On time, as promised

I think this photo shows the excitement of all of us! For the last couple of years, we have been waiting for this day to come! It is finally here! This is the verandah where I will do the majority of my viewing from!

The site cut was supposed to occur over two days (Fri & Mon) we came home that night to see it finished. In retrospect, this was a good thing as the rain Brisbane has had since this time has been biblical!

Here are some before and after pics of the site.

 From the road

 

 

 Coming down the driveway

 

 

 

 From the house

 

 

 From the orchard (back of house)

The next day brought even more rain - getting out to have a look proved to be very hard - especially if you wanted to stay dry.

It's official!

 New found 'mess pit'

 All the back along of the wall 

 The sheer size of the cutting!

 The swimming pool!

 

Turning Ground

I have a heap of posts that I want to go back and enter regarding our time at Studio M and all the hassles we have had along the way. Whilst finance has been HUGE, there have been many other dramas with things like Town Planning and whether or not the half-dead 8ft wattle right in front of where the garage should be is allowed to be removed!

I had planned to do all these things in the holidays (starting next week), however - TOMMORROW is SITE DAY!

We arrived home today to find that the surveyor had been and marked out the 50% cut/fill line and had made a few other marks in the ground. Due to the size of the slope and the amount of fill to come in, the excavation will take 2 whole days (Friday & Monday).

This quick start has caught us napping in terms of getting other things ready such as HSTP and tree removal. Hopefully these can be resolved quickly and do not stop progress. It will be interesting to see where we are at come Christmas time!

 

The photo shows our block - the far right side is our current house and the red outline is where the new house will be roughly located. I will start to add photos from the ground once work starts.

Back in Business

It was this time last year that we thought that we were in business with our finance and all things being aligned. Paper work was signed early 2013, our colour, tile and electrical selections were all done in April 2013, this has been the longest wait of our lives!

Finance was knocked back twice - first time was due to the loan fine print not allowing a construction loan for a block of land where a dwelling already existed. The second time it was all approved by the bank however knocked back on mortgage insurance to the tune of $30k.

All was lost when one afternoon whilst driving home from work I had a call from my broker asking whether or not I was still interested in building our house. Arrgh, Yes, was my response without a second thought. In short, my broker had not given up, well after my wife and I had. That was four weeks ago. In contacting Metricon, I was shocked to discover that our extension deadline had lapsed and we had not paid any further funds to extend the date and as such we were up for an additional $43k as a price rise, thankfully Metricon applied a more common-sense approach and charged us much (much) less than this. Thankfully the increase was under the unconditional finance amount and meant we were in business!

Earlier this week the loan documents were passed over to Metricon, I received and email on Friday to say that our Site Start Date was 5 December and that I will be contacted prior to that to discuss the construction. Just like that we are back in business.

As the house is being built on our block, I have a front-row seat to the construction. I will be taking photos with every changing event and will keep the blog up-to-date!

Over the coming week, I will reflect on the journey so far and discuss our time with Studio M. I will also talk about some of the unknown issues with building on acreage - who knew about water treatment and drip fed irrigation, fire ratings, protected vegetation etc. All of these things pretty much equal the same thing - $$$$!

Please comment if you would like any information on anything I have said.