Waiting and waiting for more progress...

Still not much done after almost 1 week from our 1st PCI.
The only person who came everyday was their maintenance guy.
Still waiting for their carpenter, gyprocker, painter, electrician.....once everybody finish what in the lists then cleaner will come next week.
So they only have 2 days to do all our lists...seems impossible...
They want 2 weeks time to rectify our list after 1st PCi, but until now I don't see much different....

Almost there...

Just to update that we will have our final inspection (PCI) on the 4th October.
Hopefully we won't have any major things to fix and can move within 7days after that.

SS has been great and quickly followed up for any emails and phone calls I made.
We're lucky we live just 10 minutes away, so we can check almost everyday and notice things differently.

Wsdm has fixed some of the the electrical issues we had, but today we found some more...aarrgghh...

Here's are the photos from the current issue we have :

Brickies and electrician caused this saga.

Still waiting for brickies to put back the bricks, then electrician to install updown light.

 

 

Light is placed too close to manhole in our bed WIR.

 

Missing external power point outside laundry

 

Is this normal for a gap like this for front door??

Well, we can't wait to see the final result that Wsdm will give us.
This Saturday they will clean the place (initial clean, whatever that means..) and I am so keen to watch the cleaner to clean our main floor.

 

 

Main floor tiling has begun.. & few more photos..

Hello everyone,

Just an update at our place, main floor tiles has begun and it looks good.

Only we still haven't got a date for PCI nor handover....:(
But I reckon will  be early October.

We found that there are a few things quite dissapointing us, like we can't get our up down lights for front portico. Apparently the brickies has done something inside the portico and the electrician aren't able to install it. Very annoying because they didn't call to let us know about it but they changed it to LED downlight instead. This is not the look that we wanted, since we like their Oran park display home with the same facade that have 2x up down lights, why they can't do the same for us ??

Secondly is our main ensuite bathroom. The electrician (or maybe tilers) has placed the power switch too close to the future mirror ....so if we get 2 skinny mirrors like The Ponds display, the mirror will be so small to avoid the power switch, but if they give us 1 big piece mirror as the other display home, then I reckon the power switch will be inside /blending in the mirror.
We want a 1 big piece mirror instead of 2x mirror, so will request it tomorrow, hopefully it's not too late....if it's not possible, then that's another dissapointment again from Wisdom after they gave us the wrong basin...

Anyway, here are few photos :

Master Ensuite, power switch on the right hand side

 

 

Upstairs linen and main bathroom entrance

 

Main floor starting

 

New microwave position with additional bifold door

 

foyer with painted french doors

 

Bathrooms tiling finished and 1st Paint is done...

Hello All,
Have been a few weeks since my last post.
Sorry, was so busy with work and kids, again, no excuse..sorry...:P

Well, here are more photos for our last progress...
Have been happy so far and the house looks liveable now. He..he...

1st coat of paint :

The kitchen looks better now with caesarstone installed.

The bathrooms turned out nice, after first look, we thought it looks too yellow'ish (for kids' bathroom).
Powder room (Master ensuite and shared bathroom upstairs will use the same tiles like this):

 

Kids's Bathrooms both will be like this :

 

 

Alfresco :

Our French door (soon will be painted) :

Handover will be around 14 October, another delay again....but hopefully they'll surprise me and do it sooner...Oh, and SS said our correct laundry door has been ordered and will be delivered next week.

 

Now still need to decide with our plantation shutters, should we use Basswood or just PVC with aluinium insert?

They both looks the same, price also similar, only one is from timber, one man's made.
Our front house will use all shutters and we get sun from morning till evening. Hhmm, which one will not crack easily ??

Updates.. & lock up stage

Sorry, I have been so busy this month and neglecting my blog.
But I have lots of photos here to catch up..:)

We officially locked up since 2 days ago.
The progress is great, we have our kitchen installed, cornices for most of the house, garage doors installed, and more...

Our lovely front doors

White kitchen

WIP....small, I know, but I think it should be plenty of room for my tuna cans & kid's snacks...:)

Laundry ...yay, so much space for my stuff....:)

Sorry for the dirty photo, the camera lens need to be cleaned....

Master Ensuite, cabinets looks busy with those handles...

Currently we are having problem with the kitchen end result, we are not happy with this joint looks in the bar back. The joints looks very feasible and not neat. The only option is to replace it with polyurethane, but poly easily chips & scratch (some friends said), so that's why we didn't choose poly in the first place. Laminate will be the other option, but will try to get the price tomorrow from WH and see if laminate will have joints or not. We prefer to have 1 piece of board rather than 2 boards like these....:(

Another issue is the microwave height. Tmplle Kitchen has designed it too high for us to reach...

The international standard is 1.30m-1.35m the highest you can have, but this microwave is 1.610m. So it's above me ...

We're still resolving this issue...clearly it's a faulty design...

Last but not least, we got the wrong laundry door....sigh....we changed it to their standard inclusion, like in The Ponds display home, before the admin wrapped up our documents.

We changed our garage doors and this laundry door in the same email. But apparently this door didn't get changed, only the garage door.

Still fighting about this...hopefully SS will call me tomorrow.

We got stairs! :)

Very happy to see how the stairs turned out, exactly like I imagined with a slight curve on the bottom...
Here's the photos :

Also, the cornices has been installed for some rooms...
Here's in the laundry :

The Amazing Gyprocks!

Wow, I must say that I'm impressed with these gyprocks company...
On Thursday,  in just 1 day, they had almost 80% job done...
Even today (Saturday), they still worked to finish the gyprocks.....well done....

Have been happy with the progress we had the last 2 weeks.
Here's the photos :

Front Entrance

Study Room - One of my favorite sunny room..:)

Master Bedrooms....I think we need more windows....

Looking at back Rumpus room & Lounge room

Powder room

We're  also still waiting the builder to fix this issue, the electrician placed 2 conduits (left & right) in front portico for our lights, which was really dissapointing....
It's been weeks and still haven't been fixed.

I'm hoping with the additional supervisor they gave me, it will speed up the building....
Fingers crossed!

Progress so far....

We had not much progress lately after electrical and A/C duct installed last week.
Yesterday we had our private independent inspection (H&K Ryan) and it's a big relief that no major defect were found.

Surprisingly, today Wsdm's carpenter worked hard on site to fix all requests in Howard's inspection.

The floors get cleaned too which is amazing feeling..:)

I must say the carpenter did a great job, very neat and tidy.

So, SS updated me that insulation & gyprock will done next Monday & Tuesday, very excited!!

Oh, another good news, I have 2 SS now, SJ & WA. Apparently Head office asked WA to speed things up.

But the bad news is that the house will be ready by end of September, that's like 6 weeks over our 26 weeks contract!! :(
I was expecting at least early Sept, that's still acceptable for me with lots of rain in Feb-April which was around 2-3 weeks time in total.

Anyway, fingers crossed that they can finish it earlier....

Lower Roof Pics and A/C duct was done...

I had a great weekend at Canberra, got visited by my sister last week from Indonesia for 2 weeks. So the next 2 weeks will busy taking her out, also busy organising landscapers, checking the house's progress, etc.

Meanwhile, the lower roof has finished last week and we have A/C guy came on Friday to install the ducts and mark the position of the future vents.
We have 15 outlets.

There's 1 position of future vent that I don't like, which is in the Master Bedroom. The future vent will be excatly above our bedhead/our head.
So I talked to my SS this morning and he asked me to contact Ultra Air myself about it.
Hopefully it can be moved away slightly.

Another thing, In our WIR , looks like one of the duct went to the wrong side, instead of the position that Wsdm has provided. It took some of our WIR space instead. Hhhmm?? Will talk about this as well.

I have to organise our retaining wall and apply for DA to council because the retaining wall close to the underground water tank is going to be high, like 900mm. Our left neighbour won't be able to proceed to their next pool stage if I don't do the retaining wall and fences in 4-5 weeks time.

Lower roof today

We have our lower roof done today.
Here's some of the photo when they started to work, even the SS also worked on site to help them, very impressed.

That's my SS...

Prep for lower roof...

We also had an early 8am meeting with the bricklayer's boss, A, and my SS. The outcome was great, he is willing to replace all those chippy bricks around the house, touch up to lots of mortar and the big one was to redo one side of the entrance door.
SS was really firm about this because A was reluctant initially, but in the end it was good. He's going to come this Saturday or the latest Monday , depend on weather, with one of his best brickie.

So, I'm happy with the outcome today, thanks SJ!

I also went to see the council regarding our retaining wall that really bothering me.
Apparently, since we have easement at the corner back, we can't built anything permanently along the back for 1.5m width and 22m length.
Lesson for everyone else, check and recheck again before buying a land. We didn't realise it because the land was unaccessible when we bought it, it was like a jungle with high trees and bushes.

So the only option for us, that 1.5mx22m will have to be stepdown from our backyard. But we can plant some trees, so when the trees grow higher, it can be our private screening screen from the back neighbour.
The other issue is we have to apply DA approval for our left hand side retaining wall (next to gogo's) because our underground water tank was located pretty high, hence we'll need a 900mm retaining wall or 2x 500mm step up retaining walls.
Oh no...these retaining walls will cost us lots of money......:(

Scaffolding were down....

It's been a while since my last posts...
Eaves was installed last week and painted this Monday. After that was nothing happened until yesterday when scaffolding were down. Almost 2 weeks of sunny days were gone just like that...:(

I have been feeling really down and sad the last few weeks.
The slowness of the progress that I can't bear anymore...now after the scaffolding are down, I can see today that many bricks are not good, lots of chips here and there...2 cracked bricks, un-aligned bricks, and also dirty roof.

Here are some of the pics that bugs me :

1. Chips bricks like these, have a few more around the house:

2. Zig zag bricks at the entrance doors corner, have 2 at the entrance door and 1 at the alfresco, these what really upset me today :

3. Chips brick again :

4. Unaligned bricks under window (there are 2 more on the facade and at the back) :

What do you guys think ? Should they replace them / And when do they usually do it? Is it after all bricks are cleaned?

Roof!! Roof!!

This afternoon we got a nice surprise, we got ROOF!!!!
What a fantastic feeling...I can't believe my eyes...when did they do it?
It's been raining and raining since Sunday....
Thanks, Wisdom!

Now I can sleep more peacefully knowing the 2nd floor will be watertight....:)

Sarking!!

Good to see on Saturday that 2 men were working on our site, doing the sarking! Wow, great progress & we're happy because the next day until now, it rains & rains.... I hope the sarking will be fine in this weather... Looking forward to roof this weekend though...:)

Fascia & Gutter installed.....

The bricks has finished on Tuesday 5th June 2012....

Today the reality comes....they invoiced the frames and also bricks at the same time....ouch!!
(I thought they forgot about the frames, he..he...)

Yesterday the fascia & gutter were installed. See photo attached.

http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/013.jpg
http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/010-3.jpg

Bricks Progress today..

Wow, 8 bricklayers today....surprise!

We also had our internal plumbing done...great, the floor was drilled upstair so if it rains again, the water will run to first floor...:)

The thing is, we still haven't gotten the roof, and with the cloudy scattered shower like this, our house will suffer slightly....

Here's the progress today :
http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/058.jpg

http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/057.jpg

http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/002-4.jpg

http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/001-5.jpg

Scaffolding and roof delivered!!

Nice surprise today...
We got our roof tiles delivered and also scaffolding was up...:)

Few photos to update our bricks progress.
It's day 7 for bricks, the brickies had 2 days off because one of the was sick....

Our Alfresco door:

http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/016-1.jpg

Side of the house :

http://s1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/?action=view&current=002-3.jpg

Our roof:

http://s1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/?action=view&current=001-4.jpg

Bricks Progress in 1 week...

Here are the photos for 1 week progress...

http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/010-2.jpg

http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/011-1.jpg

I think our brickies have done good job so far. Although there are some windows gap here and there, it wasn't their fault, they just followed our SS instruction to brick it like that, and it's either the frames company messed up the frame's calculation  or it's normal to have windows sills/infills like that.
The brickies said once they infills it, I won't even know / notice the difference/the gap. Yes, hope so...

http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd444/willcress/014-1.jpg

Brickies starts today!! Awesome!

Nothing can describe this feeling when my SS called me this morning that our brickies are on site....:) after  1 month with no progress....
Thank you, SS...

I visited them this afternoon and there are 4 brickies there still doing their job until 3pm only (because it's Friday! :))
They are so nice and friendly, mid 50 I guess...

Here are the photos of the progress today :