Tandaland

We are go for launch!

Contract is signed! We’ve locked it in Eddie! No going back now!

Build date won’t be finalised until the land is titled, and we’re told that should be no more than a couple of weeks away. Then we can expect them to start digging dirt around 2 weeeks after that. If all goes well we should still scrape into an April start which would be loverrrly!

Some time this week we need to make an apointment to speak to our interior design consultant from Mango Design (whoever the hell they are!). We’re pretty much settled on what was in the display, other than the tap handles and the cupboard handles. Everything else we’ll probably leave as is, although I wouldn’t mind upgrading the carpet to something a little nicer in the living areas. But to be honest, not too fussed… but the time you fill the place with furniture no one will even notice the carpet as most of the hall/kitchen/dining is tiled anyway. It just so happens that the display already matched the colour scheme we’ve been aiming for!

So fingers crossed that the rubber stamp people at Lands Vic get stamping for us!!

No real news… just waiting for our contract to be prepared….It was supposed to be done last week, but apparently will be done this week. Our land is also supposed to have title by now, but doesn’t appear that has happened either… so we’ll wait some more

I completely forgot to upload our finalised plans! DER!!!

So… the garage is about 2 metres wider than it was originally. The garage door is on the boudary side, and on the facade we added a window which is a mirror of the window to the master bedroom (see the mock ups i did). The alfresco was originally contained within the building, and we have extended it out to the boundary as well (3.5m). This means we have a 4 x 6 outdoor/undercover area now, which I think will be ace! We also added another door to the back of the garage so that we can get big stuff in and out of the backyard.

floorplan

Not only do the bastards at ANZ put up our interest rate before we even get our loan, they’ve re-sent the loan contract to us for the land, because apparently our address was wrong on the first one! I don’t quite know how that is possible given they HAD the land contract in front of them when they drew up the loan docs. But anyway… its not a big deal UNLESS I get a phone call today saying that our land is titled, then we might be in a bit of a rush So now we have to fill out all these forms again with the correct address. Apparently we DON’T own a block on Amsterdam Ave, its on Sayers Rd. Seriously… WTF?

We have our final tender back. The new plans look great. The alfresco is just as I envisaged it, as is the garage extension. To be honest it is going to be hard to know whether we’ve made the right decision until we’re in it. I can see it in my mind, but its not until you can walk around in it that you know it is right.

We hopefully will be signing contracts in the next few weeks, and we should also be off to choose our colours, door knobs and all that jazz in the coming weeks as well. From there we’ve got to wait for land settlement to occur, which will hopefully be by the end of the month, and then the builder can start building! Well… almost…we’re in the queue already, but we don’t have a start date yet!

After a little bit of a wait, we finally have our “final” price. I say “final” because we all know these things are subject to change. We’ve added everything that we want to add, and so that is about that as far as the tender document goes. We are expecting to receive the final house plans some time this week. If we’re happy with those, we’ll sign off and they will go off and prepare the contract. Somewhere in the middle we should be choosing our colours and handles and all that…. and that is where the price will no doubt go up.

The impressive thing, however, is that when we started looking we had a firm figure in mind that we weren’t allowed to go over. From my understanding, most people go over that number by tens of thousands… especially once you add in things like carpet, air-con, tiles, heating, water tanks etc. I’m pleased to say, that all up including the land and all house changes (including the aforementioned items), we’re actually UNDER budget by about eight thousand dollars! Of course, that money will be absorbed pretty quickly when it comes to landscaping, fencing and driveway…. but hey!