So so exciting to walk through the rooms. It looks awesome! Like amazing! Like just as we imagined! Massive windows, beautiful views of the garden and trees from every room. Will try to get down to the site again over the long weekend (not sure if we'll be around tomorrow tho) and give you a walk-through! Eep!! So exciting!!
I know, right?? This was YESTERDAY! On Monday it was just a block outline on the ground. On Thursday it was a mother-freaking HOUSE! Only took a couple of quick pics as we popped in after work yesterday so the boys were mayhem. Like, ended up both naked, covered in mud jumping in the puddles and falling over on the concrete floor mayhem. So so exciting to walk through the rooms. It looks awesome! Like amazing! Like just as we imagined! Massive windows, beautiful views of the garden and trees from every room. Will try to get down to the site again over the long weekend (not sure if we'll be around tomorrow tho) and give you a walk-through! Eep!! So exciting!! Love this part of the design! This is the front door, the entry will have a big skylight above it... and you'll be able to see straight through to the trees and garden out the far end of the living! *sigh* perfection!
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Busy day at the site today!! Took the boys down in their PJ Suits and Gummies to watch the BIG concrete trucks! Nico was in heaven! They had set up a massive crane type thing with a big nozzle at the end ("Look at you waving your big nozzle about! You've done that before, haven't you"! Oh young MAN!!) that sprayed the concrete out to the far reaches of the floor area. You could definitely see the difference between the normal concrete and the lighter, coloured concrete. Well I hope you would, since we paid almost a couple of grand for some colour! Observe: Laying was followed by smoothing, smoothing, and more smoothing. Meanwhile we returned home for coffee group. As an aside, I made "chocolate fudge" out of pureed black beans, honey, and cacao powder... and Nico LOVES it! Ha ha!! Today has been awesome! But I digress..... back to the site this afternoon to check out the finished job. Voila! Whoop! This house thing is really gonna happen! Finally getting excited :D They'll keep it flooded for a while to reduce cracking, let it dry out slowly for the best finish. Can't wait to dance on it!! To Weezer's new song, a current fav in our house: "Rockin' out like it's '94... take me back, back to the SHAAAAAAAAACK!" (That's Sam singing, not me. I may have modelled it tho.)
We've broken ground! After drag, drag, dragging, all of a sudden it's action-stations! Consent came through last Monday, and the diggers moved in on Tues! Sadly we have missed all the diggers / concrete mixers so far due to being at work or having other stuff on. At least the boys don't know what they're missing out on! So far the builders have dug out the foundations, rammed some massive poles a couple of metres into the ground (due to the soil being soft), and built up a block rim in which they will pour the concrete foundations. We've had to be exactly certain about where we want our toilets, like how-many-mm-from-the-internal-wall certain cos the pipes will be in the foundation and can't be moved! Here is the view at our section nowadays: See if you can spot Sam! (You won't spot Nico. He's in the car having a screaming tantrum because he threw a rock at Sam's back and now has to remain in his carseat...).
Exciting times!! In other news, we got a quote for our kitchen from a non-local kitchen guy.... and it's $4000 cheaper. Including travel / shipping all the bits to Greytown. Went back to the local options, but they can't / aren't willing to match it. $3000 is kind of a big deal when you have to watch every penny in a house-build! Boo local guys, try harder! Meeting with the concrete guy on Monday to nail down our colour choice before they pour the foundation and then the floor. Nervous! Fingers crossed the weather continues to be mild and we don't get any major surprises so that the build goes smoothly! Update y'all soon! Ugh, what a week. Met our bank person and went thru all the stuff needed to set up our bank account. A few days later we realised that although she had set up our account, she hadn't actually given us any way to ACCESS the account - no internet banking, no eftpos card. WTF ASB? So back to the bank we went... Got a letter from the Council that was impossible to decipher (this coming from an English Scholar!!). Turns out we have to pay the Council's Soliciter to put a note on our Title saying that if we had a crazy-big flood, we'd probably get some flooding. The fact that pretty much all of Greytown is on the flood map doesn't seem to matter. Tried to cut down the kitchen quote by switching out the painted cabinetry to Arborform wrapped cabinetry. Saved about $500. Bum. Our Solicitor said it'd cost about $500 for us to get him to read thru the fine print of our Fixed Price Builder's contract, (there goes the money we saved on cabinetry!!), so we decided to put on our best legalese hats and wade thru that puppy ourselves! Suffice to say..... we are taking the plunge! Signed up and pegged out. PEGGED OUT!! Finally something to get excited over instead of stressed out about! Regardez-vous our gorgeous new home (to be).... Isn't she a beauty? It was actually pretty fun to walk around pretending to hang out in the lounge, admire the view from our bedroom, and, Sam's favourite, pretend to be on the toilet! Okay, so this pegging out doesn't actually tell you guys much about the house-to-be. Maybe you'd like to see some of our inspirations? In terms of overall form of the building, it's going to be clad in angular-profiled metal in a dark, dark grey. The shape is two long forms, connected by a "bridge" in which there will be the dining area (opening out to the central courtyard), the kitchen behind that (with two skylights above), and the walkthrough mudroom / laundry behind that. It will be monopitch with the higher end being the northfacing end (seen above in the distance). Inspiration for the shape / pitch is this styley place: It won't have that cool boxy bit along the side (can't afford it), but will have cut-outs into the shape which will be clad in cedar weatherboards, kinda like this: So... it's different. You see why the general "find a house-building company and choose a plan" thing wasn't working for us? Inside we're "keeping it real" too. Kitchen is white cabinets with ply box display shelves, old-school stainless steel bench tops, and the island is one big ply box with a white stone top. Flooring will be coloured concrete. Not polished, not cut, so it won't have the details of exposed aggregate and won't have the gloss look either. Instead, it'll be quite matte and understated. I've not seen a house with flooring like it, so it's a tricky decision. Will it look practical and calm? Or will it just look like a garage floor?? Eventually we'd like to lay down light wood or whitewashed bamboo flooring, but since we can't afford it yet, and since we have small boys who destroy everything in their path, concrete is the way to go for now. Luckily, this insanely cool Netherlands home has helped me embrace the concrete floor idea: We're thinking of having clear/stained pine skirtings and window reveals, to warm it up a bit with some wood. A girl can dream, right?
So now you have the inside word! Feel free to comment, but remember what yo' mama tole you! If you don't have anything nice to say, then just say it behind our backs! The clock has stopped!! Damn you Council! Or maybe that should be, damn you slack architect who didn't forsee the miniscule details the SWDC would require? Love (actually, hate) this quote from our official notice: "Until this information is received, your application is placed on hold under S48(2) of the Building Act. The 20 working day clock has been stopped and will not be reactivated until this information is received". Serious much?? It's okay tho, there are a mere two pages of TWENTY-FIVE points of information that they have requested. *sigh* To keep our minds off the stoppage of time itself, lets look at samples! :D We have a veritable ocean of samples. The hard part is imagining how a 4cm2 sample of flooring will look when it's 67m2!! It's also hard to not have all the samples at the same time. The concrete samples are on loan from the building company, the carpet from the carpet shop, but we really need to also have a sample of the ply we plan to use in our kitchen island, a sample of the benchtop we'll use, a sample of the cupboard doors, a sample of the wood skirting we hope to use, and a much bigger sample of the paint colours (white, white, or, um, white?) we are mulling over so we can have the chance to imagine how it might all look in the room. Note the miniscule sample of concrete flooring. Helpful.
Otherwise, all we have been doing is loads and loads of meetings and emails. Ticking boxes and showing passports to complete applications to get money! Lots and lots of money! Thank God for the Mortgage Broker who's doing a lot of running around for us, and is very clear about what info we need to provide to whom by when. People (i.e., sales people) keep saying to us "Wow, the plans look great! So exciting! You must be so excited!!", and we are like.... not really. More like busy. Discussing all the options, getting quotes, trying to narrow down to make a decision. And waiting. For that goddamn clock to tick again! Yup, it's been a while. A long long while. And a rocky road too! But we are still moving in the direction of Building a House! I've kind of been afraid to post, until we had some concrete progress under our belt, because for a while there? It felt like we would never actually get to building stage. And we're still not!! But godammit we're on our way! We have: - a brand new, architectually designed, house plan (thank you brother-in-law....) - All the docs done for consents, including engineering reports and specs. AND these are IN COUNCIL HANDS!! The infamous SWDC Building Consents clock is officially ticking! - Two costing quotes back from two building companies, and another on the way - A massive pile of quotes for everything you've ever imagined (and some things you haven't). Kitchens. Flooring. Light fittings. Door handles. Toilet-paper holders, not even kidding. We've discussed and researched soffits, bulkheads, skirting, ceiling heights, trusses, thermal-breaking, sound-proofing (for the kids rooms! Get your mind out of the gutter! Oh, and speaking of gutters...), Guttering. Water-heating. Extraction fan ducting. The list is only beginning..... - A mortgage. Already! Argh! Everyone cross fingers that the rates stay low for another year til we can lock in our rate! Damn you Auckland and your overheated housing market!! - A ridiculously organised, washi-tape-enhanced filing system, courtesy of yours truly. Somehow the pretty tape makes looking at the eye-watering costs of all the quotes more bearable. Regardez-vous! Feeling updated now? Promise I'll post more often, now that things are definitely in motion. This time next year..... you'll be invited to come visit, and you can all tell me how all the time spent getting everything sorted was TOTALLY WORTH IT!!!!
Um, so it's June. JUNE! Annnnnnnnnnddddddd we're still designin'. That's how we roll. You know how everyone smiles smugly when you say you're building a house and tells you that it is gonna take much, much longer than you think it will, and cost a bunch more too? Turns out that first part is true. As for the second? We'll keep you posted... So what are we doing in all this slow-moving spare time. Research. Reseach research research. Visited the Home Ideas Centre and got exactly zero ideas. Did feel overwhelmed at the number of options of kitchen sinks tho. Who knew? Got a bunch of catalogues, or should I say, an entire giant box full of catalogues. With no prices. Awesome. Got some bamboo flooring samples. I likey! Forcing all our friends who have ever built to give us detailed descriptions of every product they installed and how much it costs and whether they recommend it for our house. Forcing everyone we meet to vote on theoretical rooflines (Gabled or flat? What about monopitch? Eaves or no? Metal or butynol? What about in-ceiling storage? What about if the kids (or mainly just Nico) climbed on the roof? What about the harsh Wairarapa sun?). There is no end to the things that can fill your mind when you are thinking about building. And that's where we're at, THINKING about building. At least dreams are free, right? Currently we're in the middle of a fun part of this whole house-building trip. Designing! Designing with no costs attached! Well that's not strictly true... James (Mackit) has to keep our budget in mind. No good showing us amazing plans that we'll never afford to build, right? But for us, safe in the knowledge that someone who has a good idea of what stuff costs is designing, we are freed up to focus on the fun part.
We've done the brief, the site visit, the developed brief, and signed on the dotted line... so James got to go away and think about everything and try to come up with a design that a) we love, b) meets all our brief requirements, c) makes maximum use of sun and shade and privacy, and d) sits well on the site. Good luck with that! Sooooo glad we're getting someone who knows WTF they are doing to sort this stuff! At Nico's nap time on a Saturday a few weeks ago, it was d-day. That's designs-day. Eep! Excited! Nervous! Nervous for James! James presented us with three designs, all of which met the brief but each was different in feel, in size, in layout. Cue two weeks of Ben and I debating the options and staying up at night drawing possible tweaks and additions. We even folded two plans in half and photocopied them together to create our very own Frankenstein house. We tried fiddling with bits "if we just moved the garage back like this, and shortened the hallway here...." Ben redrew a part of one of the houses using tracing paper (handy to have a Hubby who designs, he has all the tools!). He proudly presented the "new and improved" design to me... only for me to point out that in his design, one of the bedrooms and laundry had no windows! Fail. On the positive side, the bedroom could have had a window into the garage, and that could totally have been Sam's room! After discussing Frankenstein obsessively for a few days, we figured out that we had probably made more problems than we solved by sticking the two plans together. So back to the original plans we went. The plan that I first said "I like that one best" to James? That was the plan we went back to. The next meeting, we got to fiddle with the little details, try to make some bits bigger and some bits smaller, James did a bit more tweaking... and voila! We have a floor plan! I know you're all dying to see it.. but I haven't posted it otherwise all the excitement will be gone and no one will follow my blog anymore! Ha! So we're building a house... but what kind of house? A 1400m2 section is a pretty big blank canvas! How do you even start making a brief? We started by thinking about what annoys us most in our current house (#firstworldproblems alert!). As an example: No proper entrance space. The back door opens into a tiny tiny laundry filled with discarded shoes and empty washing baskets, plus half a sandpit on the floor! The front door is a slider into the lounge. Like RIGHT into the lounge. Like you pretty much walk into the side of our couch. So a priority for us was entrances where we can DUMP STUFF... but in a way that it actually looks like it is meant to go there! Best idea EVER, (IMHO, because it was my idea. Biased you think?), is that we're planning a walk-through utility / mud-room (aka "laundry" in normal NZ speak, please excuse my heavily-influenced-by-Pinterest speak). So from the internal access garage, we'll walk into the mud-room where we can dump our bags / boots / coats / kindy artworks / shopping etc. Huzzah, all our crap is already put away! Wow, that was a lot of detail for a laundry room huh? Our general brief is prob pretty standard: 4 bed, 2 bath plus guest toilet, 2 living (one lounge, one rumpus down the boys' end of the house), kitchen with walk-in pantry, open-plan living. Storage, storage and more storage, cos man do kids have a LOT of crap that goes with them! What's that you say? I'm the one with all the crap? Interesting point.... Um what else... I wanted to be able to see the boys playing outside (in their future sand pit) and in their rumpus room from the kitchen. Cos we all know I spend most of my day in the kitchen, baking homely treats and cooking gourmet dinners for my lucky husband. We want to position the house to make the most of sun in the winter, and shade in the summer. Also want to screen out the neighbours, and focus the living to open out into the heart of the site which is surrounded by trees so makes for private outdoor living. Not too much to ask within our budget, right? Right?? I guess time will tell! |
AuthorHolly and Ben. We've heard the horror stories, we're building a house anyway. Wish us luck! Archives
October 2015
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