Slab & Plumbing

More photos of the slab...The plumbers have laid the pipes around the house and connected both the recycled and potable water. The rain has made the area a bit of a no go for the moment. The pile of dirt has been moved from our backyard and is now on next doors land. Lets hope they don't intend starting construction in the next week.

Slab (in daylight)

Went to check out the slab in the daylight and hold on is this slab the right size...The rooms all feel quite small. We are assured everything is right but with just a slab down the size of the house is very deceptive.








This may be an issue when they start laying bricks...

Slab is Poured

Stopped by the house after work and saw our slab had been poured. Peter and Dawn's footprint on earth is here to stay now...

Colour Appointment with Wisdom

Yesterday we had our colour consultation with Anita from Wisdom. To our surprise we were all done in a little under 2 hours. We heard some people were spending up to a full day choosing colours. We pretty much new what we wanted for the external colours so it was rather straightforward. We chose black windows which matches the blackheath bricks really well, the only thing is on the inside we will have a very strong contrast with out light coloured interior. In the end we said we can always have curtains and blinds to soften the look of the black windows.

Anita really knows her stuff of what works and what doesn't and the colour schemes she put together for the display homes are what we are after so it all went smoothly. I will have to in another blog let you all know our colour selections. In the mean time the photo below is of our external colours.

Landscape Plan

For approval of our Plans with The Ponds Design Review Panel and Blacktown City Council we needed to provide a Landscape Plan. We decided to do this ourselves and save around $800. I happen to have AutoCAD at work and with my work as an engineer I also had some basic knowledge of how to use it. So after looking at a few examples and spending hours on the Internet researching trees and plants we had an idea of what we were going to do with our landscaping now just had to transfer all that to AutoCAD.

I was working on the landscape plan for just over a month, doing a little bit each night, and needed to have it finished by the 4/12 so that it could be included with the submission to The Ponds DRP. The last week was hectic with a few late nights trying to finish it all off in time. Our plant selection focused around native plants and I made sure all the DRP requirements were included and noted on the drawing. In the end the Landscape Plan was finished and we were quite happy with it, fingers crossed it passes The Ponds DRP. I will have to upload a picture of it in a later post.

Brick Selection

Who would have thought that brick selection would be so difficult. After our tender acceptance Wisdom told us to go out to either Boral or Austral and select a brick for our house. Well sounds easy doesn't it...

Our tender price meant we limited ourselves with our brick selection in that we would be selecting from the included range or the next range above to save some $$. Well it seemed me and Dawn at first were liking the total opposite colours which is not a good start in the selection process. We found a few bricks we liked at Boral, they gave us a few addresses of houses with the same bricks so that we could see what they looked like. This we felt was a great idea and after seeing what they looked like it made us change our opinion of what we wanted and liked. It is very deceptive looking at the small displays compared to a complete house in the brick. So after a little frustrating times we both agreed on a brick "Boral Blackheath" and found a house in Ropes Crossing with the same which we basically used as a starting point for our external colour selection. This made it a lot easier as now we could visualise the brick colour together with the windows, garage door and roof tiles we liked.

Bricks Boral 'Blackheath'

Initial House Plans received

We recieved our house plans today and I must say the quality of the plans is very good. It's exciting looking at our house on the plans, well for me anyway but not really for Dawn. We went through the plans and marked up a few small changes such as the way doors open, sink position, window heights and niche positions which we will discuss with Wisdom.

Below is a copy of our plans.