Land Surveyor and Sample feature Tile ready for Pick up

So today is the Land Surveyor is going out to survey the land which he should be doing right now since there isn't any issues with the weather. The land/soil surveyor should be giving me a call - hasn't happened as yet to the the surprise of the Land Surveyor- to go on premises and do his bit for the pre-build requirements.

On another note the feature tile for the bathroom sample came in from Oakleigh Beaumont tiles - Marie's hopefully gone to pick this up as I'm at work and wont be able to pick it up.

Idea for Flooring Materials and which Rooms.

This is the idea I had for flooring for the new house:

Playing with Envisage Room Deisgn

There is a few things I would change as the stair case is going to be metal and glass railings with stained wood stairs but I was not able to change this in envisage.
Room is very similar in size to and dimensions as ours with the same staircase.

Parkswide Tree removal and payment for it's value

Well I had a call from Parkswide - Council today and our guy Greg the aborist has got back to me very quickly which is fantastic!

He had already gone out and evaluated the tree and in a nut shell said it isn't going to be a problem to for us to remove it and he's okay'ed it which means full-steam ahead on our plans which is awesome!!

Then we discussed the cost I would have to pay so he calculated the cost and that would be 5k.. yikes expensive but it it full grown tree + 600 removal by them (which a bit $$$ since we recently had some trees removed) but it will have to be done! :-)
I'm pretty happy with the fact because I know they doing what we need so very happy in the end.

First Studio M Tour

Well we had a field day with so much to look at and materiel's to choose!
We looked as much materials and with there swatches as we could starting with the Kitchen setting the tone for most of the house as we knew out base colours and staying far away from the brown spectrum.

Here is some of the swatches and material we choose
Caesar Stone bench tops:
I knew that what was required was white for our project as Marie had requested majority white.
Which will be a running theme for this project.

So we end up seeing a great bench top colour 'Osprey' which had some really nice very small flecks of stone of greens, yellow, blue and saw a much white fine grain colour 'Snow' as the stone on the bench tops of the bathroom.





We thought that we would have the 'Osprey' in the Kitchen bench which will need to be a 40mm with waterfall effect (which means sides on the Ceasar stone bench)

We select two Laminex Finishes but this one one out due to being more subtle and in real life it has a little more blue toning in the grey flecks.
I think this will date better than some of the other swatch I picked up.


I this will be the island bench backing.
It may also be the facings in the bathroom bench to lift the white.

Our bench will look like this but with the kick board - blackended linewood.

The cabinetry will be white enamel - 2 ply high gloss treatment technology - instead of laminate (Marie was sold on it) as seen above image.


I found we might have too much white so was ponderning over using the Laminex on some of the cabinarty but Marie like the white as seen above - thats when I remebred I had seen industrial dome pendants on the 'the block' kitchens in 2011 or 12 which to me might be a way taking away to much white starkness and adding a bit of class to the kitchen.
Tying it in again with the white inside the white Marie loves.

Beacon light: Lucci Décor

Lucci Décor

Inside 1 Light 1/2 Dome Pendant in Black/White

$103.20

WAS $129.00

SAVE $25.80

PRICE $103.20      WAS $129.00  SAVE $25.80

Inside 1 Light 1/2 Dome Pendant in Black/White

Inside 1 Light 1/2 Dome Pendant in Black/White

Inside 1 Light 1/2 Dome Pendant in Black/White

I think it looks pretty stylish ;D

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 The bathroom stone selection is 'Snow'















Marie and I where looking at tiles that we can source from Beaumont Tiles

This is one I saw it really caught my eye but the website didn't mention the name of the tile which was odd since it had for the other room ideas - this found on the en-suite ideas section.
http://www.beaumont-tiles.com.au/RoomIdeas.aspx?room=Ensuites

This will probably be our feature tile just like this setting.
I rang Beaumont tiles Oakleigh  which is the store we need to go to pick the tiles to get the details of this tile which happens to be a new range the guy there is ordering a sample tile for me- very helpful again which he will ring when it comes in wed-thursday.

White Marble Interlock Mosaic Tile
300x300 mm

model no: 189539

We will need to pick another tile for the rest of the wall and bigger stronger tiles for the bathroom/laundry tiles.


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Colour Bond Steal Colour Choice
Ironstone which looks more Blue than online colour swatch

Cross overs (Road Reserves) aka~ Driveway entrances, Naturstrip trees and all the other shenanigans...

So I have had a busy few last days speaking to council about tree removal / replacement.
The questions asked by the council departments are always hard to answer at this stage because drawings aren't finalized but we know in order to finalize them we need to get tree removal approval and drive way moving and relocation approval - which ours will need to be a double to service the existing property and service the new property also.

As it happens I need to deal with two departments that don't necessarily work hand in hand.
For the Whitehorse Council two departments are your main concern for these two things:

1. Parkswide -

This is the department for tree evaluation by Arborist (aka tree guy) to come out and evaluate the street tree and then decide it its okay to remove *(certain trees are add to the area look so cant be removed)

The guy I have been dealing with is pretty nice guy Arborist from the council - I have spoken to him the past.  He left me a voice message saying he would get back to me on Monday with an answer as he's been working in a different department but will be back in office on Monday


I was recomended to an external Arborist opinion on the tree which was also a nice guy who recommended with the tree size we have it may not need him to evaluate it due to the tree not being very wide or very high about 2.5-3 m and less than 30cm in circumference  and that it might be prudent to just see what the council Arborist says because they have to evaluate it anyway to gauge the value I have to pay to remove it.
But he did give me the price to evaluate and the report $275inc gst and that he can remove it - which is nice to have if needed.

Our First Metricon Official Meeting!

So last week we had our first official appointment with Metricon. I had many emails back and forth earlier for other properties we where looking at but didn't proceed with for various reasons.

Anthony (our Metricon rep) who I met at the Caufield duplex open day helped us with design on the corner block that were going to build on and helped recommend a design from the duplex range that would fit on our new subdivision land area a couple of recommendations where made to us the existing house which is a 50's weatherboard is going to be kept.

Because keeping the existing house there was quite a few factors to consider such a free open space and garage and drive way space for two cars which needed top be factored into with council requirements for the area.

The winning design for us was the Windsor 25 (duplex range) and was the bigger of the two recommended to us with the subdivision allowance of 19.01m D X 18.2 m W(approx) - minus the 3-3.5m for existing property carport and open space.

This is to be confirmed with surveyor and land/soil testing plus other geo requirements which we just paid and cost $4k which is included in the total cost you pay for the project which its nice to know it isn't on top of the total project costs.

This process is said to take about 8 weeks with drafting etc before we receive a Preliminary Contract.

I am getting it drawn up with the Kingston Facade with balcony which I'm hoping won't cause too much issues with council requirements - town planning was okay for non balcony facade here hoping that the extra facade can go on the front and not require the property to be pushed back into out  tight open space yard.

Below is placement of the Chateau design..

23/08/2013       Trees, Trees, Trees

So last week we finally had tree removal on the property done but it was a bit of a saga..
Words of advice :  " Don't pay more than the required deposit to a trade before completion of a job - especially when they don't belong to large business and work for them self - it will just end in tears"

Happy that they are finally complete now we can move on to our meeting with Metricon Stage.

23/08/2013    Getting Idea's and Open Home Inspections

This my first post about out subdivision and build in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne with Metricon homes.

We initially attended one of the duplex open homes newly build in Caufield South which features on Metricon's website and Facebook page and in these happy snaps I took while on tour. We were very impressed by some of features in that home and the good use of space with the block size.

Through the tour I took lots of photos to get an idea of what we wanted and looked intensely at paint work and general standard of the work on the frames, floors, doorways and ceilings to get an idea of Metricon's finishes etc.

Here is a few pictures I took to get an idea of what we would like in our new house.

 Love the floating cupboards for bathroom this is definitely going into our designs as well as the square Kado lux square basins.
Not sure about the color though in some lights it looks a purple and others coco/chocolate color. In our project we will be staying far away from brown toning's and opting for the blues/greys and warm yellows such as the floor boards in the picture  and fresh whites for walls etc.

Lucky that recently a best friend of mine had just built a home with Porta Davis so I did a little compare work with the finishes which were pretty good also but needed a bit tweaking but that's to be expected.