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!!

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

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!

So now the real fun starts! We had our first tender meeting on Saturday. We sat down with the fine folks at Urbanedge and went through the pricing of all the extra stuff we have asked for. We’re not really changing that much in the scheme of things. mostly because Urbanedge already includes all the stuff like carpet, downlights, flyscreens etc. I think we’re up around $30k of extras, but when you consider that $20k of that is the alfresco/garage extension and ducted aircon…. well we’re doing ok!

We modified a couple of things from the original request. We’ve decided not to go with the glass splashback in the kitchen, we’re deleting the window above the bed in the master bedroom, we’re going to do feature walls later (so that they’re not in contract) and we’re not having fancy bi-fold doors to the alfresco. So that is saving us about 5 grand right there… Of course that got quickly eaten up with the extras we added in exchange.

It turns out that we actually have another metre down the alfresco side of the house that we didn’t know we had. Something must’ve gone screwy with the first measure up of the house and block. So now we’re extending the alfresco and garage a little more! It means more money, but the upside is that the external portion of the alfresco is 4000×4000 making the whole thing about 6300×4000 which will be great. Being a 4 metre span now, I dont know if they will need to include pillars as well… i’m hoping not.

The down side is now the garage has to be extended as well…. we don’t HAVE to I guess, but we want to keep the alfresco roof line hidden behind the garage roof. So that now means our garage is about 2.4m wider than it was… not wide enough to be a 3 car, but too wide for a two car. Leanne and Kumar had a great idea, which is to add a window in the front of the garage, rather than having an odd sized garage door or a big blank space.

I’ve done a bit of messing about in Photoshop to show what we’re aiming for and the alternatives.

Standard facade

Too much wall!

Too much door!

And here is the what our modified one should look like….

Our modified facade

The extra window will actually just lead into the garage, but it gives the feeling of the house being bigger than it really is and maintains the balance between house and garage. I should point out that the images aren’t to scale

We’re also adding a couple of more lights to the alfresco, and a fan point (another good idea from Leanne!)… but that’s it for now! We need to keep some money up our sleeve for when we go choose colours and taps and stuff like that.

Well crack open the Champagne (or perhaps the cheaper Australian equivalent)! We’ve finally gotten approval for our finance, which means we’re now OFFICIALLY building a house! A big sigh of relief all round. I should feel more thrilled, but I think we are just relieved that we’ve gotten confirmation. I don’t think we ever really doubted it, but you can never be too sure!

So our tender doc hasn’t come back from the builder yet, which means we’ll have to wait a little longer before we start getting into the nitty gritty. But that is not such a bad thing I suppose. Speaking of building, one thing I did think of the other day which I must add to the tender is a double door or a 2 metre roller door from the garage to the backyard. The house comes with a single door already, but I just had visions of trying to get rocks and plants into the backyard without being able to fit a wheelbarrow out the back! EEK! So we must remember to add that to the tender request!

We’re finally on our way!

Wow… busy day today!

First of all, we’ve had all the contracts reviewed by legal types and this morning went and handed them back to the vendor along with our deposit, meaning we have now OFFICIALLY purchased a block of land. Of course it’s not OURS until we’ve paid for it all… but that’s gonna be a month or two away… so we’ll celebrate a small step forward today anyway!

In other news, we’ve confirmed that our driveway will be built on the North side of the block, or the right side of the block (or left side if you’re facing the street). This was a fun one, because we’d had it confirmed several times that it would be placed in the correct location, but it hadn’t actually been amended to the contract. The problem being that it isn’t really part of our lot and isn’t really the councils problem because they don’t build driveway crossovers, and the estate can only build it in a certain location with approval from the council. It’s one of those nasty things where its not really anyone’s problem except the person who wants to move it. Anyway…..long story short, it is being put in today or tomorrow and WILL be on the Northern side of the block. Big thumbs up to Chris and Bill from Oliver Hume!

This morning we had a guy come round with a fancy infra-red measuring device to value our apartment. We’re hoping it is worth a heap more than we owe, as it is being used as equity against the new place. We don’t know what it is worth yet, but fingers crossed it is enough to ensure we have plenty of room with the finance!

Last one for today. We got sent a list of 5 references for our builder. Not written ones, I had to call up and talk to them. This is actually far better for us, because it means the builder doesn’t know what they’re telling us. Short story is they all love Urbanedge. A couple of them had built previously with “other builders” and had a lot of problems that were very hard to fix because it was practically impossible to get hold of the person who could actually help you. All correspondence for those mobs is via the office. Urbanedge apparently have you working very closely with the building supervisor, so if there are any problems they are identified early and fixed quickly.

One of the referees had minor problems with supply of their special custom fittings, and managed to work through it all with Urbanedge easily. To me, being able to work through a problem is far more beneficial than hearing that they never had any. Everyone knows that you WILL have problems when you build, it is just a matter of how you get them resolved.

So far so good!

Well we had our first brain fart today. We’ve been getting all our contracts and stuff organised and reviewed by our friendly conveyancing/lawyer types this week. Unfortunately, the conveyancer we used last time now works for a really big expensive law firm and is now not really suitable for our lowly “17 x 40″ block of land.

We were recommended another conveyancer by our broker Angela, who we then called yesterday to arrange them to look over the contracts…. but somehow as conveyancers they are not qualified to examine contracts, which is odd, because I thought these things were generally handled by the same place…..but apparently not. Anyhow, Angela the conveyancer (not finance Angela) uses a solicitor who they use and so we called her to get her to look, but no too busy! GAH! For the sake of completeness, the solicitors name was also Angela. Apparently, all females involved in property are called Angela, and all men in property are called Andrew… because we’ve had 3 of each so far!

But I digress…

Google to the rescue. “property lawyer Melbourne”. First entry was actually a website for a group we were going to engage the services of anyway, so we get in touch with them, organise all the details and send them through the PDF of all the contract BS that we’d been sent. Unfortunately our land sales guy neglected to include the section 32 for the lot in question… meaning that our very friendly lawyer Leonie couldn’t actually do much. So back on the phone to mr Land Sales who has been kind enough to fax through the documents to our friendly lawyer. Hopefully he hasn’t left any pages out

So if all goes well we should hear back in the next few hours that everything is ok with the contract and we can go in tomorrow and sign up. When it comes time to do the house contract I hope we will be a little more organised!

UPDATE: He only faxed 2 pages of the section 32… so no, we won’t be signing up tomorrow!