Professional Photos…

Our builder organised to take some professional photos of our house. He shared them on Facebook today, and I thought I’d share them here too. They look amazing!

It’s all systems go!

Our valuation was scheduled for 1.30pm today and at 2.15pm, I had a message from Scott saying that it had all gone to plan and we were ready to pay the final invoices!

Cue excitement!

So the bank paid the final invoice from our loan, and we paid the overs and let Mel and Luke know that everything was all sorted.

We’ve got handover scheduled for 5pm tomorrow afternoon. We can’t believe it’s finally here!

Final Certification

We got that pretty piece of paper from the government today certifying that our house is fully certified and meets all the requirements! Just waiting on the valuation tomorrow now.

Final Handover and Invoices

We got an email from Mel on the weekend about final handover and invoices. The email set out a few things we needed to organise prior to handover.

Electricity Connection
The electricity was connected in our builders name with Ergon Energy, so we needed to organise to change that over. I’d considered us trying to get a connection with someone other than Ergon, but when I contacted Origin Energy, I was told that we lived in a “non-contestable area” and we had no choice but to connect with Ergon.

HANDY TIP
If you live outside of Brisbane in “Regional Queensland”, there’s a pretty high chance you won’t have a choice but to connect with Ergon Energy.

House Insurance
As a part of our loan with Heritage, it is specified exactly how much we need to insure the house for in order to meet their mortgage lending requirements. We organised our home and contents insurance with Allianz Insurance.

Gas Connection
Again, living in “Regional Queensland”, suppliers for gas is quite limited as well. We connected with Elgas in the end. They had a deal where you get $80 worth of gas credits which you can use when you set up a new connection. Our bottles should be delivered within the week.

HANDY TIP
Make sure your builder/plumber provides you with a copy of your gas certification as you will need this to organise a connection.

Wheelie Bins
This one was an easy win, we just had to call our local council and the bins were delivered within 2 days.

 

We also need to organise our connection with Telstra, but that’s for another day.

Attached to the email was also the invoice for the final instalment of the build, and also our variations. Both of these need to be paid for us to have settlement take place.

We were very proud of ourselves when it came to our variations – we went a total of $3,700 over for the entire build. A fair chunk of this was made up of the extra retaining we went ahead with, the upgrades in plumbing and appliances, and some additional electrical bits and pieces.

I forwarded the invoices onto the bank and our valuation is scheduled for 1.30pm on Thursday. Fingers and toes crossed everything goes to plan from here.

The final touches

When we got to the house this afternoon, Luke was still there doing some final bits and pieces. The site clean had taken place today too and it looked so good!

The slab for the car parking had been poured under the house earlier this week, and it was much thicker than we thought it was going to be.

The slab under the house

They’d also put down some crusher dust as a part of their site clean and levelled it up so that the cars didn’t have any trouble getting onto the slab, and also around near the retaining wall which they’d tidied up as well.

Retaining for additional carparking

The appliances are all in place (and it looks amazing!!), and everything inside looks to be pretty much all sorted, with no defect stickers left around anywhere.

The kitchen

Luke said to us when he was leaving that we should have final certification through early next week, so everything going to plan, we might be having handover by the end of the week! OMG!!

I’m in love!

We went out to the house this afternoon, I opened the front door, and… I fell in love.

Our floor coverings went in today, as did our pendants and they finished the tiling too! The above photo is looking from our front door – directly in front of the kitchen is our living room, and the dining room is off to the right thee.

The kitchen looks AMAZING. The tiles on the splashback turned out better than I expected, and the pendants match in perfectly. Now we just have to wait for our appliances to go in.

The carpet has been laid in the bedrooms too, and it looks equally as good, and is super soft to walk on.

And to round things out, here’s a look at the hallway.

So, so, so happy!

Moving in!

I got off the phone to Luke literally just before and he mentioned that we might be able to move in within the next couple of weeks! All things going to plan of course.

Cue excitement… and a little bit of stress!

All that’s left from what we can see is the painters need to finish off a few things inside and a lot of the outside, the shower heads need to get sorted, the floor coverings need to go in, the kitchen splashback needs doing, and then the slab underneath needs to go down. Not too much, really!

More pieces in place

We did a quick stop off at the house on our way to Brisbane this afternoon after work and a few more bits and pieces were in place.

In the bathrooms, the mirrors and shower screens were in place

 

The sliders on our bedroom cupboards were also in place. They now just need painting.

The front stairs were also getting finished off this afternoon while we were there, but we didn’t take a photo. The balustrade was all in place and the landing was all nailed in too. Hopefully next week they will finish off the little bits of tiling that need doing (a bit in the main bathroom, the splashback in the kitchen, and then the corking), and maybe we might see floor coverings go in… maybe.

Problems with Plumbing

Well, we were right, the plumber and the electrician both headed into the house for fit off this week.

On Tuesday, we had a call from Luke telling us that the basin we had chosen for our powder room had an issue. Basically, the basin was going to sit right up against the tiles at the back.

We had two choices:

1. Run with the basin as is. It will fit; or
2. Select a new basin.

It wasn’t really a difficult decision for us, so we headed off to Samios again to find a new basin that would fit. We were actually really lucky and managed to find one straight away as Luke had called ahead and they’d started looking for us!

On Wednesday, we headed out to the house after work. The electrician was there and was in the middle of fit off. A lot of the  downlights were in place and some of the power points. It’s starting to look great. The downlights are great because you can actually barely see them.

 

We also got told that we needed to find ourselves some pendant lights for the kitchen. We weren’t aware of this so we will have to take a look in Brisbane on the weekend.

On our wandering we saw that our other basins were in place and some taps too. It was then that we saw the shower heads were laid on the floor ready for installation today. And 2 of the 3 were wrong. Sigh.

We called Luke to let him know that these weren’t anything like we had ordered and he said he’d look into it on today for us. Then we took a look at the one which was right, the shower head with the hand-held shower for one of our ensuite shower heads. And there was a problem too. The water outlet was too high, so our shower head would be way too high too and look stupid because of the crane arm. See below.

 

Cue another phone call with Luke.
So the decision was made to see if we could get the shower heads that we wanted and with slightly shorter crane arms.

Luke called today and said that it’ll have to wait until next week now as the rep he deals with at Samios is away. Bugger.

Another week of progress…

This week, we got a key to our front door!… because they need to start locking the place up now.

The painters also started this week, and looks like as of this afternoon, they’re pretty close to being finished. We are really happy with our colour choice now we can see it on the walls in bulk amounts. We knew it’d look different in different rooms based on the amount of light in each, but we still love it.

Our septic tank also went in this week, and our rainwater tank got delivered as well (right in the middle of our driveway). Shame it wasn’t connected with the amount of rain we’ve had this week.

We suspect that this week might see our electrician and plumber head in for fit off, but we’ll just wait and see.