Tandaland

Our land is apparently set to be titled on the 2nd of May, which is next Friday. Whilst I’m less than happy that it is 2 months after we were told it would title. I’m glad that we at least have a date!

Things are starting to move now!!

Thuy was talking to the builder about our taps today… and as expensive as they are, we’re going to get them anyway! This is the only fitting we’ve changed in the whole house. Everything else we were totally happy with. Obviously we’ve extended the garage and alfresco, but otherwise we’re happy with everything as is. So our post contract variations amounts to all of about $1000. Smiles all round.
This is what they look like…

As an added suprise, we also found out (via the builder) that our finance has final approval! So that means we’re all done, signed sealed and delivered If all goes well, permits and stuff will be done in the coming weeks, and fingers crossed we’ll be building before the end of May!

Excitement PLUS PLUS!

Just as we were about to start getting upset, we’ve received a little from Oliver Hume and a phone call from Choice Loans. Construction has finished at the estate, and the land will be titled within the next couple of weeks. This makes it about 2 months after they said it would be done, but given that we’re not ready to build anyway… no biggie.

We also heard back from Choice Loans about the documentation we need for finalising the land contract, and it is all fine and dandy and will be in the hands of the builders by next week. Again, given that the land has been delayed so much it ends up not really that big a deal. So the only question remains is whether the builders are being proactive, or whether they’re going to sit and wait for the final finance docs before they do anything. If they’re already getting the paperwork done, we should still be right to start building by mid-May, and if they haven’t well… we may still make May. So even worst case scenario, isn’t that far from what we were hoping way back in January when we were crossing our fingers for an April build. Frankly, that was always a little optimistic

We still haven’t heard about our taps though…..

We hate waiting.

Waiting is OK when you are waiting for a specific time or date. Like, “the show will start in 15 minutes” or, “we’re going OS in 8 weeks”. But I hate waiting for stuff that has no certainty. Phrases I hate are, “hopefully by the end of the week”, “around mid-month”, “April…maybe”.

Thuy calls it “elastic time” or something similar…but in Vietnamese.. so I think that was giờ dây chun…or something. You’re given a time, and it just stretches and stretches….

We’re actually patient people. But we just get annoyed when someone says, “Your land will be titled late march or mid-feb at the latest”… but mid-April is fast approaching and there is still no sign of it being titled. That in itself isn’t so bad, but it has a flow on effect, because it delays everything else.

In actual fact, we’re pretty lucky that we managed to get land AT ALL that is titled before about August. Some of the blocks we were looking at around Deer Park we wouldn’t have been able to build on until around September… so really we should be all smiles.

I hate being sold pork pies.

We had our colour selection meeting yesterday. Two things have become abundantly clear to us.

a) We’re not interior (or exterior) decorators.
b) We don’t care that we’re not interior (or exterior) decorators.

We were very excited when we turned up. The idea of choosing colours, tiles, carpets, bricks, rooftiles, handles, knobs, knockers etc etc SEEMED like it would be fun. The reality, as we discovered, is that we really just don’t care!! We wan’t our house to look nice, but we’d be perfectly happy for someone else to sit there and pick from the 32 shades of white on our behalf!

We were having fun to start with. When you have only a dozen or so shades of Colorbond (I just noticed that they spell colour as color btw… which annoys me given that it is an Aussie company… but then I guess what the hell is Weetbix??) it isn’t too hard to slip a few coloUr chips together and say, “yep… i like that’. We knew we wanted shades of grey on the facade, a lighter main colour with a darker entryway, and we knew we wanted the front door and garage to be a more natural tone. Bricks and rooftiles took as about 10 seconds each… we both just pointed to the same colour and style and said, “that one”. I’m not sure my “artist’s impression” really is that accurate… but I guess it comes down to what monitor you’re using anyway

colours

So choosing those wasn’t too much of a problem. But then we got on to the kitchn things really slowed down….

We had already decided that we loved the interior of the Larne as it was displayed. The only thing we really wanted to change was the brown of the cupboard doors. This is the colour of the doors as displayed in the Larne. We like the colour, didn’t like the lines.

So we went for a similar colour, but sans the “ligna”…. like this:

Of course, being a bit darker than the original choice, we thought the white of the rest of the kitchen may be abit too harsh, so Thuy picked up this caeserstone(or a similar one, I can’t recall):

But of course, that didn’t match the white cupboards or the brown cupboards or the wall tiles. So it was back to the drawing board. We selected a whole new range of everything, decided that it still didn’t really go and that it was all getting a bit too “brown”, so we said STUFF THIS as it was all getting a bit too airy fairy and a bit too “unknown” and so went back to the original white caeserstone:

So I think perhaps we have a bit more contrast than the display has, but i think that we’ve offset that a bit by not having a quite so white paint throughout.

By this stage we’d pretty much had enough. We’d chosen all our handles and stuff which was easy, because we knew exactly what we wanted. The kitchen was done, exterior was done. Time to move on to flooring! UGGH… by now it was a case of, “what style of tile was in the display? Millenium Grey/Pearl? Done!” “what carpet was in the other display? Chequered Flag 15? DONE!”

Then we got onto paint…. oh my god. What a pain in the arse. Do they REALLY need that many shades of white??? In the end we basically had to railroad our consultant to suggest colours for us, because we not only did’t know… but we also didn’t care. As long as it doesn’t look like shit, we’re done! By the end of it we’d just had enough. It’s not that the consultant wasn’t helpful or nice, it was just that we really honestly didn’t care. Of course we care that our place looks nice, but we just couldn’t be bothered sitting there picking out individual items.

Give me two dozen “themes”, let me point at one and then let me customise the bits I specifically don’t like. We’re not blank canvas people. We like to have a template, and then modify it to suit. In the end that is precisely what we ended up doing. Now we just have to hope that we didn’t stuff it all up completely!

It’s all happening now! We have our colour selection booked in for Monday at Mango Design. We have no idea what to expect, but then that is half the fun isn’t it?

We already know that we’re pretty happy with the entire house as we saw it on display. The only things we’d really want to change are the cupboard handles, the tap handles and the carpet. Everything is else is just nice as it is. We were always aiming for a chocolate theme throughout with splashes of red here and there. In this case, we’ll try and keep the house itself fairly neutral, and add the colour with appliances, furniture etc.

Probably the only point of conjecture at the moment is the facade colour. Again, we’d probably stay fairly neutral… we don’t want anything too out of the ordinary!