire fence in backyard.

New timber paling fence going up.

Trench for the pool wiring.

Back retaining wall with increased height drainage pits and extra soil being put into the site.

Project 2

Form work for concrete steps.

Matching coloured concrete for steps with the pool tiles and driveway.

Project 3

Side fence on top of retaining wall.

Steps, and pool fence going up. DW pretending to be doing the work! JKS

Keys!

Handover was done on 18 July 2013.

Lights, Alarm, Carpets, etc

The alarm was installed on Friday 28 June 2013.

Most of our lights were installed on Saturday 29 June 2013. We’re going relatively green with mostly LED and ECO friendly choices.

LED fan in Katie’s bedroom, looking towards the kids zone. The fan is probably a little too low, but that can be adjusted later.

LED downlight. The beam angle on these downlights are not fantastic – we’re hoping they will work out as they were a last minute replacement (from our rapidly disappearing contingency budget!) for the builders range downlights.

Builders range downlight.

Kids zone

Family

Family and dining

Media

Kitchen pendants (2/3 installed when the photo was taken)

Photo taken through the stacker door (as we don’t have access to the house when the tradies are not around :().

We think our kitchen will be pretty close to the kitchen that we roughly based ours on i.e. this one.

We ordered our carpets! Tick – another big item is off the looooong list. After a lengthy research period (25 minutes), we decided on the Cosy Comfort SmartStrand Silk range, narrowed down to two colours Riverstone (darker sample in the photo below) and Crystal Stream.
(PS. They’re not blue at all – funny how colours can show up completely different on computer monitors.)

We went with Crystal Stream (on the right in the above photo), with a Cloud 9 underlay. Installation is booked for 22 July 2013.

Water tank.

Solar water

Solar power was also connected in the last week.

Retaining wall drainage is now linked to the site drainage. These pipes will be covered with soil.

Paint and Bench Tops

We chose to change our bench tops from Essastone Piazza to Essastone Carbon due to the Piazza not being available in the country. We would have had to wait 5 weeks for the Piazza.

We also changed our paint colour from a Resene ‘bon jour’ like custom mix to Dulux White Duck Quarter.

Niche cabinet

Family room

Dining room window

Dining room niche

Kitchen

Hallway to front door.

Media room

Garage shelves

Powder room

Bedroom 5

Looking towards the family room.

We have electricity (and Tiles)!

The panels for solar electricity were installed on Friday (14/06/2013). It’s a good thing we were onsite as the contractor had no idea where his colleague put the wiring (which was installed during the frame stage)!

After netball on Saturday (15/06/2013), we noticed that our electricity was connected. The builder used power from our neighbour to get to this point in the build. Thanks Allan!

In the past week, the tiles were laid, scaffolding was removed, the painter polly filled the internal walls, trim and shelves. A plaster tradie was also around to fix the cornices in the media room and around the staircase. It is rather funny how the tradies all have their radios on at the same time – and all tuned to different stations. :)

Cool lazers being used, rather difficult to get the lines wrong, or not?

The kitchen guy was there on Saturday to correct the kickboards and ‘fix’ the pantry shelving. We are not very happy with the standard of the pantry, it’s basically just a bunch of free standing shelves – not exactly what one would expect in a butlers pantry. We will talk to the builder about this but we’ll probably have to add it to the rather long list of things that we’ll need to resolve afterwards.

We think our white cabinets looked a bit average without the brushed aluminium kickboards.

Render was also applied to the garage and feature window on the facade.

We’re considering the ‘CHERT’ carpet from Carpet Call.