Can you believe some people are working between xmas and new years?

Well, it's been a lazy kind of time since xmas - I've been avoiding shopping centres at all costs, concentrating on playing video games, reading comic books and having yum cha (my kind of holiday!). Moved back home on the weekend as well, after babysitting a big dog and small cat. Cats are OK - they don't need much attention :)

Drove past our block of land today, and was surprised to see some fresh concrete around the underground powerpit that we had put in at the start of November - about time! Looks very neat and tidy now.



However, we also got a letter from the council saying the demolition crew had wrecked a couple of footpath "squares" - I don't know a better word for them - and it'd cost us $600 to have it all fixed. Now, my understanding of the "asset protection permit" was that it would protect us from paying rectification costs, but apparently that's not the case... another $600 going into this build :(

And while we're talking about powerpits and demolition additional costs, we had a comment from B&T (another Nolan builder - I should start up a little club!) asking about the demolition process. Here's a summary:

• Obtain asset protection permit from your council & pay any required bond amount (ours was $160 for the permit, $1000 bond)
  
• Choose a demolition contractor after getting some quotes
  
• Arrange telephone line disconnection through Telstra (allow 1-2 weeks), They won't physically disconnect the line - once the phone number has been "inactivated" your demo crew can just cut the lead-in phone line and take it to the telephone pole.
  
• Arrange electricity and gas disconnections through your electricity/gas providers (allow 2-4 weeks) and the house must be vacant before they'll remove the electricity and gas meters.
• If you're redeveloping your block, make sure you leave the water meter and front tap, and get your demo crew to remove everything but these two items.
  

As for underground powerpit, strictly this has nothing to do with the demolition, but should be done well prior to starting construction (allow 4 weeks from time of ordering powerpit). I'd order the powerpit at the same time as arranging electricity disconnection. For this, call your electricity provider and ask them who provides underground powerpits in your area. Our one was about $1600 (had to get power from the powerpole across the street so a little more than the basic quoted cost of around $900). Good luck B&T! For more details click on the "demolition" tag on the sidebar of this blog.

Finally, here's a screen capture of MyMetricon, the online tool for tracking your house build. Apparently Porter Davis has a similar customer tool, but I've not seen what it looks like.



This screen shows our "preconstruction" chart with everything completed (finally!). This includes such items as deposit, sales process, colour, electrical selections etc, contracts, planning and ordering, right up to the site start date.


This pic shows us the "construction" screen - and clearly nothing's been started yet (the site scrape doesn't get a mention on this screen). Hopefully this empty screen will rocket along to having a whole bunch of yellow bars soon!

Also got an email from Gena yesterday (didn't think she'd be doing emails on her break!) just letting us know we won't be getting any bills while we're overseas in January, which is nice.

I think we'll head to the beach for a day or two tomorrow as it'll be over 30 until Thursday afternoon. Not much accommodation about, but will find a little motel or something near the beach (hopefully) online.

T&T