Excavation Complete

After one week we are done. Took a little time (and added expense) to get the sandstone out. They needed to bring in some sort of rock saw to get a nice clean cut down the fence line. Finished product looks pretty nice.
We got a bit of a shock when we found out we were up for 23 truck loads of fill removal. Seems a little excessive.

Excavation Pics

From the back

From the front of the block

Anyone want some Sandstone?

Start of Side cut. Location of retaining wall

Rock saw at work

Excavation starts

Just found out they have started excavation already!! Had a call from the supervisor not long ago saying they had hit sandstone(we knew that was coming) and asking whether I was happy with them to remove the sandstone and take the fill.
I wasn't expecting them to start the same day they assigned us a supervisor.

Construction Certificate approved and we have pegs

We received a new hydraulic plan a few weeks ago to fulfil council requirements. Basically we had had to add more trenches to hold more runoff. Not real happy about the extra 7k variation that was added to the contract but what can you do.
Thankfully no major issues getting the construction certificate approved which we found out about last week.
We went out to the block on the weekend and noticed they had done the pegout. Sorry no pictures. I wasn't expecting them in yet.

Demolition begins

Demolition started Monday this week and is supposed to finish Wednesday. I will upload some pics when I get them.
We are hoping that our builder will be lodging the Construction certificate this week, but are waiting on the engineers to update the hydraulic plan with some extra detail as per councils condition.
Another condition from council is that we have to build retaining walls as soon possible after excavation. 
The only other condition that really affects us was we needed tree protection for the Gum tree out the front so I had to organise a fence guy to place a fence around the tree for the duration of the build.
We are using an accredited certifier for the construction certificate so hopefully it won’t take as long as council to get approved.

DA Approval Granted

Finally, after 13 weeks we have been told that approval consent has been granted.

After the neighbour submissions and the months it spent in the engineering dept at council we starting to think it would never get approved. The assessing officer mentioned we will have a few special conditions such as tree protection for the Gum trees on the block. We will find out more details about these from the builder next week. Hopefully nothing major.

Demolition is booked in for next month so now I can start ebaying the appliances from around the house.

Getting sick of waiting

We'll it's been a little over six weeks since we submitted our DA now and we are still waiting on approval. We found out last week neighbour notification had concluded however they had received 2 letters. One neighbour has concerns about trees. The other neighbour has problems with runoff. Bugger.
The Accessing officer will be looking into these at the end of the week.

Kitchen Design

I thought I would post the 3D design we received from the kitchen company. We are pretty happy with the layout.
The island will be filled mostly drawers and the microwave. We will also have a few drawers in the pantry too to give us better access to items near the back. The right most cupboard next to the dishwasher will contain pull out bins so we no longer need ugly bins standing on the floor.

Plans back in council

We finally got a new drainage plan from the engineers so our plans are going back to council today. It took us a while to find a solution with rainwater tanks sizes that would fit along one side of the property leaving a clear path down the other. Hopefully council won’t send the plans back this time.

Otherwise we are looking forward to receiving a 3D kitchen design from the kitchen company shortly.

What a mess

We have been instructed that we need to change the drainage design and instead of a charged system we now need to increase our water tanks to 10,000L and the overflow from this can be disposed to an absorption trench in the rear yard. The problem is the engineer has updated the design and placed another 2 massive water tanks down the other side of the house where we planned to have a clear pathway. I have had no luck contacting the engineer to try and either move the tank or change it dimension to be higher but a little thinner so we have more room down the side of the house.
To top it off our Contracts Co-ordinator resigned and had her last day is today. The role is officially vacant for a week and half. I don’t have too much hope of us getting back into council in the next few weeks.

Plans rejected due to stormwater design!!

Here we go. Starting to get problems.

As we are downslope the councils preferred option is to flow stormwater with the level of the land to a downslope easement. However as we don't have an easement on our property we need to contact our downslope neighbours to request access to theirs. If they reject access to an easement then we can look at an alternate design for stormwater like the charged system we currently have a hydraulic design for. However they said the hydraulic design didn't cut it anyway.

So back to the drawing board.

Plans in council, Kitchen Appointment

We have been told our plans have been couriered to council yesterday. Yippee!! Hopefully we won't have any problems with the plans or the neighbours.

We had our kitchen appointment today and can imagine the kitchen will look pretty good. Since we have heigh ceilings we have decided to upgrade the height of the cupboards so the cap between the cupboards and the ceilings will not be so great. Also decided to add a few more drawers in the island and place the microwave in the island out of the way.
A few pics below:

Caesarstone Benchtop.

Polytech Cupboards - Snowgum Gloss

Colour Appointment Done

We had our colour/electrical appointment yesterday which went for about 5 hours. We were exhausted by the end and I think we upgraded quite a bit through the appointment so not really looking forward to seeing the total price.

I have updated the sketch of the front of the house with colours to give an idea of the fascade.

Listed below is the breakdown of some of the items selected.

Externals
Render - Wattyl Wild Yukon

Roof Tiles - Contour Gun Metal Gutters,Downpipes - Colourbond MonumentFascia,Eaves,Posts,Garage - Colourbond Dune Windows - Artic Off white Front Door - Corinthian Infinity Woodgrain Internals
Skirting / Architrave - Wattyl Flokati Bedroom Walls - Wattyl Flokati
Main Walls - Wattyl White Pepper Feature Walls - Wattyl Squire House Doors - Corinthian Impression - Wattyl Flokati

Landscape Plan

I have uploaded a copy of the landscape plan we plan on submitting to council. I simply altered the site plan and added references to new and existing trees around the property. The plan is pretty simple as we don't plan on changing much in the backyard in the short term. The front will be made up of a picket fence, some low hedging and a few shrubs.

We are booked in for next Friday to do colour selection, kitchen and electrical!!!

Contract signed

We got our updated tender and thankfully no major surprises. Actually came in cheaper thanks to us not needing an onsite detention system. So signed off on this and paid our deposit.

Took a few weeks to get our updated drawings and everything is looking good except it was missing a few items we previously asked for. You really need an eye for detail when going over plans/tender.

Signed the building Contract today!! 40 week estimated build time with 5 week break at Christmas so we are looking at around 10 months build time. A little peeved they wouldn't increase the late completion payment from $1 a day. Basically take it or leave it.

We also choose our demolition company (State demo) and paid the deposit to them.

We should be doing our colour selection, kitchen and electrical over the next few weeks prior to submitting plans to council. Wish things would move along a bit faster.

Story so far

We decided to buy the worst house in one of the best streets in the suburb within the Sydney Northern districts. The block has a fall front to back of around 2 metres and about 1 metre side to side.

In January we started talking to builders and decided to get Huxley homes to do a quote for us based on a custom version of Monash. We liked Huxley because they built a split-level home in the neighbourhood we liked the look of. Also most other project home builders were not flexible on their design or don't do splits.After discussions with the architect from Huxley we received the following sketches which we love.

After a bit of a wait we received our Tender. Was a bit of a shock as it was over $50k more than we had originally thought. This was mainly due to high site costs as we are building on bearers and joists, the house being a little bigger than we thought and extra allowances for a possible on-site detention system for stormwater.We decided to go ahead with the tender but decided to cut back on a few little things here and there. Since then we have received our drawings and hydraulic reports and it looks like we don't need a detention system as the house is less than 35% of site coverage.We noticed a few things missing or we wanted changed on the drawings so are waiting on this and also waiting for them to draw up contract. Still haven't received updated site costs yet so that should be interesting.