It's A Box...

Spent all of today working on the framing in the front yard. We were able to get the frame along the new walk to the front entry down, plus the outside from on the right hand side (Facing) of the yard done, plus the main border along the front of the left. We also transported that mound of dirt left over from the dingo scrapings and filled the right hand box most of the way up. That'll knock down the amount of chip bark we need for that box now, so that's great.

Might not sound like we did a great deal, but it was very tiring work. I also learnt how to angle grind, use a circular saw and a level meter :)

On a sadder note, I lost my bunny Haplo today, who was almost 4 years old :( Ash and I got Haplo and Elvira not long after we got together (Later followed by Dashel and Aurora) to fill the void of a puppy we couldn't have at that point of time. He had been looking a little thin and was losing a bit of fur over the last month or so, but he was still moving along happily enough. Feel very sorry for Elly now, who's the last of the 4 remaining now. She was very protective of him when I went to check him out, which was so cute (Albeit incredibly sad) because she'd always boss him around in the cage. I'm going to look for a new house for Elly tomorrow...Don't feel right keeping her in there at the moment, and it's way too big for her. Hopefully she's still got a few more years left in her though. I'll always remember my little bunny who used to crack it when we'd change his straw, then spend the next half an hour throwing it around his hutch getting it all back how it should be.

Preparing For Front Build

Dad's got the plans for the front yard all drawn up to correct measurements now, so we're all set to go now with the work on the front yard.

We made a trip down to Bunnings to order the wood we needed for all the framing, but they didn't have enough of what we needed, and what they did have, lacked a bit in quality. Went for a drive down the road to Bowens instead and they had lots of what we needed and the wood all had a good finish and cut on it. Wound up costing us a little more than we were originally thinking, but it will look a bit better, plus they'll deliver it tomorrow morning for us.

During the week we also painted the front fences green to go with the colour scheming of the house.

Dingbat, Away!

Today we had Ash's brother (Andrew) come over with the Dingo and start ripping up all the dirt/weeds in the front yard so that we can get started on the landscaping of our front yard.

When I got home from work, the job was 80% done already, so after a bit of lunch dad and I went out and finished most of the rest off. It looks a lot different now that it's all been lowered a bit, but ironically looks like it did about a year ago, only lower. At least this time around I know something's actually going to be done with it and we're not just going to have a mud bath in our front yard.

After getting it mostly to the level we wanted we had to do a little bit of corner work by hand/shovel but that didn't take too long. Biggest thing I took out of it all was the fact that the plastic weed mat we had down in the garden bed got ripped out. It was installed wrong and it's been bugging me ever since it went in! Not that there's any plants to worry about there for now, but it's still nice to know all is well in there.

And It's Mine, All Mine!

We paid off the final 5% of the deposit today so we're fully paid up in terms of deposits now. We'll still have to clear finance (Basically pre-approval from the bank, but dad and our broker are certain we'll pass this without any trouble), but once that's done, it's literally just a waiting game for the land.

Mum, dad and I were driving down to do it as we got a call from Ash saying she'd just left work, so she'd meet us there. We decided to go and visit Terry our convayencer, basically to let her know she was our convayencer. Mum and Dad are using her and had high reviews of her, so I figured it was just as easy to use her. Plus she's not that far from where we live now and when we'll be renting in Wallan. She was a very nice lady and she's going to take a look through everything properly once she's back from Christmas holidays.

Met up with Ash, paid the deposit, then had a quick look at our new purchase and then went to Harvey Norman, where we found a couch that we'd like for our Family Room, so that's in the book of things we want :)

When we got home I helped dad take our little shrubs out of the front garden and moved them out the back, so that they don't get demolished when Andrew comes through with the dingo tomorrow.

Also read through the contracts this morning at work, in particular the list of things we can/can't have in the estate. Most of the the things listed aren't that big of a deal. We can't have roller shutters, which we weren't really thinking about having, but hadn't completely ruled out. So they're now definately off the list. Also on the list of no-no's was single pole letter boxes. Basically our letter box will have to be a sandstone one, or contained within a fence/mini-wall...which is kind of interesting as another thing lists that you can't have any fencing out the front, so i'm curious to see how that one plays out.
The rest of the limits shouldn't have too big of an impact on us, but they're things we'll need to be aware of.

Land Ho!

This afternoon when Ash finished work, we went down and paid the initial deposit on our land! We now have a 5% holding on a lot in Mandalay!

We'll have to come back tomorrow (Or in the next few days) to pay the balance of the deposit (A further 5%) as we're doing it on my parents credit card (So we don't have to pay for a bank cheque/money order basically) and then subject to financials, it'll be ours...well it'll be held for us until we fork over large amounts of money in August 2010.

The lady we've been dealing with so far at Mandalay was off for the day, so we had a different lady, but she knew my parents anyway from having worked a few days at Wallara Waters.

We also got given an encyclopedia of a sales contract, which has all the land information as well as the 10,000 Donny Do's and Don'ts...I think that's going to take a bit of reading through.

As a side note, it was absolutely bucketing down with rain when we went down. Doesn't really feel right having so much rain in December, but I'm not complaining.

Picture Follow Up

Just a second post to upload the rest of the pictures of the brick removal stage:

Lulu thinks work is tiring, but holes are good beds

Whose Idiot Idea Was This Again?

Ugh what a mind numbing day of labour! What we (Being dad and I) originally thought would be a simple 2-3 hour job max, turned into a full day battle against my front yard. Where most people would lay pavers with sand and mortar, this guy had laid them on top of concrete, which was fused with bricks and more concrete. All of this went down around about a meter and really, really didn't want to come up. It took a lot of work to get all of that bedding up, and the unfortunate part was I had to do all the physical labour side of it myself. On the upside I got to make a fine mess everywhere :) This is what our house looked like before...well actually before we bought the house

We did some work on the house about a year ago, where we removed all of the roses around the front of the house, took out the shrubs down the driveway side and side fence. There was also a tree in the back right hand corner which we removed. All the bark was replaced with urban stone as well, giving us an end result looking something like this:

Huzzah!

Dad is convinced we can do this, so we're now looking into ways we can get this ball rolling.

Knowing also that we will have to sell our current house to fund it (we'd still have to regardless, even if we could fund the whole loan ourselves) we will have to start working on a few light renovations on the place to bring the price up a little bit and just make it a bit more pleasing than our current dirt and dead shrub front yard. Dad's got some ideas for it, but it looks like we'll be ripping up the paver/bricks that form the current garden bed, making some levels, putting a path to the front door and laying some crushed rock down the front to park the cars on.

Tomorrow we get to start on that

Change In House Design...

Ash and I were poking around on the Porter Davis website the other day and I found a house plan that I liked the look of, the Illoura 33 and we decided we'd go and have a look at it. Ash's off sick today so we decided to go out to Caroline Springs to look at the display house. Mum and Dad came as well as we were going to go by ourselves during the week at any rate.

We went through the house and I liked it better than the Queenstown. I personally felt that the back end of the house was laid out a little bit better than the Queenstown, but I liked that there are several living areas, and all the bedrooms are in their own little area, not on top of the kitchen/dining rooms, but still close enough by. I also really liked the fact that the Master bedroom is down the back end of the house and not by the front door. That's one design of houses that I really dislike but it's been on most house plans for years. I want to be as far from the street as I can to minimise noise! The kitchen/dining/living area was nice and spacious as well.

Ash and I spent a little time walking around it alone and discussing the pros and cons of the place and outside of a couple of minor tweaks, we both really like the house and have decided we're going to build this model

More Finance...

Well finance hit another snag. The valuation of our house came in about $30,000 under what Mark had budgeted for, so we're still pretty much in the same hole that we were in before, having to put more into the intial loan to get it all started so they can do their whopper loan.

Dad has done some shuffling of numbers and is pretty sure we can still do it, we'll just have to do a land loan first, which can should be able to afford while still having our current house, then sell the current one and then get a build loan. Little more stuffing around and I'll need it all explained to me thoroughly but he's pretty sure it can/will work. He needs to talk to Mark about it a bit first.

Let There Be Land...

Ash and I discussed some of our other options for land and we gave the thought of moving a little further out some more serious thinking. We didn't really want to go too far out as I still have to drive to the city every day for work, so it couldn't be any more than an hour away from the city. We still wanted to be removed from the "rat race" as they like to put it, ie, if we could avoid it we didn't want to live in a highly suburbanised area. It'd cost too much and we don't really like people all that much so a quieter area would be best. Finding something that fit our price range to match that though was a bit tough. It was looking like to get land big enough and cheap enough, we'd have to either build out Dandenong way, or Melton. Neither prospect appeal to us in the slightest so we were a bit stumped.

We decided to go for a drive out to the new Mandalay estate out at Beveridge and see what that was all about. We keep driving past it to go to Wallan, but it's a brand new estate that's going to be built around a golf course, so we weren't really that excited about it all, just going to take a looksies.

We went up to the land sales office and had a chat with the lady running the office. Stages 3 and 4 were on sale (4 being released the day before apparently) and they were nice big lots. There were a couple that were 14 wide and a bunch of 16's, but there were a lot of 18+ wide blocks, so we bit the bullet and asked how much they were going for. A block in stage 3, 18x34 was $150,000...Roughly $40,000 cheaper than what we were looking at in Mernda and cheaper as well.

We tried to contain our excitment a bit until we left the office as that price was completely doable for us. It was cheaper by roughly the amount we'd have to put into that stupid mega loan and was in an area we liked (Away from everything but not hermits) so we scurried home to run this idea past dad (Our semi-broker and financier)

Alternatives?

While still annoyed about not being able to build where we wanted to, we've been looking at other options including building in a later stage release in Wallara Waters, where my parents are building. Land is about $40-60,000 cheaper there (Depending on the size of land) than Mernda so it's an option.

Ultimately we decide though that we don't really want to build in Wallan that much and we'd only be doing it as a fallback position and it's a decision we could wind up regretting

The Bad News...

We had a broker come and visit us (The same guy mum and dad are using) to discuss financials and if we can afford to do the whole thing we want basically.

After a meeting of about an hour we got told we wouldn't be able to do what we wanted. Mainly because even though we're selling our current house, we have to be able to take out a combined loan for our current house, land and the build, which we fall short of marginally. It'd mean we'd have to put in some money of our own, but given we just decided we want to do this, we obviously don't have that kind of money saved up.

It's really annoying as he said we can afford to do this easily with our combined wages, but because of all the global finance junk they've really tightend up on how much they'll lend. I think it's actually gone up (or down whichever way you look at it) by 10% just in the 20 months since we bought our house. I can understand why they've done it I guess, but it doesn't help us in the slightest.

Ash and I are now extremely shitty and somewhat upset/disapointed

Queenstown Re-Visited

We had a very full on day looking at display homes with my parents today.

When we woke up Ash and I had decided that we'd go for another drive up to the displays at Mernda and see if we did actually like the place and basically decide if we actually wanted to build or we were just getting super excited for no real good reason.

When we got out of bed my parents were pottering about and they mentioned that they were going down to Mernda so that they could take some photos of the front of the ex-display house that is the model they're getting. Ash and I decided we might as well just go over with them as it'd be silly for us to drive seperately. We hadn't told them our plans or thoughts on building yet though so we were still a little hush-hush on that aspect incase we weren't actually going to go through with this.

We went back through all the displays and wised dad up on the situation. We took them to the Queenstown display and told them that this is the house we think we want to build...only to find out that it's almost exactly the same as the Hayman house they're building (Which is no longer built). It was very weird to find we have such similar tastes in what we wanted in a house.

We all went through it pretty thoroughly and got a good idea on what we'd want to change in the place and so on. Dad and I also went to the land sales office to get an idea on the size of the blocks and how much they were going for. They had a release of land that was titling in April of next year and we'd most likely be looking at a block of land 16w x 32 deep and it was going to cost us around $188,000 for the land.

After we'd finished up there we went for a drive to the Craigieburn estate and had a look at the Lifestyle and Access houses they had on display there, but none of them appealed to us as much as the Queenstown did.

We got home around 530 after a long day of walking and looking at houses, but with the knowing this is definately what we wanted to do.

In The Begining...

Ash and I went down to Hawkstowe to look at the area after reading about it in the Sun, more as a curiosity than anything else and to see how much a house and some land would cost us roughly. We had a bit of a drive around the estate and the area seemed appealing enough so we went and looked at some of the packages they were offering over at the sales office.

The options seemed like they were within our price range, but we liked the look of some of the options they had over at Mernda a little better, so we went for a drive up the road to the Mernda Villages estate to see what was what over there.

We arrived at the Display Village and opted to go for a walk through the Porter Davis displays, as they're the builder my parents are going through so we're already somewhat familiar with them. They had 3 Lifestyle and 3 Prestige houses on display so we did a walkthrough of them and of course we really liked the Prestige houses the best. We liked the Churchill, although we think it may of been the lovely lap pool that was selling that house to us, but we loved the Queenstown 33 they had on display there. It was a house that we could very easily see ourselves living in and raising a family in. We grabbed some pamphlets for the place and headed home from there, pretty excited about the place.

There Can Be Only One...

The following is a journal depecting the journey that my partner (Ash) and I go through in the process of building our own home, in the new Mandalay estate in Beveridge.

Ash and I have been living in our current house in Roxburgh Park for almost 2 years now, with our 3 dogs - Sorcha, Bailey and Lulu. We also live with my best friend Steve and my parents, who are staying with us while their house in Wallara Waters (Wallan) is being built.

The decision to build was a rather quick and unexpected decision for us, as it wasn't on our radar at all a few months ago. We'd only just bought our current and 1st home in 2008 so we were pretty set where we are for the long haul. We knew that the next house we'd buy would be one that we built, as we were finding there were a lot of things we wanted to change about our current home, so we'd just skipi that problem by putting in things we want everywhere, hopefully eliminating that problem. But that wasn't going to happen for several years.

We came about the decision from a random newspaper article I read about the estate of Hawkstowe, between Epping and Mernda. I commented to Ash that it'd be a really nice place to live (Visually) and we decided to go for a drive to go and check it out.

The rest as they say, is history