Tim & Tina's new home building blog - redevelopment in Australia!

Just in stock: door dampers v2.0!

2012-02-09T19:14:00.001+11:00

OK guys - it's taken a while, but we've got our new door dampers in stock!

Check out the video below for an introduction to the new redesigned door dampers. As before, they're suitable to install on kitchen cupboards, laundry, bathroom vanities etc. You can also use them on pot drawers, but after some experience with the previous model, the pot drawers can weigh 10-20kg when loaded with pots & pans, so you will need more dampers - 4 or more depending on how heavy the pot drawers are.

If you'd like to order a set, or find out more details, please check out our dedicated site tim-and-tina.com. We'll be shipping these from Monday next week, all over Australia!

t&t

DIY Deck Part 6: All done (bar the staining!)

2012-01-24T12:55:00.000+11:00

So here's the result of our summer project;

Deck after a rinse and a bit of a scrub. Getting conflicting opinions on whether to clean the deck now and stain, or wait 6 months then clean and stain. If only the deck was this clean and shiny all the time!

Installing deck lights - if I was more prepared, I would've ordered these from eBay and saved 40%, but since I needed to wire in the transformer and run cables under the deck, had to buy them from the Big B at full retail *gasp*. There's 6 lights pointing upwards and 4 pointing out towards the "garden" at the back.

A dusk shot. The LED lights are surprisingly bright, once the backyard is properly finished, it'll look great! Now have to decide what to do with all the weeds and rubble littering the backyard - maybe paving around the deck? Lawn/turf? More mulch? More decking?

T&T

DIY Deck Part 5: 99.5% completed

2012-01-17T12:47:00.000+11:00

As of this morning, the deck is pretty much complete now!

In the near corner there's one short board I'll take to the father-in-laws place to be ripped down to 60mm to fit. I could've done the deck with no ripping, but it would mean larger spaces between the boards, and I wasn't keen on 6-7mm gaps!

On this side, I haven't put in the trim board yet (the vertical piece that hides the joist ends) because I've got a set of LED deck lights that I need to install in the last decking board first. Need a pretty big spade bit (about 35mm) or a small holesaw to get the cuts done.

So I have a newfound respect for all trades now after working on this deck for two weeks solid! Back, arms and hands a little sore. Getting everything square, level, and with consistent gaps is much harder than I'd thought.

We also went down to Laminated Timber Supplies in Croydon yesterday to check out a stain called Cutek CD50. Been reading up a bit on stains, and it seems there's either water or oil based stains, and oil based stains are "generally better" for my liking, as they're easily recoated and don't peel, unlike some water/acrylic based stains. Anyway, spoke to the sales manager David there who was extremely helpful, stained some of my decking offcuts to see what they'd look like and gave us a couple of sample pots. The price is more than the stains in Bunnings etc, but seeing as we've already spent plenty of time & money getting the deck done, it doesn't seem smart to try and save $50 on a stain that can make or break the deck! Will decide on a stain in the next few weeks, anyway. Definitely Cutek is high on the shortlist, mainly because of the service provided so far by David and the good feedback given amongst DIY forums.

And for those who're interested, just to recap on costs - we were quoted $7000 from a tradesman to build our deck (without stainless screws, without deck lights, without picture border!) and I think I've spent maybe $2300 on all materials (including a mitre saw, and a thousand leftover stainless screws). So if you have the inclination - and the time - doing your own deck can be quite satisfying and cost-effective!

Upcoming projects - make a small laundry step (using leftover decking), maybe a letterbox, and confirm the new supplier of our soft closing door dampers version 2.0!

T&T

DIY Deck Part 4: Decking starting to be installed

2012-01-10T21:26:00.000+11:00

So after a frustrating couple of weeks waiting on one ebay seller to get back to me, turns out the delay is all due to Toll IPEC receiving my item and then deciding to lose it for a week. They still haven't found it. Ironically their marketing slogan is "Toll Ipec - If It's Urgent", which should then be followed by "...don't use us, because we'll lose your items and not let you know about it". Pretty impressive for a courier company to fail so hard at their job, so in future I'll be making sure to avoid using them whenever possible.

Anyway, had an excellent experience with Better Hardware. I placed an order Sunday night with a note I needed these screws urgently - I got a call Monday morning from their sales manager who offered to meet me in Melbourne and hand them over to me! I said the next day would be fine, and he couriered them to me which I received Tuesday morning today! Rare to get such great personalised service, highly recommended. So if you need any decking supplies, email Tim at BetterHardware directly and say you saw this recommendation on Tim&Tina's blog and he'll look after you!

So here's what I received from Better Hardware - 1000 stainless steel screws, 10Gx50mm long. Two square driver bits, and a Smart-Bit for countersinking.

I also made a jig out of some leftover aluminium fastener plate - basically I wanted to screw each board down one at a time and make sure all the screws lined up correctly. I staggered the screw joins too to try and minimise any crack formation in the joists.

So, long story short - lots of measuring, re-measuring and re-re-measuring, I manage to line up the first decking board and the first two picture frame boards, and lay a few more decking boards down before my cordless drill battery had enough.

I do love the mitred edge on the picture boards! A bit of a hassle to setup and get 100% right, but looks mint! The Smart-Bit is highly recommended, a massive timesaver and gets the countersinking depth perfect each time. Hoping to get all the decking down in the next 4-5 days!

T&T

DIY Deck Part 3: Joists 70% done

2012-01-07T22:56:00.001+11:00

After the hard work getting the bearers in, the joists (so far) have gone in pretty quick.

Put down some weedmat first, and a bit of sand/rock to hold it in place. Also set in some crossbracing (probably redundant with all the joists being fixed in, but whatever) and the joists are held in with triplegrips at 400mm centres.

Got the first 10 or so joists fixed in, and will get the rest done probably tomorrow - need to trim them to fit in around the brick pier first.

And then more internal framing to do so the picture border can go in.

Pretty annoyed with how one dodgy ebay seller is holding up progress though.

*EDIT* Turnes out the delay was due to the courier company managing to lose a parcel in the 10km between the seller and myself. Even so, if a seller isn't going to be working for a certain period, they shouldn't be advertising items for sale if they're not going to post them for a week. *

T&T

DIY Deck Part 2: Bearers all in

2012-01-05T22:42:00.001+11:00

So I finished installing all the bearers yesterday - mixing concrete is hard work!

So these are the 4 bearers that will support the deck. 3 are long, with 5 stirrups supporting each, and one is shorter with 4 stirrups.

8 of the supports are concreted in place. The black strip is an idea picked up from some DIY forums - basically it's dampcourse material, same used to stop damp moving up your walls. When it rains, it'll stop the water pooling on top of the bearers and joists, hopefully prolonging the lifespan of the deck. There's a proprietary product called Protect-A-Deck which costs a fortune, or by using dampcourse, it's $13 to do the whole deck and then some leftover.

This is one of the things I like about DIY - you can take as much time as you want to research how things are done - and you realise just how likely it is for a contractor to skip things because you (the customer) don't know any better. Would a contractor use this kind of protective strip? Probably not. Will your contractor use sealer/preservative over the cut ends of treated pine bearers/joists? Maybe, if you're lucky. Will your contractor calculate the exact spacing of your joists so they're even, or will they simply slap joists down at 450mm centres and have an uneven one leftover? Will they even use the correct nails, joist hangers, unities/triplegrips? Unfortunately if you don't know what questions to ask and what specifications to check on, you'll probably get something less than the bare minimum. I certainly don't pretend to know everything about decking, but it does take time to read up on best practices, if you can find the time.

I'ev been getting ready for the next stage of the project by making sure all some of the hand-me-down tools I've scrounged are clean, sharp and ready to go - new blades for the circular saw, removing rust from the set square, various OCD things like that!

Tomorrow - I'll be putting on some crossbracing across the bearers, placing weedmat and rock, and installing the joists.

T&T

Happy New Year! DIY Deck Part 1!

2012-01-01T19:21:00.000+11:00

Happy New Year! My New Year's resolution was decided weeks ago - to finally get the deck built in the outdoor room. Did some rough sketches in Visio first to get an idea of the rough dimensions, plus a few more detailed drawings.

This is what our backyard currently looks like - the brick pier is joined to the main house slab by some massive concrete channels, which is useful for attaching some of the bearers. Theres a forest of weeds elsewhere in the backyard!

Anyway, before xmas I cleared up the outdoor room area, removed the temporary step made up of bricks & sand, pulled out all the weeds and used weedkiller before spreading out the sand to level things up. Dug 8 postholes for footing - there will be 11 brackets on existing concrete. No point actually using posts since there's only about 300mm from the ground to the finished floor level.

And today (New Years Day) it decided to be about 35 degrees - a little warm to be doing decking, but I was pretty keen to get cracking on it all, since I had some timber delivered last week for the substructure. Treated pine bearers and joists, with Merbau decking to be ordered and delivered once the framework is done. Here are 4 brackets bolted in for the outermost bearer.

These are pretty nifty things - drill a 10mm diameter hole in the concrete with a good hammer drill, blow out all the concrete dust, install one 10mm diameter self-tapping concrete bolt in the big washer and loosely tighten. This way, you can still rotate the bracket and fine tune positioning, rather than hoping to get it 100% aligned during the bracket installation! Of course make sure all the metalwork is galvanised (or stainless steel).

First bearer installed. 10mm galvanised coachbolts retaining the bearer. Once everything is nice and level, tighen the bolts holding the brackets in. I've got it setup so after using 2/90x45 bearers, 90x45 joists and approx 20mm decking, it'll be 10mm below the rear door sill - sweet! (I hope!)

And the next bearer installed exactly the same way. However this one has a little cantilever off the end so the deck will "project" out over the ground.

And of course, rechecking to make sure everything is still nice and level.

There's two more bearers to install closer to the house, however they will have one bracket on concrete, and 4 stirrups cemented into postholes. Probably won't get these done until Wednesday, as it's going to be 40 tomorrow and about 38 the day after, and after sweating it out today I'm not going to do that again!

This is definitely the biggest DIY job around the house, but so far, so good. I was quoted $7000 for this deck to be done by a tradesperson, and so far I'm estimating the materials to cost about $2000. Fair bit of labour involved, but I have another 3 weeks off work which should see it completed by then!

T&T

DIY: Constructing a side gate Part Two

2011-12-24T07:24:00.000+11:00

With the gate frame hung, time to finish things off - really wanted it done by xmas day, so I finished 99% of the gate yesterday. Usual disclaimer applies - these pictures for informative/educational purposes only, no responsibility taken if you cut a finger off or your house collapses while trying anything you see here etc.

Picked up some screening slats from our local timber wholesaler, a hardwood called Ironsomething in 180cm width, 7cm height. You can also use decking timber as slats, but most decking timber is reeded (grooved underneath) whereas slats are DAR (Dressed All Round, or smooth/finished on all sides) and slats are thinner/weigh less than decking. Anyway I had planned to use 17 slats, but after trial fitting all the slats, took a few off to reduce weight on the gate. Fortunately the precut length was exactly right for the gate size.

You need to predrill all the holes for mounting the slats, otherwise the wood will crack. Drill out the holes large enough so the fixing screws don't impact on the wood!

Calculate the proper spacing for your slats and mark on the frame. That said, I tried to calculate the right distances and I must've screwed something up, because after marking the frame and trial fitting the slats again, everything was way off. I gave up on that, and used a couple of hardwood stakes to get the spacing right. Anyway, I fitted the first three top and bottom slats, then every few slats after that I rechecked all the spacings.

Seemed to turn out OK. Now, if I'd been more prepared here, I would've bough a bit of extra galvanised steel to reinforce the centre mount of each slat, as 180cm is quite a wide span. I'll get it done in a week or so. To secure the slats to the metal frame, I used galvanised self-tapping metal screws. Make sure they're galvanised or stainless steel screws (more expensive) to prevent rusting!

Finally, with a bit of muscle from Tina, we rehung the game. Let's see the dog get out of this one!

So there's only a couple of things left to get this gate finished properly.

Reinforce the middle of the gate with a gate of extra galvanised steel, and secure each slat to that to prevent the slats sagging over time.
After a week or two of weathering, stain/oil the timber. Will choose a dark stain to match the bricks.
Install a latch to the brickwork to secure the gate shut.

Pretty happy so far with how it has turned out. Overall cost, about $160 for the gate frame kit, $10 in misc screws, $95 for timber. 10 minutes to screw the frame together, 15 minutes to align and install hinges, and about an hour to measure out, predrill and screw in the slats and hang.

And to everyone, merry xmas - hope there's plenty of beer and food coming your way!

T&T

DIY: Constructing a side gate Part One

2011-12-20T18:12:00.000+11:00

Since we moved in, been struggling to find time to do all the little jobs, but we're slowly crossing them off the list. I'd tried to get some people in to quote on making a side gate, but no-one is interested in small jobs - or if they are, they quote exorbitant amounts to make it not worth your while. Anyway, we need a proper side gate to keep the dog secure.

Thing you might need: Safety gear( gloves, eye and ear protection. A level. Drill/driver. Timber screws. Measuring tape. Hammer or mallet.

So we picked up a Fortress gate kit from our local hardware supplier. This is just a frame kit, you can choose from a variety of heights and widths, and if it doesn't suit your width exactly, you can cut the width using a hacksaw. For us, the 1.8m wide kit was just right.

The horizontal bars are on the left, and the vertical bars are on the right. Hinges are pre-installed. I laid out the kit so I could figure out where each section would go. Since it's a wide gate, there's a diagonal brace. Very important the the brace runs diagonally down to the bottom hinge as shown in the photo below! If it's the other way around, it doesn't brace the gate in compression and your gate will come apart!

Anyway, it was pretty simple to put it together, took me about 10 minutes. Use a mallet or hammer with a bit of scrap wood to put everything together. The kit comes with some self-tapping metal screws to secure all the parts once you've put it together.

End result. This gate is 1.8m wide and 1.4m high.

So this is where the gate is going to be placed. I thought about attaching the gate with the hinges against our wall, but I'm not that keen on using Dynabolts, chemset screws etc into our brickwork to hold the weight of the gate. Instead, I've decided to mount the gate with the hinges on one of the existing fenceposts, the one painted a bit grey on the right. The fencepost isn't quite plumb vertical, but I can allow for that. Should the fence be replaced in future, just need to unscrew the hinges and re-mount the gate.

Ideally you'd have a second person to help you install these hinges. Estimate where the gate should go and make sure it clears any ground covering you have. Try to get the hinges plumb vertical. The kit doesn't come with any screws to install the hinges, so I got a packet of these timber screws as shown.

After both hinges are secured, hang your gate frame!

And if you took some care, the gate should be nice and level after all your work.

So with the frame all installed and level, the next step is to choose what cladding to put on it. You could use traditional timber pickets, colorbond, slats etc. We'll head out later this week to pick what cladding to use; most likely a Merbau to be stained dark; though I'm also considering a composite product that doesn't require ongoing maintenance.

Cost of the frame kit was about $150, plus a few bucks for the hinge screws. Just need to add in the cost of cladding and more self-tapping metal screws to attach it to the frame, and then a latch to secure it against the house. So far, a pretty simple project, not too costly, and well worth giving it a shot if you can't get any reliable tradesmen to give you a quote on making your own side gate!

T&T

Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol! A reason to get out of your home theatre?

2011-12-17T11:08:00.001+11:00

So the other night we decided to get out for an evening and catch the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise. It's like James Bond crossed with Nathan Drake (for anyone who has played the Uncharted games!)

So we saw it in Hoyts Melb Central, but it wasn't until after that I learned that a few sequences were shot in IMAX format. Did anyone else see The Dark Knight in Imax, where it took up the whole huge screen (it was awesome...). Anyway there's a neat skyscraper sequence in Ghost Protocol that would look similarly great in IMAX, and usually Imax isn't that much more than a regular movie to see, so I'd recommend that if you're interested in a decent action movie!

The highs: Lots of gadgets, actions, explosions. Tom Cruise doing his usual "running very fast away from people with guns/explosions" (as per Minority Report, Knight & Day, all the other M:I movies etc)

The lows: Bizarrely improbable/barely intelligible plot. But then again, this is an action movie people, plot would simply detract from the computer integrated into a contact lens gadget. No big deal, just sit back and enjoy!

Funnily enough the very first M:I movie was on TV last week, and in the opening scene is the team leader, watching a cassette on an aeroplane, then smoking. It came out all the way back in 1996!

Anyway, overall review for MI Ghost Protocol - a good solid 8/10. It's the fourth in the series, so you know what to expect by now!Oh yeah - and Simon Pegg is (as usual) brilliant as the comic relief in this film. If you haven't seen his other work, go watch Shaun of the Dead and Star Trek (reboot) right now!

Anyway how does this relate to everything else? Since we moved into our house, we've only gone out to see a movie twice (the other one was Contagion which was pretty good too - a two hour movie about taking sickie from work, but very well directed). I remember seeing that movie, wonder why the seats were small, made of dirty fabric with someone else's food on the food, and they didn't recline? I think I liked it better in my own home theatre! Yeah it's definitely an indulgence, but we both work long hard hours in difficult jobs, and there's nothing better than sitting down to watching 4 episodes of battlestar galatica back-to-back on your own 3m screen! (except if you go to watch a movie in IMAX which I'll grudgingly accept is totally much better!)

T&T

DIY: Old pine furniture makeover

2011-12-04T20:52:00.000+11:00

So, having previously modernised an old file cabinet to go in our study, found another unwilling victim to experiment on. This is an old pine 2 drawer bedside table I've had since I was a kid - I was unwilling to throw it out or donate it, but didn't want it in our house looking how it did, with many decades of abuse, the varnish peeling off, and the pine starting to yellow. The choice was either to stain it in a very dark finish like Japan Black, or to try the distressed/whitewashed look. Because the thing was in pretty poor shape already, with lots of dents and scratches, I figured the distressed look would be the way to go! Tina also picked out a really nice black French style chandelier for the entrance way, so a little bit of the house might be the "French Provincial" style, a nice contrast to the rest of the Modernist/mid-century/modern mix style of the rest of the house.

Materials needed: sanding block, medium grit sandpaper (about 400), semi-gloss enamel paint, some paintbrushes, lots of spare newspaper.

First of all, took everything outside and using the sandpaper and block, sand off all the clearcoat to get to bare wood. Wipe it off using a damp disposable cloth to get rid of all the dust. Wish I had a "before" photo for this project, but looks like I forgot!

Took it all back inside to paint, covering the floor with newspaper. Would be better if you could paint it in your garage though, as the enamel paint fumes aren't good for brain cells. I bought a little pot of semigloss enamel paint (usually used for your skirting boards, window frames etc) and some cheap brushes, and had a go slopping the paint everywhere. Didn't aim for a good finish, since the aim is to make the final product look slightly worn.

Don't paint the inside wood runners as either the drawers will bind, or you won't be able to get the drawers in at all if there's a fine clearance. Didn't bother painting inside the drawers, but you could if you wanted to. Let things dry off, and keep the dog away from it all.

After a day of drying, put it all back together. You could also have removed the doorknobs first, and replaced them with some other style - same with the legs. Actually looks pretty good in real life!

To get a really distressed look, you would now get your sandpaper and file away at the corners and edges to remove the enamel paint. However, if you wanted a really good (non-distressed) finish to your project, you should probably coat the wood with a primer prior to applying the enamel, and use a spray gun with multiple fine coats to get an even finish, since it's impossible with paintbrushes.

Anyway, this was a nice way of preserving an old bit of furniture and making it fit in with our new house.

T&T

DIY: Sensor floodlights installation

2011-11-22T17:04:00.001+11:00

So this is something I was going to do as soon as we moved in (over a year ago!) but of course I kept forgetting to do it, and only happened to remember while at our local hardware store. We had a standard bayonet mount light fitting outside our front door, and I'd always forget to turn on this light when expecting visitors.

So this is what you call a standard builder's light fitting, the most basic thing imaginable that does the job. The good news is, with this light fitting (also called a batten mount) there are many direct DIY replacements available that you don't need an electrician for. This takes maybe 10-15 minutes to do and is very simple.

I chose this twin floodlight sensor DIY fitting - you can also get oysters with sensors, but I wanted a lot of light in the front. About $30 for the sensor unit and $7 for a twin pack of floodlights. They're pretty high powered at 150W each, but this light will only be on when someone triggers it at night, so I'm not too concerned about their power consumption.

So the next thing you need to do is get up on your ladder and remove the light globe, the threaded screw collar, and the plastic dome thing around the bayonet mount until it looks like this. You probably want to make sure the light is off too.

Open up your DIY sensor light. Make sure you've got the DIY version - there's also a non DIY version in case you have no bayonet mount - for that one you'll need an electrician to legally install it. I've removed the centre cap on the light - you can see a little plug right in the middle - this screws into where your original lightbulb was.

Place the unit over the original bayonet mount, rotate it so the sensor is facing the direction you want, then replace the original screw collar to hold the sensor unit in. If you want, you can also add 3 screws around the outside of the unit to stop it moving, but I've put a few of these in other houses and they stay pretty firm without additional screws.

Screw in your floodlights, adjust the angles of the lights and sensor and make them firm using the wingnuts provided.

Finally, test to make sure your lights work!

I only want these on when someone walks into the sensor range at night, so I'll wait until tonight to make the final adjustments. There are two adjustments you can make - sensitivity of the sensor, and duration of light, just turn a couple of dials on the back of the sensor. The beauty of it is, you can leave the light switch inside turned "on" all the time, but these floodlights will only come on when someone triggers them.

The next lighting-related project is to replace more of the internal plain bayonet lights with nicer ones - we've got a fancy light for the entrance that we'll need an electrician to install, but there were quite a few nice DIY fittings that I might get, once they're Tina-approved! Any electricians reading this in Melbourne and want to help us install some lights in return for some blatant promotion on our blog? Contact us! :)

T&T

DIY: Fence painting

2011-11-19T09:57:00.000+11:00

So, this isn't the hardest task of all, just a bit time consuming. Did this job around Halloween as there were lots of very scary little monsters wandering our street consuming chocolate. We love the look of timber paling fences, just not the colour that was there. You can paint fences the usual way with a brush and lots of swearing, or by using a sprayer. Dulux make a sprayer system which is actually reasonably priced, about $50 for the spray unit (no electricity or anything required) but you have to use their paint formulation, and there just wasn't a colour we liked, and the paint for the sprayer does cost more than plain standard fence paint.

So we ended up with the ol' paint in a bucket, colour is a dark grey, Iron-something, to go with our whole "shades of grey" colour scheme. The wooden rod is a leftover hardwood stake which I used to stir the paint.

So before painting, make sure the fence isn't wet, give it a clean to remove bits of dirt, spiders and other junk (I used a big broom) and cover up any landscaping you don't want splattered with paint. In hindsight, should've painted the fence first before doing anything else!

Ended up using old newspaper to cover up the little solar lights I'd stuck along the side. I love these solar lights - no direct power required, you don't have to remember to turn them on or off, and they give a really nice little glow to the garden at night.

And all done. There's still a bit of fence tucked to the side of garage I'll get around to painting one day.

Could probably do with a second coat too, but from a distance it looks fine! Much more modern than before and works with our overall colour scheme. This section of fence, about 9m long and tapering at the front, took just over an hour to do. Got plenty more fence on the sides and back to get around to, but the front is starting to look acceptable.

Just got a call from Metricon customer service too (on a Saturday morning no less), asking whether the service manager had got in touch with me, so things have been followed up satisfactorily there - although we've decided to not get any further "servicing" done on the last outstanding item!

T&T

For sale: "Special" Nintendo Wii!

2011-11-12T10:08:00.000+11:00

So being a big boy now,, I tend to buy too many toys. One of them is for sale - Nintendo Wii. Suitable for much younger kids than myself!

Anyway, this one is special. I bought it brand new for the express purpose of modifying it for homebrew and ISOs - what does that mean? Well, if any of you have kids with a Nintendo DS, you might have heard of the R4 card. A Wii that can run homebrew is kind of similar, where you can run your "backed up" games from an external hard drive. All the hard technical stuff is done - just plug this wii in, and the homebrew channel and ISO loader is all ready to go! I've basically taken it out of the box, run it for 3 hours to modify it, then never touched it again.

The package comes with the full retail box, wii, power supply, one controller and nunchuk, sports resort original game, sensor bar etc. Asking $150 + $10 postage anywhere in Australia (if you're in Melbourne, we can meet in Niddrie for a pickup). Comment below if you're interested - best xmas present ever!

And on another note, I did get a callback from the 90 day service manager about our door issue. It turns out that the only option to fix our issue is to rip out half the master bedroom and reconstruct it. I'm of the opinion this might fix one issue but cause a dozen more, so unhappily we might just have to live with our defective doorframe :(

T&T

DIY: Landscaping continues

2011-11-03T19:14:00.005+11:00

So last weekend, decided to push on to get more of the front landscaping done. With the hard work of carting many wheelbarrows of aggregate around the house completed, we got 6 cubic metres of black wood mulch delivered.

We chose black wood mulch primarily for its appearance - if you've got garden beds or trees you want to mulch, black wood mulch is probably not what you want!

Anyway, with a bit of help from Tina and my parents, we got the mulch roughly spread out across the front in about an hour. It'll help keep down weeds when it's laid out a few inches thick, and gives a pretty modern, sleek look to the front.

Have done a little tidying up in the front since then, but it's come a long way from the builder's rubble that was there before!

And speaking of builders, there's still one sticking point left. Just like Megan & Stefan, and I guess pretty much anyone who's ever built a project home, Metricon haven't got back to me yet on our bowed ensuite door - noted at handover and 90 day inspection, all the way back at the start of 2011. I sent a very polite letter into the service department about a month ago, and that was met by deafening silence. Wonder if if anyone reading this blog works for Metricon and wants to look up my case and get back to me?

Coming soon (probably not)... planning to build a deck!

T&T

DIY: Landscaping with stones/aggregate

2011-10-16T21:06:00.004+11:00

Managed to finish off setting in the pavers along the side of the house yesterday, and flattened out the front "garden" in preparation for the next stage.

Went down to Daisy's Garden Supplies today - I had shortlisted a few landscape/garden supply places, but quite a few of them don't open at all on Sunday so they got struck off the list immediately! Anyway, they had a good variety of mulches, rocks, stones, sleepers etc, and I was very surprised to hear they'd deliver an order within the hour, even on a Sunday afternoon! So anyway, we chose to get 5 cubic metres of 20mm screenings - it's a granite aggregate, looks great with lots of white/black flecks in it, plus half a dozen sleepers and some other bits & pieces.

So, 45 minutes later we had this dumped in front of the house:

Here's the laundry side of the house with some pavers set into mortar;

and after about 90 minutes, we'd done this much movement of stones. Used layers of newspaper and weedmat under the stones to control weed growth (from what I've read, apparently layered newspaper does a fine job to block weeds growing - we'll see! At least we have plenty of newspaper to recycle this way!).

We'll probably add a few more wheelbarrow loads of stones once the basic coverage is done to make sure it's more level. Already a big improvement over the uneven mud trail that's been there for a year; and once this side is done I can hang up a clothesline outside the laundry.

Hoping to get all the stone laid out by next weekend, then mulch/planting the front garden, and maybe even make a start planning a deck for Melbourne Cup weekend!

(does anyone know if you need a permit for a small deck, around 20sqm?)

T&T

DIY: Setting in outdoor pavers / stepping stones

2011-09-26T18:34:00.002+10:00

With a lot of soil-shifting complete, decided to do a bit of work getting the dead side of the house along the laundry a little tidied up. The plan was just to order in a truckload of pebbles/rocks to line the side with, but we decided to maybe stick some pavers along the side to make it a bit neater.

Disclaimer: We know nothing about landscaping, garden design and all that kind of stuff, so please don't follow any of our recommendations! If we get something horribly wrong in the photos or description, that's to be expected.

Tools needed: Gloves, mask, eye protection, string, stakes, wheelbarrow(s), shovel, hammer/mallet, mortar/concrete, spirit level

Try and get the ground as level as possible. In our case, in the 2m between houses the ground drops nearly 50cm and the neighbour has some brick walls with vent holes that can't be covered. No luck here in getting much level ground! Anyway, I set up a string guide, marked our where the pavers should go (roughly 60cm centre spacing) and tried to get things as level as possible.

Got some 20kg bags of premix mortar (concrete). Empty it into your wheelbarrow, add water (approx 3-4L should do) and mix thoroughly. I found one 20kg bag was enough to set in 4 small pavers.

Lay down a bit of mortar, place the paver and use the level to tap it in. I ran extra mortar around the edges of the paver to try and help secure it.

Once all the pavers are laid in, I'll cover the rest of the area with weed mat/layered newspaper and then get in heaps of stones/pebble stuff to fill in all the gaps.

You know, before getting started, I though "How hard could it be?" to lay in a bunch of pavers perfectly straight? The answer is, it's a lot more difficult than you think, especially when your ground is waaaay off being level to start with. There's a few pavers out of alignment, but I think once the stones are set in around them it'll be a lot less noticable. Plus we won't be spending all that much time in this side area of the house. So far, not an expensive exercise as the pavers are $2 each and a bag of mortar is $7.

Memo to self: Investigate putting up a proper side gate so the dog doesn't get out!

T&T

Is It Big Enough?

2011-09-24T17:32:00.006+10:00

So we received this comment on the last blog post recently;

"Is Nolan 41 is big enough? what do you guys reckon? I am interested in a big home, should I go for Nolan 50?"

Kind of a hard question to answer I think. What's big enough for a married couple with no kids might be much too small for a family with 5 kids, in-laws and a lot of visitors. And in the second part of the post, you say "I am interested in a big home" - so why not just go out and build a 100 square + hotel?

Or buy one already made, like this on in Doncaster East... it's only got 5 bedrooms and an 8 car garage!

Apart from personal preference for "a big home", there are other reasons for considering alternative sized dwellings. Most population studies point towards growing number of single-occupancy dwellings, so someone looking to start an investment portfolio or develop residential property might look more towards compact, single-person dwellings with good access to public transport. For example, with a 700m block you could develop a large single house targeted at the upper end of the market, or construct 2-3 small townhouses - cheaper entry price, larger target market, easier resale, perhaps greater rental potential as well. However, if it's for your own personal family with no immediate thoughts towards resale, then build what you like - it's your mortgage after all.

Do you really need "a big home" too? A larger house will cost more to build nett than a smaller house (though interestingly enough on a per square meter basis it usually works out far cheaper). You can also factor in higher ongoing costs in terms of utilities, council rates, insurance, furnishing etc.

But ultimately, just go and buy the Monarch 58 for sale in Balwyn, a steal at just $2.85m. It's on Domain here, or Realestate here.

We covered the pros and cons of buying a display home earlier. This particular development we've visited a couple of times becuase it's quite near our place, and follows the usual inner suburban display style of white tiles, dark wood, and lots and lots of styling and building features unavailable to "normal" customers. You'd hope this display home is built to a decent standard as well; at least you don't have to deal with the occasional depressing elements of house building! With the Balwyn median price of about $1.5m, this display home offers quite reasonable value for the area with a huge block (910m in Balwyn is enormous!) and many superexpensive upgrades. The base price for a Monarch is something like $480k, but with the upgrades and landscaping I wouldn't be surprised if the build cost alone was around $1m. Not real keen on the main road location however, Belmore Rd is a nightmare to drive through in the morning and afternoon peak hours.

Finally, went and walked the dog to an auction on the next street to ours this morning - an old place on 800sqm passed in at $700k with a reserve probably north of $800k, which makes it the second one in our immediate area to pass in at auction. Who knows where the property market is going to go in the next few months?

T&T

IKEA Springvale opened

2011-09-16T18:28:00.005+10:00

So Ikea have opened another store in Melbourne, which was great news for us as we're both pretty tragic IKEA fans! Plus it's only about 20 minutes away from us. Their designs are generally top-notch if you like modern, relatively minimal furniture pieces at good prices, and they have so many items it's pretty much guaranteed you can't leave the store without buying something interesting.

I think the only questionable aspect of Ikea products is the longevity of the chipboard/paper pulp products, though everything we've ever bought is still functional. Oh, and their mattresses are not good at all - bought one for our old house and sold it on ebay a few weeks later.

We decided to head there last Sunday evening, as they're conveniently open late night weekends, and strolled the 2.5km walk that is the guided route through the store. I didn't mind this wire wine rack, I think it was made of two $50 sections stacked on top of each other. More functional than beautiful though.

Plus some ideas for our laundry. We have a big walk-in linen cupboard full of my computer gear and car parts (what else would you store in a linen cupboard?) but we have a big blank wall above the laundry sink and bench. We'll probably put some open shelves above the bench - so you can hang things to dry on it, or store stuff that will still have plenty of air circulating around it - and maybe a wall-mounted cupboard or two. Also maybe some wall-mounted hooks and fold-down drying racks. Not that I'll get to use it, since we got married Tina has demanded I stay out of the laundry for fear of ruining her clothes... who am I to argue?

If you wanted to delve deeper into the inner workings of Ikea, there's a National Geographic feature docu on the production process (google "Ikea Megafactories", about 1 hour long), or this decent read by Businessweek.

And speaking of Ikea, by any chance is there anyone from USA reading this who wants to lend us a hand? We need two (or four) of these Besta suspension rails to wall-mount some Besta cabinets, and for some reason Ikea Australia have decided NOT to sell them locally, and Ikea USA won't ship internationally?!!! If we can't get this necessary hardware to mount the cabinets, I'm going to return them and get something else. I'll pay for the rails, postage to Australia and some more for your time! Leave us a comment if you help us out!

To finish with, today is day 364 since we got the keys to our house - can't believe it'll be ONE YEAR TOMORROW! Maybe I'll bake a cake for the house... though there's also soil to shovel, a dog to walk, a bike to be pedalled and a few other things to do tomorrow.

T&T

So, maybe we should think about landscaping?

2011-08-28T21:27:00.003+10:00

So we've been away a little while on holidays - we hadn't taken any holidays since we started this whole redevelopment adventure back at the start of 2009!

We've pretty much finished with the house interior, just a few minor things to procrastinate further about of little consequence. Got a letter from Metricon while we were away, stating that the "90 day service items are now finished" with the exception of fixing our dodgy ensuite door, which is still bowed and scraping. That only took about... 11 months? And with still the bowed doorframe outstanding. Gotta get back in touch with them to find out how they're going to fix things.

Anyway, with the insides done, we might now have a think about getting the outside done. First admission upfront - we know NOTHING about outdoors, gardens, landscaping, stuff like that. If it wasn't for the dog we probably wouldn't go into our backyard at all. I had some excess soil dumped in our front yard months ago, spent an hour or so shovelling that and carting it to the backyard yesterday and didn't enjoy that at all, and it's only 1/4 done. Meh.

Seeing as it was a nice day, we headed down Bulleen way where there's a couple of outdoor-thingy stores and had a wander around.

Perhaps some of these big grey rectangular things along the side of the house where the laundry is?

And a whole lot of these little rocky grey things to go around the big grey things above?

And some bigger square things, which conceivably could cover our bare portico concrete. Grey of course.

Does anyone reading this have any clues on landscaping? f you can point me to any useful landscape resources to read, that'd be good (Except the homeone landscaping forum, I tried reading that and it's like an infant (me) reading a nuclear science manual. Too many complicated words and not enough bright pretty pictures).

I know I'd like some kind of raised vege/herb garden at the back of the house, except it doesn't get much sun there. And the less grass the better - unless someone's invented a new kind of grass that cuts itself, sweeps itself away and puts $25 into my pocket each time.

T&T

The Big Winter Chill

2011-07-12T16:20:00.003+10:00

So it's been getting a little cool in Melbourne. temperatures around 12 during the day and half that at night. The heater has been getting a bit of a workout, and all seems to be good!

Some observations on planning heating in your new house;

We upgraded to a dual zone heater with a better gas efficiency rating. We can heat the whole house, or just downstairs. For a while we were just heating downstairs, but then our master bedroom is an absolute fridge, so we're back to heating the whole house instead of using zones. Might be more useful in a single storey house to have zoned heatin.
In the rooms which aren't used much, we've closed off the heating vents and shut the doors if these rooms have one. We also added a big sliding door between the open plan living area and the front of the house, which keeps that area nice and warm! If you're planning your house design, think of adding cavity doors in places. Open plan areas look great in display homes, but in a real-life home, you will want to close off areas for noise, heating/cooling etc. Cavity doors almost disappear into the walls when not used, but are effective in closing off areas when needed.
We set the temperature around 19-20, sometimes 21 for a while if it's really cold.
The last gas bill was about $100 I think, not too bad! Our energy rating turned out to be just over 5 star. We have put roller blinds over most of the windows, if we used heavy drapes or curtains, I think that would keep the heat in better.
Might have been nice to add a heating outlet in our large ensuite, though we're planning to put in a 3-in-1 like an IXL or equivalent once we choose what light fittings to be put in (still haven't got around to that!)

On that note, does anyone have any recommendations for lighting shops in Melbourne? Apart from Beacon there doesn't seem to be much else. Maybe head back to my favourite shop, eBay :)

T&T

Annoying salespeople coming to your door?

2011-07-02T13:11:00.002+10:00

So I was talking with someone at work, who complained that her elderly mum-in-law (who lives by herself) had dodgy salespeople talking their way into her house. Certainly a safety and security risk and there's plenty of unscrupulous people out there who will take advantage of those at risk.

Anyway, after a bit of googling, I found a website that have identified this problem and give away "do not knock" stickers.

I ordered a few, one for our front door, one for my friend's mum-in-law, and some to hand out to the rest of our family. I'm not sure how effective these will be, but in out old house there was always someone knocking on the door at dinnertime trying to get us to switch our phone, gas, water, electricity.

Now if they come knocking after this sticker is up, I'll simply take all their details, and find someone to report them to. Apparently if you have this sticker, then it's illegal for door-to-door salesmen to annoy you (though charitable organisations are exempt).

Free DO NOT KNOCK stickers available here from Victoria Legal Aid.

I'm also going through our stash of old clothes and stuff this weekend as I'm hoping to find some blankets to donate to RSPCA Burwood. Don't throw them out, puppies and doggies need winter warmth!

T&T

Would you buy an actual display home?

2011-06-25T20:39:00.004+10:00

So, while browsing around, came across a Metricon display house for sale in Point Cook.

Asking 625-650k, on 512sqm, with immediate possession available.

Let's say you wanted to buy a new car, but was told it could be a 6-12 month wait. Not uncommon - the current Golf GTi apparently has a waiting list this long! But... you could grab an "executive driven demonstrator" model immediately, with a few thousand bucks off. In my eyes, certainly a good dealm as you avoid a long wait plus manage to avoid some of the immediate huge depreciation when buying a new car. I bought a new car, once upon a time... never again!

Anyway, this case is slightly different when buying a house. Let's think about some of the aspects of buying a ex-display home vs building from scratch.

Stamp duty will be considerable more on a completed house, compared to a vacant block of land.
The house is built - you can inspect it, walk around it, and move into it straight after settlement.... instead of waiting for land to be titled (and we've all heard horror stories about land titling 6-12 months later than it was meant to!)
It should come fully landscaped, with floor coverings, window coverings etc. A huge difference to when we moved in - with bare concrete floors, bare yellowtongue flooring upstairs, mud and crap everywhere and no driveway!
If you purchase an ex-display home while it's still functioning as a display home, often the vendor will give a decent return (7-8% not uncommon) while the house is being used.
All fittings and colours will be as displayed - if you don't like it, bad luck. Up to you to repaint or replace fittings after settlement. Display homes usually have had a lot of thought put into their interior design, and to be honest Metricon have some of the best display home interiors that we've checked out. Hopefully matches up with your own tastes.
Being a display house, there would've been some amount of wear and tear of the property due to stickybeaks opening, shutting and banging around everything possible. Buyer beware!
Usually display houses are optioned up hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the basic home - whether or not they're to your taste, and the price premium put on the sale price of the property is up to you to calculate.
The location of display homes is typically in the higher-traffic area of the development, simply because display home builders want more passing traffic to check them out. Could be in a noisier location than other homes - assess carefully.

Anyway, if you wanted to check out this particular Fairhaven for sale, click here.

Or here's another display home for sale, but from Porter Davis on the East side of town, asking $520-550k.

T&T

The Home Building Insurance SCAM.

2011-06-17T19:08:00.004+10:00

Just a note - thanks for everyone for visiting, somehow this blog has clocked up 200,000 hits!

The Age recently published an article about the home building insurance scam.

In case you didn't know, if you're building a new house or doing a renovation, you're also paying an insurance premium on home building insurance. It doesn't show up as an item in your renovation quote or new home contract, but it's built into your building contract.

Anyway, it's basically money thrown away. The article states that in the last year, 53,000 Victorians paid up insurance premiums, but only 3 people made successful claims.

3 claims in 53,000. Almost makes the insurers refusing to pay out on Queensland flooding look good.

Anyway, this is one massive rort - its so corrupt from beginning to end, there's basically no way to even start to fix it. As "customers", we must pay the premium, like it or not, and there's stuff all chance of us ever seeing a cent of it, should any dodgy work be seen further down the track. "Government" will promise to fix things, but since their fingers are deep in the pie, there's no chance of that.

Hence, while all builders will proudly state there's a 7 year guarantee on their work, based on the existince of this so called home building insurance scheme, NONE will admit that this guarantee is a fraud.

Be an educated consumer. Don't accept any dodgy work from your builder, whoever it is. Spend the dollars to get an independent inspector to go through building stages - and of course, don't accept that the builder's "independent" inspector is anything but a stooge.

Yet another grumpy mood right now obviously - and if you're the moron in the right lane who decided to swerve into my lane outside of Doncaster Shoppingtown today at about 6pm, you're damn lucky I had the reflexes to avoid hitting you, 'cause one way or another I would've made sure you ended up in emergency with a broken neck, ya f'wit.

T&T

Nothing to see here, move along...

2011-06-14T22:01:00.004+10:00

Not much happened on the home front in the last month or two. Kresta finally showed up to replace the 2 blinds that fell down immediately after they first installed them. One of them is fine, the other one in the master bedroom... well, it's the wrong colour. So yet again, another 3-99 week wait for the correct item to show up.

Also got a call from a new service manager at Metricon, who has taken over the last service manager's job (he quit, or something). Anyway... he says he'll chase up the issue of correcting our crooked cavity doorframe. Not holding my breath, I mean - we've only been in our house about 9 months now.

Most recently, a good article in the The Age about changing your mortgage lender. I believe that 99% of mortgage holders probably spend more time trying to save 2c/litre on petrol, than tens of thousands of dollars on your home loan. If you've got a loan with one of the big 4 banks, seriously - read the article in that link, then call your bank or broker tomorrow and get out of your overpriced home loan.

The arguments that used to apply to changing home loans mostly don't apply anymore. Banks aren't allowed to charge punitive exit fees (ie ridiculously enormous, made-up sums to stop you switching your loan). Sure, you might have to go through the rigmarole of providing paperwork if you're changing a lender, but doesn't saving $69,000 in interest payments and/or years off your average home loan make it worth your while? And if you've got a bigger than average mortgage, you'll save even more.

And if you're too lazy, and/or stupid, and/or ignorant to be bothered trying to get the best deal on your home loan, well - it's your life and your money to waste as you will. Excuse the grumpiness, bad case of post-snowboarding muscle pains.

T&T

DIY: Sheer curtains

2011-05-08T17:57:00.004+10:00

So we're sloooowly getting through the list of things to do. Still waiting on KRESTA to make good on the two blinds that fell off days after they installed them (grrrr....) but anyway, decided to finish off the two remaining windows left uncovered.

The only reason why these windows weren't done months ago was that we weren't sure what to cover them with. Blinds? Romans? Curtains? Sheers? Anyway, this is what most new homeowners end up doing for the first few days....weeks...months... years it takes to decide what window coverings to use!

Yep, old bedsheets. Not that there's a nice view anyway of our neighbour's horrible ugly old bricks. So anyway, finally Tina decided sheers would be the way to go. On our regular excursions to Ikea, picked up a Vagen curtain rail and Wilmaaaaaaaaa! sheer drapes (too many Saturday morning cartoons as a kid obviously)

Didn't take many pics of the installation as it's pretty easy - but in hindsight, maybe I should've taken more pics for this DIY. Anyway

1) Decide how high to hang your curtain rail. You can stick it on the architrave, but I decided to mount on the wall, but into studs as I don't have much faith in plaster fix screws. Use a studfinder or knuckles to locate studs. Plus we had lots of photos during the build, so I knew where the studs would be. Typically on either side of a window you'll have a double or triple stud support which is ideal to fix into. Predrill holes with a power drill, then fix rail mounts to wall. Take into account the curtain length when fixing your rail, I fixed it so there's an inch gap at the bottom of the 250cm curtain when hung. This curtain also comes with a hemming kit, so you can shorten to any length easily.

2) Safety first - eye protection is a must, and don't climb up on a wobbly chair to drill up high.

3) Iron the curtains to get out creases before hanging them. Duh.

4) Tell your wife it was a very hard, painstaking job to get right, and hope she doesn't notice the one crooked curtain mount *facepalm*. Will cover that later with.. erm.. something.

Anyway, here's a pic of the small (180cm wide) dining window covered. The 280cm family room window was done identically, but with a third support bracket midway along the curtain rail. Ikea sell a long and short version of Vagen ideal for varying width windows.

So, for $8 - $15 for rails and fittings, and $20 for curtains, 20 minutes per window to fit, the sheers are up, and look quite elegant. Easy to DIY, and cheap to change curtains in future if we decided to go for a different look. Cheap enough that you don't really have to put up with temporary window coverings too long, providing you know what you want. Of course, if you were doing these in bedrooms you'd want blockout curtains or other window covering, but since no-one sleeps in the dining room, sheers work well and allow daylight through.

T&T

If you use a computer, you NEED this!

2011-04-28T19:28:00.004+10:00

Nowadays, pretty much everyone is dependent on computers, and two recent near-tragedies happened to my brother (his computer caught fire - seriously, it did!) and my sister (after spending many months overseas, her netbook started smoking!) What is it with my family starting fires in their computers?

Anyway, my brother had all his documents, resumes, job applications etc on his computer, and my sister had over 10,000 irreplaceable travel photos on her netbook. Fortunately I was able to pull apart their machines and save the data on their hard drives, but really - it's all about backing up and protecting your precious data, which we typically only think about once the tragedy has happened!

So I've researched various ways to backup your stuff, and the best one I've found by miles is Dropbox. It works on PCs, Macs, even Linux. Just sign up (free!), install the software on any machines you want to use (I have it on two desktops, my laptop, my iPhone and iPad) and it automatically syncs and backs up your important data online, and makes it instantly available to all your connected devices, or anywhere with an internet browser!

Normally you get 2gb storage as a free user (which if you only backup your important files should be plenty), but if you use my special link to sign up to Dropbox, you'll get an extra 250mb bonus storage, again for free!

You gotta be pretty good to get the thumbs-up from me, but this service is brilliant. And if you don't sign up for it, you'll wish you did when your computer catches on fire and you lose years worth of work for nothing. I'm using Dropbox to backup my company data, tax returns, travel documents, important photos and more.

Funny enough, there's a dropbox cartoon illustrating exactly what happened to my family's computers...

T&T

Long rant ahead in favour of bigger houses!

2011-04-23T10:40:00.006+10:00

A bit of action in the week before the Easter break - Tina got a call from Metricon about someone coming over to have a look at our cavity door (the only remaining thing to be done from 90 day inspection). I also got a call the other day from the installer of our blinds apologising for their poor quality - even though he wasn't at fault. Fault for the blinds lies in the manufacturing, so when the 2 blinds are remade, he'll come back to reinstall them and also recheck all the other blinds to make sure they're not going to fall apart. Things are looking up!

"Metricon's signature brand "Monarch" has a floor area of 456 square metres with a starting price of $477,000. Photo: Angela Wylie"

Here's an article that we stumbled across a few days ago, while going through The Age - Room to Move, but is a bigger house better?

Now the article is a decent read - of course, we tend to read everything about homes and housing, having gone through the process. However the real reading is in the 100+ comments left after the article; if you half an hour free, have a read through yourself!

* warning rant begins *

It seems pretty much all the comments have been left by people who have not had first hand experience of building their dream house - let's summarise their small-minded negativity here:

Big houses = "McMansions", unpayable massive mortgages, huge utility bills, no backyards, too much cleaning, too many unused rooms, too far from the city, self-indulgent, consumerist... the list of whinging goes on and on.

#1: If you want to score easy points in an argument, come up with a catchy label. Obviously, McMansion sounds good as it brings in all the negative connotations with McDonalds. Other labels used to instantly denigrate opposing arguments are "Boat People" and "Cash For Clunkers", for a start.

#2: Affordability of mortgages are relative to the position of the mortgage payer. No doubt many of the comments on The Age are from those unable to fund any kind of mortgage for any sized property, so naturally there is an assumption that "bigger house = bigger mortgage" and the jealous green dragon rears its ugly, bitchy head. Any smart home owner has worked out their own personal level of mortgage affordability risk.

#3: Utility bills? Our first house was a 12 square cottage in Mitcham. We cooked in the summer, despite 2 airconditioners, and froze in the winter despite central heating and a log fire. Our utility bills were all higher in that cottage compared to our new house, which is far more comfortable in all seasons. Our new place has a 5.5 star energy rating, solar hot water, better orientation, better layout... the list goes on.

#4: No backyard: OK, this is one thing we could probably have more of. From our outdoor room to the back fence is about 7 metres. However, we tend not to spend much time in the backyard and have no want for a pool. My parents had a massive backyard in Templestowe which again was never used. Other people may have different priorities. Plus we have a beautiful huge park 2 streets away, the Eastlink bike trail is 3 streets away and a fantastic ride, and the dog loves going for long walks around the area.

#5: Cleaning? Rooms we don't currently use don't need much cleaning - we have a couple of rooms reserved for kids when they arrive, at the moment they're used for drying clothes (no need for a clothes dryer). We don't do any more cleaning than we used to.

#6: Unused rooms: We certainly use all the rooms we need to at the moment! The home theatre gets a workout frequently (and all our extended family loves it for movies, Rock Band/Guitar Hero sessions etc), our study is home to 3 computers and a mountain of paperwork, another spare bedroom is used for a home business, and everything is efficiently laid out as we have the space to do so.

#7: Too far from the city: Not an issue for us as neither of us need to go to the city. And when we do, it's a 20 minute drive on the Eastern Freeway. Plus the city sucks anyway - parking is hard to find and expensive, there's too many d!ckheads on the streets and everything we need isn't in the city anyway.

#8: Self indulgent/consumerist: Well, all people have different goals in life. Our goal was to have a comfortable, modern house for us and our future family, with a little bit of luxury to enjoy coming home to every night, and that's what we've achieved. We love cooking in our big kitchen. We love (or maybe it's me) playing video games, watching TV shows and movies in the home theatre. We love our massive bedroom and its ensuite - it's like being in a 5 star hotel every day, without the minibar and pay-per-view fees. Since we spend a lot of time at home, why not make it something you love?

Anyway, my final view is that there's a small subsection of the community out there who feel they need to mask their inferiority complex by being overly critical of other people, other people's choices and strangely enough, other people's homes. Give these people the attention and respect they deserve, which (no surprise), is zero on both counts.

*end rant *

Edit/postscript: Looks like the first article was so popular,an opinion piece was published afterwards. Let the fun continue!

Days of the humble home at an end as goliaths invade suburbia

T&T

Product/Company warning: KRESTA blinds

2011-04-16T10:13:00.007+10:00

So now with the wedding planning and event all over, it's back to making our house a home.

We've been in over 6 months now - how time flies. We had the 3 month service review done at the start of the year, and while most things have been fixed satisfactorily, I'm still waiting... waiting.... waiting.... waiting....

...waiting... for the service manager to call me back about when we're getting our faulty cavity sliding door frame in the ensuite fixed.

To recap, before handover our independent inspector noticed this fault (door and frame touching each other, failing to meet basic Australian Standards guidelines to tolerances). The problem was "fixed" at handover, but clearly a pretty dodgy "fix" since a week after handover the door and frame was touching again. Noted at 3 month review, promised to get it fixed, nothing done yet. I will be calling in the coming week to find out what's been done.

More issues have arisen with our window coverings. We were able to grab some standard blinds from Spotlight and Bunnings to hang in some rooms, but for the home theatre and master bed we needed custom ones made due to the nonstandard window widths.

Anyway, here's a timeline of what happens - mostly for my benefit, so I can record what's going on in case we end up taking Kresta to the Small Claims Tribunal.

late Feb 2011: Placed order with Kresta for 7 blinds: 2 translucent and 5 blockout, 50% deposit paid. Promised to be be done by mid March as a rush order.
Mid March: No blinds.
Tuesday March 22nd: Called Kresta to find out where our blinds are since they never contacted us after the deposit paid. Turns out we might get them installed next week. Paid remaining 50% owing on blinds.
Tuesday March 29: Blinds installed.
Thursday March 31: Noticed one blind in the home theatre room had come off the rail and was lying crumpled on the ground. Could've happened this day or day before.
Friday April 1: Called Kresta Doncaster store to complain about blind. Polite customer service lady said the installer would pick it up the coming Tuesday.
Tuesday April 5: Defective blind taken away by installer and quoted 10 days to remake.
Wednesday April 6: Got home after work and saw the big blind in the master bed also fallen off the rail. Looks like it was two blinds "glued" together by a tiny strip of glue and of course glue isn't enough to hold the big blind up.

Thursday April 7: Called Kresta Doncaster store again to complain another blind was defective. They said they'd call me back to organise another check.
Monday April 11: Kresta called and said they couldn't check the defective blind until Saturday 16th April.
Saturday 16th April: Kresta called and says installer is sick. Can't fit us in again until Saturday 30th April. Clearly I'm not impressed. I take the defective blind into Doncaster store and leave it with them.

So, we're in the middle of some issues with Kresta. At the moment it's too early to judge whether or not there are going to be issues with this company - it's OK to make mistake as we're all human, but it's the complaint resolution process and customer satisfaction that will make or break companies. So far, not so good. Will keep updating progress, should Kresta come good on their service claims, we will acknowledge this.

On that note, here is some tips for you new home builders to avoid some of the basic errors that we made when choosing suppliers for our house. Consumer Affairs Victoria reviewed basic contracts for several manufacturers and you are legally entitled to demand a change in the contract should they state:

contradict or do not allow for consumers’ statutory rights in relation to implied warranties.
limit the performance obligations of the supplier.
require the consumer to pay in full before completion of the contract.

Should any company have any clause relating to these terms, first request they change them to comply with the directive by Consumer Affairs Victoria. Should they refuse, DON'T ORDER WITH THEM, take down as many names as you can and contact Consumer Affairs Victoria who will investigate on your behalf - and find another company who trades fair. Unscrupulous retailers will take advantage of the fact that most consumer simply don't have time to research their rights prior to signing a contract - we didn't. But now we are aware that Kresta are in prima facie breach of the Consumer Affairs directive for asking for full payment upfront, we have a strong case to push for a full refund on defective items, even outside their stated "warranty period". Also be aware Vista part of the Kresta Group (Kresta Holdings Limited)

Google search for "company name consumer affairs complaints" - sometimes provides information on major offenders.
Also, if you're an iFan, get this free app for your iDevice: My Shop Rights.
Consider reading ProductReview and NotGoodEnough.org - however these kind of sites tend to be negatively biased - bad experiences tend to be publicised more than good ones. Still, a good way to hear of real-life experiences. Similarly Homeone is a great resource for all home builders.

*sigh*

Keep fighting for YOUR RIGHTS people! On a related note, I recently reported Micro$oft for selling defective game consoles. While on that particular issue Consumer Affairs decided it wasn't a big enough fish to fry, I was able to claim repair costs through my credit card insurance (though it did take 5 months to be approved). Worth checking to see if your credit card provider offers this service.

T&T

Sunday, March 27, 2011

2011-03-28T16:10:00.004+11:00

There are certain milestones in life, and we took a big one yesterday.

Tim and Tina got married!

To the love of my life, Tina, who has been my constant companion, confidant, lover and partner for many years - yesterday was undoubtedly the best day of my life.

I haven't slept since we got married - simply too excited to let sleep interrupt the knowledge that after all these years, we're finally husband and wife.

Everyone was asking me yesterday whether things feel any different. At the time, I said no - but at home, by ourselves - yes, everything was different. It's unexplainable, and only after taking the big steps, and saying those words, and tying the knot, can we know what being married is like.

So, to everyone following our blog - the last few months have been joyous, anxious, emotional and intense - and our wedding day was beautiful beyond words.

In the interest of maintaining our privacy; here's one little photo teaser.

Thanks to our parents, bridal party, family and friends for sharing our big day, and to Tina for saying YES to being my friend, girlfriend, fiance and wife. I love you.

T&T

90 day service: Reviewing unfinished work

2011-03-08T15:19:00.003+11:00

So, many many month later... still working on getting things fixed from the "90 day" service inspection. Our ensuite has 2 cavity (sliding) doors, one of them is fine, but the other one has a bowed frame so the door scraps along the frame itself.

It was like this before handover, it was "fixed" at handover, some kind of dodgy job obviously because a week later it bowed again, and it's still like this now.

The service manager at first said it would be fixed - the tradesman sent around to fix it said he couldn't do it. When I called last week to find out what was happening, the manager then said he "probably couldn't" fix it. Obviously not happy to settle for that answer, so I got him out here today to check it again. Since it hadn't magically fixed itself, he called Canterbury who supplies these things - no reply apparently, so when he gets in touch with them, he'll call me. If I don't hear anything by next week, I'm back on the phone - again.

And don't even get me started on the work in the garage.

T&T

Door dampers - now discounted postage on packs of 10!

2011-03-01T13:12:00.002+11:00

Still have a few of our soft closing door dampers available to purchase at tim-and-tina.com! Have recently found a little loophole to send a packet of 10 cheaper than I first thought - now only $24.95 posted anywhere in Australia including registered post!

And of course if you want to buy more than 10, discounted prices are available on the website too.

T&T

90 day service: why are things getting worse, not better?

2011-02-25T19:11:00.004+11:00

So after we had some general fixing done a week or so ago, we ran the dishwasher and found our kitchen sink drainage with added extra leakiness.

As part of the 90 day service, the trades came and tested all the sink for drainage - but it looks like something got screwed up here, because out kitchen sink wasn't leaking before, and now it is.

Of course, I've tried tightening the drainage clamps around that U-bend, but it's still leaking. Don't know what the problem is, we didn't cause it, someone's gonna have to come fix it.

Still haven't heard back from Metricon about the few remaining items that need to be completed.

Repair and repaint cornice and plaster in garage from where garage door was fixed
Straighten/replace ensuite cavity door frame
Fix leaking kitchen sink

*edit* Went and checked the kitchen sink top to bottom - turns out they loosened the drain plug and forgot to tighten that one. So far so good.

T&T

Custom blinds ordered

2011-02-22T22:24:00.004+11:00

So, we're both been hugely preoccupied with major works the last few weeks, but managed to get around to ordering some custom blinds in.

We're getting blackout blinds for the home theatre room (finally! no more bedsheets and towels over the windows!), as well as dual roller blinds for the master bed. Hopefully will have them installed in about 3 weeks.

After they're done, that'll only leave the study, family and dining rooms without window coverings - we'll decide on those later.

*EDIT* At first I recommended the company supplying our custom blinds - due to some MAJOR problems with the blinds though, I won't name the company in this blog post - yet.

T&T

Broadband - naughty Optus! NBN failboat.

2011-02-15T11:02:00.004+11:00

So Optus is getting a slap on the wrist for advertising "Unlimited" broadband - with some limits.

ZDNet reporting on Optus misleading advertising

The analogue equivalent here is of a restaurant advertising an "All You Can Eat" seafood buffet for $29.95 - but after the first plate of food, you're only allowed to have dry crackers and water. Naughty Optus (but then again, they're not alone in misleading advertising!)

When we were planning the house, it's wired for cable broadband, but we decided to go with ADSL2+. Mainly because there's only two players in cable broadband in our area, Tel$tra and Optus, and a duopoly is no better than a monopoly. Oh well - the cable provision could always be used for Pay TV, though I reckon that's an absolute waste of time & money.

At first I wanted TPG, but all their nodes were full in our area, so we went with iiNet. Slightly more expensive, but probably the best customer service I've ever experienced, so two thumbs up for them!

And is anyone else wondering how much more Australia can screw itself up by building the NBN? Let's invest bazillions of dollars into a "broadband" network that's outdated and overpriced even before it gets started. Sending data through bits of wire and glass is as outdated as the landline phone. Plus the argument that Australia is a bigger country with less population density compared to everywhere else is a fallacious argument - population centres are dense and localised. As usual, Stephen Conroy shows how out of touch with reality he is by stating Australia's population density is 2.7/square km - even a Year 7 student knows that stating an average value is meaningless, because the average human has one boob and one ball. Myki fiasco x 10,000.

T&T

The money value of time

2011-02-13T19:35:00.004+11:00

There's been a few ads for knock down & rebuild in our local paper - here's a couple that we saved because (of course) it features a Nolan!

Can you spot the difference - December 2010 on the left, and February 2011 on the right?

Anyway, the basic difference comes down to the money value of time, or as most people know it - "time is money", and this is a great example of that in real life.

Would you rather have $100 today, or $100 in 10 years? Here's a hint - take it today. Inflation alone means $100 in 10 years won't buy you as much as $100 today, ignoring any other benefit from investing or growing the original $100 over 10 years.

Same thing applies to building a house. As time goes by, labour and material costs increase, let alone other associated costs to operating a business. One largely overlooked factor in leaving your initial $1000 deposit is that although it locks in the base price for your house, it only does so providing you start building within 150 days (or however many specified days according to your builder).

To be fair, it would be unreasonable to expect your $1000 deposit to hold the price of your house for 6, 12, 18, 24 months into the future, for all the reasons mentioned beforehand. How would you like it if your boss decided to commit to paying you your exact salary for the next 5 years?

If you're building, make sure the builder isn't dragging their heels in organising appointments for precontract, contract, colour appointments, tile appointments etc. Similarly, make sure you're as organised as possible - do your homework in picking colours and selections, know exactly how and where to make modifications and upgrades if you want, demolish any old house asap if you're rebuilding, know your block of land inside out and get to know people at council if you have to regarding building permits.

A special warning for those building in new estates, land developers are notoriously optimistic in having your land titled - delays of 6-12 months and beyond in titling is not uncommon, and you're the one who will have to foot the bill for delaying the builder - you can bet the developers have a good legal team writing their contracts to make sure they're not responsible for delay costs!

Anyway, getting back to that picture of the ads, in 2 months the price has changed $11,000. This doesn't mean that every 2 months the base price will keep increasing by that amount, typically prices hold for 4-6 months before increasing again. Factor in price increases when building - base prices change, upgrade prices change, upgrade categories change and so on.

More food for thought - let's say that extra $11,000 is paid back over 25 years at 6.45%. The extra interest alone on $11,000 is about $11,165 - so now instead of paying $11,000 more, it's cost you $22,165 more.

Unlike flat screen TVs and computers, building a house doesn't get cheaper year on year, exactly the opposite!

Hmm... I should really start writing a book about building new houses - any readers out there work for a publishing firm?

T&T

90 day service: Antenna saga FINALLY ended

2011-02-11T23:38:00.006+11:00

Got a txt yesterday from the antenna people - called them back this morning, and by the afternoon someone had come around to finally connect our antenna.

So this is how it goes - when you build a house, you don't get an antenna. Your choice is to

Add the antenna into your contract - let's say it's $400. This is maybe double what it would cost you to do after handover, but you should be able to move right in, plug in your TV and start watching whatever you want to watch.
Organise the antenna to be installed after handover. Might cost you $200. Much less than the builder, but you have to make a few phonecalls.

Anyway, I thought we'd bite the bullet and pay the builder to install it for us... and get the benefit of having it ready to go as soon as we had the keys. Instead, we ended up getting it finally connected nearly five months after we had handover, despite me constantly reminding, calling, emailing Metricon to get it fixed - and it only took a 10 minute visit from the antenna technician.

Anyway, moral of this story is for anyone building a house, whatever you can get done yourself, do it yourself. Things like higher ceilings, floorplan changes, door locations etc you can't really change yourself after handover without spending huge amounts of cash so you'll have to get it drawn into contract.

Here are some things you may consider doing yourself once the house is yours.

TV Antenna (See above rant). But not extra TV points, easier & cheaper to do it through the builder.
Driveway, outside decking, rendering, stackstone, exterior tiling etc. You could pay $5000 to render your facade through whatever builder, or pay a tradesman $2000 for the same thing, avoiding the builder's markup.
Light fittings. You will get standard builder's light fittings in most rooms, which are the cheapest, nastiest things you can get - bare lightbulbs and a plastic hat. But you can choose exactly what light fittings you want, and get an electrician to wire them in later. Note that downlights are a tricky issue -you should put in downlights downstairs (in a 2 storey house) through the builder as it can be impossible or very difficult to add them in after plaster is up (floor trusses can block transformers etc).
Flooring (carpet, timber etc). You'd probably find better quality and range available cheaper if done yourself after handover. We used Fowles Clayton for our carpet and they did a great job.
Window coverings. Same as above. Except don't call Spotlight - they were meant to show up today to measure our remaining windows for custom blinds, and never showed up. Shitty customer service (by not keeping basic promises) is the easiest way to lose not 1, but 1000 customers. Ever been to a Spotlight store and watched 1 person try to serve 500 frustrated customers?
Feature walls - if you're handy with a paintbrush, cheap to DIY.

So, things that are integral to the house that you want, or if you're too busy to organise things yourself, get it through the builder. Everything else, organise it yourself if you want better range and price.

So, now only a couple of remaining items for our 90 day inspection - bowed cavity frame in ensuite, and plaster repair and paint in garage.

Ultimately, I'm happy I finally got my antenna connected, but since I paid the builder's premium to get it done during the house construction, it should've been ready at handover 5 months ago, not now. Or at least fixed within a few days of moving in - it's not like it was an expensive thing to organise, and it really soured our new house experience. You don't need a postgraduate degree in marketing to figure out what I'm trying to get across here - but if you do, my consulting services are available!

T&T

90 day service: General fixing

2011-02-08T18:08:00.004+11:00

Had a couple of guys subcontracting from Metricon come in this morning and stay for about 3 hours doing most of the general service items. This included

checking all doors for open/closing and latching properly
checking all windows for correct opening/closing
fixing other misc items from 90 day inspection list
checking plumbing - correct filling & drainage and overflow operation

Anyway, the only thing they couldn't fix today was the cavity door in the ensuite - the door is not bowed, but the frame is slightly bowed. Apparently there's a couple of ways to fix it, so when he ges in contact with M they'll let us know how it'll be done.

Still antenna connection and garage cornice fixing also outstanding.

Finally got around to fixing my laptop last night - again, another product warning - DO NOT BUY HP BRANDED STUFF! Overpriced, underperforming, poor product support, zero long-term support (apparently a 3 year old laptop is so obsolete they're not supporting it in any way anymore) and crappy product design (nearly as bad as the xbox 360).

The main problem with HP notebooks - if you should be so daring as to want to actually open or close the screen on the computer, the hinge design is so poor that about 100% or them (more or less) will fracture. See this picture below - there's all the stress of the movement focussed on about 4mm of thin flexible metal. Idiots. Google "HP laptop broken hinge"and see how many million dissatisfied ex-customers HP have made enemies of.

Anyway, I was just about to do this to my DV9000...

but ended up buying some ebay hinges and replacing them myself. Next notebook computer - maybe an Acer (I have one from 2002 that's slow but otherwise works 100%) or Toshiba I think - definitely NOT HP JUNK!

T&T

90 day service: Southern Star Windows

2011-01-29T23:11:00.003+11:00

Had a trade from Southern Star Windows come around 7am yesterday - only about an hour earlier than expected! Anyway, nice bloke called Michael had a look at some of our issues.

Replaced faulty awning window winder in the home theatre (only opened halfway)
Replaced lock in balcony french doors (faulty)
New keys for laundry slider door (incorrect keys given)

All pretty simple stuff - good work done there! He also recommended occasional application of silicon spray to exposed chain winders, since dirt and dust will build up and cause "stickiness" otherwise. Ialso got an SMS from the Metricon service guy, he was meant to come yesterday as well but was sick, so I expect to get a call next week to reorganise that service.

Just got a couple of other outstanding items to be scheduled - antenna to be connected, hopefully sometime this millenium, and the garage roof to be repaired where the garage door service cracked the cornice & exposed unpainted ceiling.

We had 20 people over for dinner tonight for an early Chinese Year celebration, and all were pretty impressed with the house - and the evaporative cooling had no problem with the 31 degree day. Let's see how we go tomorrow with 40 degrees predicted!

T&T

Product warning: Zone Hardware brand roller blinds

2011-01-25T20:50:00.004+11:00

One of the roller blinds we installed was a Zone Hardware blockout roller blind sold by Bunnings. Fine for the first week, but then with the week after putting out some hot sun and heat, the blind started to produce an intolerable, unbelievably intense odour, something like bleach, chlorine and poison gas all mixed in together.

It was so bad that when entering the house, all you could smell was this stench! We had to open the window in that room and close the door so the whole house wouldn't get contaminated.

I sent an email to Zone Hardware through their website reporting the problem, but after a week of no reply, no answer, I got fed up and called Bunnings to tell them I was going to return the blind.

To their credit Bunnings had no problem in giving me a refund (of course the blind had been installed and I'd thrown away the original plastic packaging). I did say I wouldn't mind an exchange providing they could guarantee the smell wouldn't come back, but they said because they were all made in large batches, the next blinbd might/could/would have the same problem.

Anyway, just a warning for anyone consider the Zone Hardware brand roller blinds. It wasn't that cheap, the blockout blind I bought was definitely not suitable for use, and the importing company doesn't seem to care about customer concerns or health of the products they sell. I suspect poor manufacturing quality assurance, and the local importer probably has no idea what chemical cocktails and ingredients go into the overseas manufacture of that blind.

T&T

Couple of pics from our old place, and another milestone reached!

2011-01-22T09:46:00.004+11:00

No real reason to post anything today, except I noticed that almost simultaneously the blog has hit 150,000 hits and 100 followers! Thanks everyone, for taking an interest in our house building project, and keeping us on our toes with many relevant comments and questions. We hope that you've enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) our blog, and that you might have picked up any hints and tips along the way, to avoid finding out things the hard way!

Anyway, I've been doing a lot of cleaning out of my junk in the last few weeks, selling things on ebay and various specialist forums. It stems from a video article I saw on NHK TV - dansharii.

"断捨離 (danshari) means to throw away unnecessary stuff. It's one of the keywords of the recent years in Japan.

"断" (dan) - to cut out unnecessary stuff. ex) receipts, shopping bags, coupons, etc...
"捨" (sha) - to throw away junk. ex) clothes, books, toys, etc...
"離" (ri) - to step away from your obsessions. ex) souvenirs, anniversary gifts, etc..."

The last thing I got rid of was my projector screen from the old house. Ahhh, memories - this is the first house we lived in, bought in 2005 in leafy Mitcham. Kinda wished we'd kept it instead of sold it, but we wouldn't be able to afford our current dream house if we did. Made many beginner's mistakes when buying this first house, including the following:

Didn't check the windows opened - the last bloke painted them shut.
Had two aircon split systems - one didn't work.
Didn't confirm there was a double carport - more like 1.6 carport!
Somehow managed to ignore or downplay the fact it was on a busy road, next to a petrol station, with a bus stop right out the front and a school 100m away. Let's just say it wasn't exactly the quiet life!

However, still have very fond memories of the place, made good resale and now it's an osteopath practice.

Back to the screen - here's a pic of it in our old house. The layout of the house was OK for living but terrible for home theatre, which is why I have a floorstanding speaker placed conveniently in front of a sliding door. The screen is mounted about 2ft from the wall, so when it drops down, it drops in front of the TV - that way, you don't have to move any of the speakers. This was a Brightvision 120" (305cm) screen, white glass bead with matt frame and with in-line and IR remotes. I got an electrician friend to wire up a ceiling powerpoint so the power cable could be hidden. Not a bad screen for the price (around $200 in 2005), but not suitable for our current house - too small, and 4:3 format instead of 16:9 or Cinemascope which is my ultimate desire. Plus now I've got a full wall neutral grey projection screen (just google it for more information), I don't think I could go back to a full glass-bead white screen!

What I loved about the house is that despite being small, it had very clever storage. On the left of the pic you can see built-in bookshelves, perfect size for books, dvds, cds, toys etc. I imagine you could retrofit these builtins to most houses with plaster stud wall construction - cut out plaster, remove and relocate noggins, install builtins, perhaps repaint walls. Maybe a project to undertake in many years if/when we run out of storage in our new place!

Final picture, screen down at night. BTW, anyone considering a game console, don't buy an xbox360, they're still rubbish, noisy, overheating pieces of cr@p that'll break down 1 minute after the "Warranty" expires. Google red ring of death, then go buy a Sony PS3.

So if you buy an xbox360, more likely than not it'll be part of your next dansharii very soon!

T&T

90 day service: data points replaced

2011-01-17T18:09:00.004+11:00

Had a guy come out to check the faulty data points I had - turns out the original installer put them in "wrong" somehow, and the clips holding the data jack to the wall plate had broken off. Didn't take long to replace the faulty ones, just hoping the other ones aren't secretly crap as well!

Also had a major win today - sold my old motorised projector screen, and while I was taking the screen out to the buyer's car, my neighbour was leaving. Now, this week being hard rubbish collection, everyone has junk outside their house, with plenty of scavengers driving around in the vans and trailers looking to pinch stuff. I'm not that type... at least I thought I wasn't, and I noticed my neighbour had some very nice looking speakers on her lawn! So I asked her permission to salvage them, and she said to help myself... and I did!

Turns out they're Wharfedale Valdus 400. Hooked them up to my trusty old Pioneer amp, and they work just fine! Quite a bit bassier and slightly pitched top end compared my reference speakers (Jamo Studio) but I'll keep them for the time being, and maybe look at replacing the drivers in future, if I ever get any spare time. Definitely not an audiophile grade set of speakers, but I'm mainly after the enclosures, which are in pretty good condition!

Anyway, they look quite nice with the speaker grilles removed - only thing is the Wharfedale badge is missing from one of the speakers (can't find them on eBay, anyone got a spare one to send my way?!). I was planning to get a few nerd projects done this year, one of them being a laptop-based dedicated MAME system (like this one, or the ikea mame hack), and also custom building a set of speakers - so I may look at replacing the bass, mid-bass, tweeters and crossover, but reusing the wharfedale enclosures. Something for later!

Finally, this afternoon I cruised down to Frankston to pick up a brilliant eBay win - I love the King Kahuna beanbags that we saw in a store in Chadstone a few weeks ago, and wanted a few to set up as the front row in our home theatre room - bought 4 used ones for a bargain price! After a bit of a clean and topping up beans from our old beanbags, they've turned out fantastic! Very sturdy construction from marine vinyl, comfortable, and seeing as how our dogs manage to fight and tear every beanbag I've had, these we'll keep locked up in the HT, away from them.

T&T

Family room - just about finished! And another door damper videos

2011-01-15T21:37:00.003+11:00

Sometime after xmas we went to Ikea and bought a couple of Besta cabinets to serve as the basis of the family room unit - I couldn't really find anyone else who could make a 2.4m wide entertainment unit to hold all the junk I wanted to stuff in it. Went back again yesterday, and Besta/Framsta is 20% off until the end of the month, so that might be of use to you if shopping for basic cabinets etc. We bought the high-gloss dark grey drawers, as well a a wall-hanging Besta unit to match the one on the floor - though for some stupid reason Ikea Australia don't sell the Besta hanging rail which is sold in USA; and it's absolutely essential for wall-mounting this unit! If I can't find it or import the hanging rail myself, we're returning this back to the shop.

Anyway, our family room is comfortable enough now, so if you check this video it'l show some of the colour choices and furnishings. Haven't mounted the surround speakers behind the sofa, and we will eventually canvas-print some of our travel photos to hang up - walls are kinda bare. I made this video for tim-and-tina.com's soft closing door dampers but it'll do OK here as well.

Shameless self-promotion, go and buy some of our self-adhesive door dampers right now!

T&T

90 day service: Garage door fixed

2011-01-14T12:42:00.005+11:00

Got a call this morning - Rob from Gliderol was in the area and was hoping to fix our door today - yes please!

Our main problem with the garage door is that it never worked smoothly - lots of grinding, metal-on-metal noises, and it would always get stuck halfway and near the bottom, stopping it from closing - super annoying.

Anyway, Rob quickly diagnosed 2 problems.

1) Tension on the springs too tight - easily fixed.
2) Motor and chain mechanism mounted incorrectly - bit harder to fix.

Basically the panel glide door moves up and down when a pulley/chain mechanism pulls/pushes the door up and down. It should be mounted securely at two places, but the original installers decided to mount one end loosely around some electrical conduit pipe, instead of 2 inches to the right on solid wood - see the picture below!

So of course the door mechanism wasn't securely, it kept moving about, and also cracked a lot of plaster where it was mounted through the cornice and around the pipe. Makes you wonder whether some of these trades use any grey matter at all! Wouldn't have been any more difficult to mount the door correctly in the first place.

Now the pipe protects some electrical cable which goes to a junction box mounted above the garage door externally, where we will eventually get dual floodlights fitted. So if you have any lights centrally mounted above your garage, make sure your garage door mechanism is mounted properly, and not onto conduit!!

Anyway I called Mark and informed him the plaster needs to be repaired and repainted - also here at the other end, where the motor also had to be shifted over to keep everything in line. Just a paint touchup required.

Finally, the last bit of advice I got was that the door needs to have a bit of lubrication in 3 months with WD40. These black tension springs need to be sprayed all along.

Also these rollers on the side need to be able to slide back and forth freely, so apply WD40 to the groove in the case holding the rollers in.

Final result? Now our garage door works like it should - quickly, quietly, without getting stuck and without all the vibration along the mechanism that was there before. Good result!

Data people are meant to come this Monday, and also got a call this morning from Southern Star regarding doors, windows and lock to be fixed, which is booked for Friday 28th. No word yet from the antenna people, and will have to find out when the plasterer can come in.

So far, 90 day service item fixing seems to be organised efficiently and quickly, with a good tradesman coming today for our garage door. Let's hope the rest of the checklist can be fixed equally well!

T&T

90 day inspection

2011-01-12T18:44:00.003+11:00

Got a call yesterday to organise a house inspection today, to follow up on our 90 day service period which we submitted before xmas last year.

We didn't have all that many items to report - mainly the garage door which sticks a lot, incorrect keys for various doors, and of course my antenna which still isn't connected. Plus other things like sticking doors and windows.

Anyway, Mark went through all the items on our list, some things are too inconsequential to fix - we have a lot of tiny cosmetic cracks along windowsills and cornices, but they're part of the house settling. If windows were falling out, or cornices dropping on our heads, then it'd be an issue!

We got a call back from a company this afternoon who will come in next week to check the fitment our of data connections - basically when you try to plug in a network cable, the jack falls into the wall cavity, so they're not secured well enough. Hopefully the other trades required will get in touch with us this week while I'm still on holidays.

I've managed to procrastinate plenty and the deck hasn't even entered design phase - but at least I managed to complete Mass Effect 2, which is definitely my game of 2010. Been getting rid of various things on eBay as part of the moving process. Trying to figure out what kind of landscaping to do in the front yard - anyone have any suggestions for garden/landscaping supplies in Melbourne? Thinking of some king of rock/stone, surrounded by mulch/chipbark and various spiky planty things - whatever looks modern, neat and requires no maintenance is top of the list!

Also put up a few blinds - so far the minor bedrooms and laundry have Holland blinds, with dual Roman blinds in the sitting room. Had a pretty decent quote on custom blockout blinds for the home theatre and dual rollers for the master bed, so if we go ahead with that I'll let you know who to call.

Finally, I needed a spare wheel for my car and ended up buying 4. Smart, right? Anyway, if anyone has an Audi A4 B8 (current shape) and wants a spare, or to replace a curbed/scratched wheel, let me know - only $60 per wheel or $120 for all three. Audi dealer price is about $400 per wheel!

T&T

DIY: Modernising an old bit of furniture to fit our new colour scheme

2011-01-07T19:07:00.003+11:00

So with my parents catching the renovation bug and insisting all my "crap" is removed so they can get on with things, I've had to take back my old filing cabinet. It was a $5 special from a place selling ex government furniture, but doesn't really suit the style of our new place.

Anyway, not to worry. To bring this worn out piece of furniture into the modern age, all you need is some adhesive vinyl and a sharp knife or blade. I chose a semi-gloss silver vinyl that I normally use for car stripes and decals. Clean the piece up first, remove all the old cobwebs (that this one had, anyway), and fill in any holes with filler or putty.

The backing paper (white) just peels away from the vinyl. It's like clear-wrapping a schoolbook to protect it.

Tuck in all the corners, trim and smooth out any air bubbles and you're done! Difficulty 2/10. Cost for the vinyl on this project, about $15.

T&T

DIY: Installing Holland blinds

2011-01-02T18:35:00.003+11:00

Happy New Year everyone! We had a quiet one at home with some of my family around to try out the home theatre, and managed to catch a view of the city fireworks, sipping champagne from our balcony - nice!

So after overeating for the last few days, went out to do a bit of belated post-Xmas house shopping, and managed to luckily snare some nice Holland blockout blinds at Spotlight for 40% off. Normally at Spotlight you can only find one random blind in a nice colour, and it'll be in the one size you don't need. But we were able to find 10 blinds, in matching colours, to suit the three smaller bedrooms plus a few other rooms.

Tools needed: Ruler/tape measure, pencil, power drill, screwdriver, a helping pair of hands. Difficulty 2/10 only. I didn't take any step-by-step photos because things were over so quickly.

Anyway, in most Holland/roller blind ready-to-hang packages you'll get the blind itself, two attachments for either end - one with a chain attached, one without. A couple of brackets to mount the blind attachments onto the wall and some screws.

Position the blind so it's in the centre of the window, with equal gaps (if any) on either side. Hold the attachments on with your hands, and mark with a pencil where the screws should go for the brackets. Double check for level using your ruler/tape measure or a spirit level. Predrill the screw holes, screw in the mounts, then slot in the blind. Should take 10 minutes per window with double checking. And the attachment with the chain mechanism will be about 1cm wider than the other attachment, so the brackets should not be symmetrical if you want the blind to be positioned dead centre.

Anyway, this is Bed 3, using a 180cm wide blockout Holland blind, with a 210cm drop. The window drop is much less, only about 100cm, but the excess length just stays on the roll. This blind is mounted in the reveal - ie within the window frame itself.

You can also get double Holland blinds - with a blockout blind combined with a translucent blind, that allows light in but not vision for privacy. Because the upstairs bedrooms had to have translucent glass in them anyway to meet Rescode, we decided that all that was needed was blackout blinds. However we may look for double Holland blinds for the sitting room, as it has clear glass and faces the street.

In Bed 4, because we had to have custom sized windows for some reason, the blinds are slightly too large to fit in the reveal, so I decided to mount them outside the reveal.

You can have Holland blinds cut to size if you wanted your slightly large blinds to fit in the reveal, but not too fussed with it. I've heard conflicting stories as to which mounting method gives you the best blockout (light reducing) effect. Checking the three bedrooms we put the blinds in this afternoon, one faces east, one faces south, and one faces west, so it's hard to make a direct comparison. Tina thinks the outside reveal mount reduces light the most, but in all cases the blinds darken the room significantly, to make sleeping no problem.

Now, just to get some custom window coverings for the master. Final tips, standard off-the-shelf, ready-to-hang blinds are normally 60, 90, 120, 150, 180, 210cm wide - so if you're in the planning stage of house building and want to avoid custom sized window coverings later, check that your windows are standard sized :) Or use curtains, which can be drawn to any size. We were trying to avoid curtains in this house, but we may have to use them in the home theatre to get the most complete blockout effect there.

T&T

Merry xmas, etc!

2010-12-27T23:06:00.003+11:00

phew, seems like the last couple of weeks just flew by. Finished up work for the year, which means we've got a few weeks free to tidy up the house, try and start on some landscaping etc.

Anyway just before xmas we submitted our 90 day inspection report, along with a copy of the invoice the concreter gave us - and a few days ago we received a cheque from Metricon covering the replacement of one cracked footpath bay. Nice to see the builder coming good on reimbursing us for the cost of that one as promised! We haven't heard anything yet about getting the 90 day inspection items done, but the office is probably shut for a few weeks so I imagine we won't hear back until end of January. Until then, the most annoying thing is putting up with a recalcitrant garage door that opens, but rarely closes properly, grinding away and getting stuck. Still cursing the cack-handed data wiring zombies that didn't connect the antenna and gave me crappy unsecured data jacks that fall into the wall cavity.

We've also had heaps of furniture arriving from Bay Leather Republic and King Furniture - and for anyone with a bit of spare cash around, the current King Furniture post xmas sale is pretty good, for what it's worth. You gets what you pays for. I'd love to get more King furniture but Tina says I've spent enough there and we've run out of room for any more of their designs. Then again, I reckon I could just about squeeze a chaise lounge into the laundry...

On that note - we've got a sofa to give away for free if anyone wants it, it's a two seater fabric sofa with black & white stripes, couple of coffee stains, comes with a brown suede type cover. Erm... maybe good for the shed, or if you're a hard-up student, or just want a free sofa. It's free, remember! Pickup from us in Melb eastern suburbs. If you want it, put your email address in the comment section below and we'll get in touch with you.

And with xmas over, it's time to keep the credit cards burning. Erm... towels, pillows, blurays, and the impulse buy of the day was a Jura superautomatica Ena coffee machine. Just as a hint to anyone considering coffee machines, in general we've not had good experiences with Sunbeam stuff - cheaply made not to last it seems and we've been through 2 of them. Was considering a Saeco, but my boss has had trouble with 2 of them. We did a housesit with a place that had a top-end Jura that worked brilliantly, so we thought this one might be good - house ain't a home without a coffee machine! And the silver-white colour matches our kitchen perfectly!

T&T

More DIY shelves - laundry cupboard and pantry

2010-12-11T10:38:00.004+11:00

Figured while I was going about making shelves, I'd add another one to the laundry cupboard and pantry. With the tall 2.7m ceilings, there's a huge amount of empty space above the standard 4 shelves the builder provides. To be honest, if we had thought about this we would've got the builder to add another 1 or 2 shelves, I'm sure it wouldn't cost too much extra - handy hint for anyone building with taller ceilings! Get tall doors, maybe raise your robe fitoffs, maybe add in extra shelves.

As it is, it costs about $10 per shelf in materials, so it's not that much anyway, just time and tools to make. This is the laundry cupboard, full of junk. The starserve is up above the top shelf, as well as all the data fitoffs, as well as my adsl modem router.

I simply measured the width of the shelf and cut some melamine to suit, and cut up a couple of additional bits of melamine for end supports. This shelf, just like the shoe shelves, simply sit on top of the existing shelf so if we ever want to remove them in future, just lift them out.

End result, another shelf above the top shelf in the laundry cupboard. I won't be putting anything heavy up here, but it's good to have the extra storage. Did exactly the same for the pantry.

We have our 3 month maintenance coming up soon, so this weekend we're going through the house to check the operation of all the doors, windows, checking cornices and other joins for cracks etc. We've been keeping a list ever since handover, so this we'll submit next week.

T&T

DIY: Additional shelving in cupboard

2010-12-04T21:35:00.002+11:00

With the floors pretty much done, and an itch to go spend yet more money at the Bunnings conglomerate, I figured it would be time to give Tina a little present and give her the shoe cupboard she's always wanted :)

We already have a huge walk-in linen cupboard in the laundry and another one upstairs, so the one in front of the powder room at the bottom of the stairs would be ideal to convert to a shoe cupboard. We don't wear outdoor shoes inside, so this is the best location near the front door and internal garage access door for swapping over shoes.

Things needed: Measuring tape, pencil/marker, drop-saw (or jigsaw, circular saw, hand saw if that's all you have access to), eye and hearing protection, glue, nails or screws.

Anyway the standard linen cupboard has 4 shelves in it. They're about 126cm wide and 35cm deep, but the doors are slightly narrower. If you wanted to go all out, you'd figure out how to remove the shelves (peel off the little white stick-on dots hiding the screws, undo everything etc etc) but since the additional shelves would only hold a few pairs of shoes, I decided to make mini-shelves that would rest on the original shelves at each end.

You can buy melamine boards in various lengths & widths, and fortunately found some in 1200x300mm which was ideal for what I needed.

So we got 4 of those planks and a spare one to cut down into supports.

And finally reassembled everything - a little tricky without removing the original shelves, but not too hard. Held together with wood glue and nails, plenty strong enough for shoes.

And the final result? Linen cupboard converted to shoe cupboard. Plenty of space! The downlight positioned just in front of this cupboard lights it up perfectly.

Really didn't take much time - about 10 minutes to measure, 10 minutes to cut, 30 minutes to assemble and install. Difficulty 3/10 - hardest part is measuring and figuring out how to construct your shelves - whether they stand on top of the existing shelves like I've done (recommended for light loads), or whether you want them fixed like the original shelves.

Whle there, we also picked up a sample of some simple white quad to install around our floor, so if it's wide enough to cover all the gaps, we might start on that next weekend.

T&T

Nolan "On Display" video

2010-11-28T22:09:00.002+11:00

Found this while surfing through random videos of people playing with their Jack Russells on youtube - the Nolan display home (I think it was in Point Cook?) featured on "On Display". We never got to see this house in the flesh as it closed down before we even throught about building a house, so it's interesting to check out the video. Some of the pics from this house are also used on the website.

However, we've got to say - normally the metricon display homes are beautifully decorated - however this one has some truly shocking colour schemes. Anyway, watch for yourself and make up your own mind!

Also had a lovely afternoon at a neighbour's house who invited a few of the residents on the street over for a Christmas afternoon tea. Was really good to meet some of our neighbours who we've not met before, and all of them have said what a good street it is - couldn't agree more!

T&T

DIY grout sealing

2010-11-27T21:09:00.003+11:00

So with the weather forecast being pretty dire this weekend, I decided it was time to stop procrastinating and get the floating floor finished - only had to do a little finishing off in the study, kitchen and pantry, but the last fiddly bits took me forever to plan, measure, measure, cut, swear because it didn't fit, measure, cut again, and finally put it in properly. Anyway no photos because it's a mess and I can't be bothered cleaning up.

However, here's some photos we took earlier of sealing our tiles. Most people know the pain of scrubbing out mouldy areas of grout in showers, and while sealing the grout won't eliminate the problem, it should make it less of a problem.

The issue is that water penetrates grout, stagnates and forms the ideal breeding condition for mould. Sealing the grout essentially aims to provide a hydrophobic (water repelling) barrier, to prevent the water getting in.

So, this is what you need to get started: grout sealer (try your local hardware or tile store), some paper towels, fine brushes, a plastic tub, gloves and eye protection. Electric shaver is optional.

On the instructions for the grout sealer, our one said to spray it over the grout and use paper towels to mop up the excess. We thought a much more precise and efficient way to apply it would be to spray the sealer into the plastic tub, then paint it on using the brushes.

The paper towels are used in case any drips go onto the tiles. With doing walls, you can't use too much sealer as it'll drip.

However, doing floor grout you can put a lot more sealer on, as it'll pool in the grout line.

Also, if you've been using your shower, you should let it dry out for 48 hours before sealing it, and not use it for 24 hours after sealing it. We also did 2 coats in the shower to give the sealer as much coverage as possible.

This is a pretty simple DIY, 1/10 for difficulty. Just takes a bit of time and patience to do a neat job. You might need to redo it every 4-5 years or so depending on how you use your shower.

T&T

Concrete finished

2010-11-22T20:10:00.003+11:00

OK, so this was all done last Friday - the footpath and crossover concrete was poured, and the guys were back to expose the aggregate. Here you see a bloke with his high-pressure washer spraying off the top layer of the driveway.

And a close-up view - concrete still very dark with high water content.

Unfortunately the colour didn't stay as dark after the concrete had dried out - this is 4 days later. A bit of a pity as I liked the very dark look it had in the earlier photo!

After all the aggregate was exposed, the driveway was acid etched, sealed, and had expansion saw cuts made. Hopefully we'll be able to drive over the crossover tomorrow! Think I might get a quote on getting the remaining footpath replaced, as it looks pretty crappy next to the brand new concrete.

T&T

Concreting day two

2010-11-18T22:36:00.005+11:00

So at the end of Wednesday, we had the driveway all formed up, plus the concreting behind the garage plumbed in for two additional drains and formwork.

This morning, starting nice and early as usual, the rear concreting was done in about 90 minutes. It's a colour-through charcoal grey. Along the side near the fence is about a foot of land, will eventually get around to putting in some weed matting and probably white stones there.

Standing in the garage looking out of the house, this is the driveway. It will be an exposed aggregate, 80:20 mix of black and white stones. Because of the slight slope from the street to the garage, there's a stainless steel grate plumed into stormwater drainage. There's also a great big footprint you can see on the left side near the portico, but our concreter says not to worry - they'll be back tomorrow to wash off the top layer of concrete to expose the aggregate and that footprint will come off as well - sure hope so! Anyway, I also got a year older today, certainly doesn't have the excitement it used to when you were 18 to 21, but gots lots of concrete as a birthday present - quite happy with that!

Finally, a big chunk of footpath has been removed as well as the old original crossover. If the weather is kind tomorrow, we'll have the crossover formwork inspected by council and poured as well!

Also got a call from Bay Leather Republic saying our theatre recliner will be delivered on Saturday.... at 6:45am! Can always go back to bed after that.

T&T

Driveway and concreting preparation

2010-11-16T12:35:00.003+11:00

Got woken up today by some loud trucks pulling up outside; turns out it was our concreting contractor appearing unexpectedly - I guess 8 weeks delay isn't too bad.

Anyway, we're in the process of getting a double sized crossover, double sized aggregate driveway, and concreting behind the garage to the rear of the house. Not sure when it'll be all finished, but at least it's starting!

Also had the real estate agents (who sold us the old house) turn up to give a valuation on the property. One day (if we ever have a positive account in our bank balance again), we wouldn't mind redeveloping another plot of land; the only problem is local prices have gone totally wild and finding a well-priced plot to redevelop is getting very difficult - what interest rate rise??

T&T

DIY: Obscuring/frosting windows

2010-11-13T20:07:00.004+11:00

When we were specifiying our house, most of the upstairs bedroom windows had to be obscured up to 1800mm or so, so that you couldn't look into the neighbour's windows or backyards. It cost more, and that's because the actual glass is replaced by special obscured glazing. Part of Rescode, so there's no way to get around it. But our powder room and ensuite windows are clear, meaning we can see out - and people could see in. The solution to this issue then, is to add frosting/obscuring film, so that looking in or out isn't possible.

For a DIY, this is about a 7/10 for difficulty - it's easy to do, hard to do well. Anyway, what you'll need is some obscure/frosted film, Bunnings may have it, or you may be able to buy it from a window tinting place. Also some scissors, a sharp blade, a measuring tape, and ideally a helper.

Anyway, Step One: Clean your windows thoroughly, scrape off any excess silicon holding the glass in, and make sure it's fully dry. I also got a little step stool to help clean the top of the window.

Step Two: Apply the film to the window. First measure the window size, and add a few centimetres all around as you won't be able to position the film exactly spot on. Peel away the first 20cm or so of the backing paper, and with a helper, position the film so that it entire covers the glass area. Press down with your fingers to get it to stick to the window. If it's off centre, you can pull it off and re-apply, I did this many times.

Step Three: Once you've applied the film reasonable well, use your fingers or a plastic card to push out any air bubbles.

Step Four: Use your sharp blade to trim away the excess, using the window frame as your guide. I screwed this up on one window, trimming too far away from the window frame, so I'll have to redo the window later on.

And that's pretty much it - frosted windows for privacy.

So, if you have any windows that you want obscured, you could give this a go. The film shouldn't cost any more than about $35/sqm, and the worst that can go wrong is that you screw up applying or trimming the film, and you have to start again.

Other things we did today? We were meant to pick up a couple of almost-new King Furniture couches from a private seller, but she reneged on our deal despite a deposit left and a written contract. Pretty sad, poor behaviour. I won't name names, but if someone with a name similar to "w3ndy gr4nt" from a suburb similar to "k3ilor 3ast" wants to do business, don't trust her one bit. Anyway, we ended up spending a small fortune today, what with the King Furniture floorstock clearance sale yielding a brilliant find for our sitting room, and a good deal at Bay Leather Republic for electric home theatre recliners in the softest leather in the world - looks like we won't be spending this Christmas squatting on the floor at least!

T&T

Unrelated: Why Micro$oft still sucks

2010-11-12T21:12:00.003+11:00

So, finally moved our bigscreen plasma from mum's place into its rightful position in the family room, hook up the xbox360, and... nothing.

Well, not nothing, but lots of this:

Yep, the shining example of Microsoft product development and hardware testing. My 360 is rooted, and not for the first time - this problem came up a couple of years ago and I had it "repaired", and now it's happened again. Checking my xbox live account, turns out the warranty expired in Jan 2009, despite the repair being done within the warranty period.

No wonder I've hardly touched the 360 - I've also got a Playstation3 which is superior in pretty much every way - free online play, worldwide game compatibility, better interface, builtin wireless, Bluray, PlayTV, easily changeable hard drives. I'd be quite happy to burn the xbox360 except I've got a lot of Guitar Hero/Rock Band hardware on the 360 format, and with xmas at our place this year, all the cousins will want to rock on.

So, for all you people looking to buy a game console, STAY AWAY FROM THE 360! It's unreliable and you have to fork out more money each year for the assumed pleasure of online gaming. Buy a Playstation3, Wii, a pack of cards, a blackboard and chalk, some mouldy cheese, all these options will give you more gaming pleasure and will certainly last longer than any Microsoft product.

On that note, now that we've got broadband going again, I was in the market for a new computer, and it ain't going to be powered by Micro$h!t, that's for sure. And what am I going to do with my stuffed xbox360? Something I should've done a long time ago - I'll take it to a console specialist, get it repaired, and modchip it like mad so I can play all my *cough* "backed up" games. Yeah, that'll show 'em.

T&T

Internet connection fixed in record time, and furniture sneak preview!

2010-11-10T23:11:00.005+11:00

Well, it's been a surprisingly good experience getting hooked up to broadband. I wanted a TPG connection as they seem to have the best deals currently, but our exchange is full for TPG. So the next best deal seemed to be with iinet. I signed up with them a couple of weeks ago and was told up to 20 working days for connection, turned out to be about 8 working days.

The day after connection, I bought a new ADSL2+ modem router, and nothing happened. Lodged a fault report, the next business day (Monday) was called to arrange a technician inspection. That happened on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday (today) Telstra had been onsite to fix the problem. Plugged in my modem, and everything's great! Very good customer service by iinet, they also called me today to confirm they think everything had been fixed, and to callback if it hadn't. If only all companies looked after their customers this well, there'd be a lot more satisfied customers out there!

Anyway, the driveway/crossover which had been scheduled for tomorrow has been delayed... again... which make it about 6 consecutive weeks of delays. Some of it is due to the weather, and some of it is due to astrological improbability (which means there's no reason given, we just getting delayed). I'm told the driveway will definitely happen next week - in tradesman terms, definitely has the same meaning as probably not.

So we've been keeping ourselves busy spending lots of money ordering furniture. This little beauty should hopefully be in the house this weekend - King Furniture's Opera, a 2 and a 3 seater in black leather for the sitting room, probably.

Personally, I'm a closet modern furniture buff - think Eames, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe etc. One day I'll get around to posting pics of some of the modernist chairs we have and getting into some of the details about them, and no doubt that's when we'll hear the sounds of internet browsers been closed and people going off to watch OK Go and trained dogs. Anyway, the original idea was to get a couple of Barcelona style chairs for the sitting room as they look incredible - unfortunately all the replicas we've sat on have been pretty uncomfortable. The Opera is a good choice for a sitting room - it has a relatively low back, allowing interaction all around the furniture, but the low back means it's not great for lounging around or watching TV. Good for chatting, and I also plan to spend a lot of time on my back lying across the 3-seater, reading many trashy SF novels the size of a phone book. The design of the Opera is great too - simple, clean lines are a defining feature of Modernism, and will never date. I mean, how many 1970s' puffy sofas in green floral fabric do you see on eBay for $0.99? And did I say how good the leather is? We also have other King Furniture on the way, maybe another sneak peek another day.

T&T

Kitchen: floating floor installation, and ADSL investigation

2010-11-09T22:02:00.003+11:00

So after reporting to iinet on Friday night that my broadband wasn't working, I was called yesterday morning to schedule an appointment sometime today on my day off - the technician came around 10:30, tested the line and determined that there's a fault somewhere up the line. He called Telstra, and apparently it'll all be fixed up tomorrow! Kind of surprised to see how fast things are getting fixed - so far, big thumbs up to iinet for their customer support. Hoping to be on proper ADSL2+ by tomorrow night!

Spent the rest of the day preparing and laying the flooring in the kitchen. After removing all the plaster lumps and filling in holes in the slab, laid down the underlay/moisture barrier.

Few hours later, kitchen flooring is done. The only parts I'm leaving for later are the small gaps where I have to cut boards lengthways to slot them in, hoping to have them all fixed up this weekend.

Nice to finally have the concrete slab covered up, the amount of dust coming up all the time was driving us insane - couldn't keep anything clean!

T&T

Floating floors, day...?

2010-11-06T20:16:00.004+11:00

Did a bit more flooring since the last post - finished off the study on Cup Day.

We salvaged the temporary front door (it was going to be thrown away anyway!) and stuck a couple of trestle legs underneath it to turn it into our new study table. Not sure if we'll paint it, vinyl wrap it or do something else, it's a bit rough at the moment but looks nice and is huge!

Nearly finished the entry and hallway, and there's a few fiddly bits left under the stairs and towards the powder room and laundry.

Will need to find my jigsaw for some complex cuts near doorways, and re-arrange my dropsaw to do lengthway cuts.

Also finally got my iinet ADSL2+ connection established - bought a brand new ADSL router, and... well, nothing works. Lodged a fault report with iinet who will then take it up with Telstra if it's a Telstra wiring error. However, if there's a fault in the wiring internally, then it's yet one more stuffup to fix up. Unfortunately I think we got the worst data cablers in the world to do our house, with the antenna not connected to starserve and the data plugs not correctly attached - they all "fall in" to the wall cavity when I try to plug in a data cable. Meh. Anyway, should it turn out to be a problem with the internal wiring, I'll get it fixed up and send the bill to Metricon, who can then get the idiot cablers who stuffed it up in the first place to reimburse my costs.

T&T

Floating floor installation Day 2, more pain and suffering but we're getting there.

2010-11-01T22:38:00.003+11:00

Today I completed about 60% of the sitting room floor before lunch while Tina prepared the family room for installation; removing all plaster lumps, vacuuming and underlay. We then started on the family room after lunch.

Before: Family room cleared of all furniture (of course), slab as clean as possible. If you look closely out the window, you can just see the head of Mr Meyer, our lemon tree - despite our poor track record of keeping plants alive, Mr Meyer seems to be thriving even in the constant rain we've had the last few days.

Next picture, about halfway done with the family room. The complicated thing here is that we started the entry and hallway before the family room, and we want the boards to line up. This involved lots of measuring and calculating, and allow 15.9cm of space before laying the first full board in the family room. Once the boards here meet up with the hallway boards, I'll go back and trim a line of boards to fit against the wall.

Essential tools for floating floor installation: Hammer, pull bar, rubber mallet, tapping block, spacer blocks, pencil, ruler, measuring tape, a bigger hammer when you realise you should've spent more than $3.99 on the first hammer which weighs as much as a banana and is about as effective. Plus a few bandaids for those scraped knuckles, and lots of swearing when you accidently bang your rubber mallet against the wall and it leaves a big black scar that you'll have to come and patch/repaint later. Or just pay someone else to deal with the pain and suffering of installing a floor. But I figure we've come this far, we might as well push on until it's all done - it's like watching a bad movie, thinking you should walk out but there's only 20 more minutes to go.

Finally, the end result, family room pretty much all done, but where it extends into the hallway at the bottom of the picture not yet done.

Pretty happy with how things are going so far, but the complicated part really starts tomorrow where I have to make sure the family room floorboards are perfectly parallel with the hallway flooring. Plus doing the study with the double cavity doors - I think I'll have to put a 3mm expansion gap filled with cork, caulk or an expansion joint, depending on how closely we can cut and lay the flooring.

I've also discovered a little dip in the floor, right near the entrance door - d'oh! I think I'll put a potplant or something over it to stop visitors walking on it and noticing the defect. High tech solution, right?

T&T

Flooring update: Floating floor installation Day 1

2010-10-31T20:18:00.006+11:00

Been a busy week, so not much time for blog posts. Tina's brother made a surprise visit from the UK, so spent most of the week eating out and stuffing our faces. Anyway, we made up for all that indulgence during the first couple of days of the Melbourne Cup long weekend, getting started on our floor installation!

The delivery of 130sqm of flooring and underlay was scheduled for Saturday, but ended up arriving Friday afternoon instead. We measured up the ground floor, and it came to 122.5sqm - but decided to order a bit more to allow for offcuts, excess etc - always a good idea!

Now, at this early stage of the post I figure it's a good idea to make this disclaimer: installing floating floors is difficult, time-consuming and back-breaking labour! Don't believe the salespeople when they say anyone can do it with a few simple tools in half an hour, it ain't true! While we have decided to install our own floating floor, I'm certainly not recommending everyone reading this blog to give it a shot unless you have the required tools, a lot of time, forgiving neighbours who don't mind 8 hours of power-tool usage, and a spare labourer or two, this is NOT a one-person job! On that note, Tina has done a superb job as my unpaid labourer, preparing floors, taping underlay and moving lots of floorboards around - gutsy!

Anyway, getting back to the story, Friday and Saturday was set aside for preparation. As one of my uni lecturers used to say - Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance! Lots of lumps of plaster and other junk was left on our slab, so it took a few hours going around on hands & knees with a hammer & chisel, chipping off all the lumps. Our slab was pretty flat - ideally you don't want any more than 3mm variation from flat over a 2m run. We then swept and vacuumed the slab in preparation for the underlay.

The underlay is 3mm foam with attached plastic membrane - important if you're laying a floating floor on concrete, to prevent moisture building up and warping the boards. You can lay floating floors directly over old floorboards, vinyl tiles, tiles, concrete, providing the foundation is stable and not too uneven. We taped over all the joins with duct tape. The underlay runs at 90 degrees to the direction of the floorboards.

The first row we laid along the long side of the entrance. The little black blocks are spacer to maintain approx 10mm gap between the floorboards and the skirting to allow for expansion and contraction of the boards. We'll cover up the gaps later with some flat bead/quad. The brand we chose for floorboards was Tarkett, using their "clicky-locky" system, which is actually really painful to work with, if you follow their instructions! Their idea of an easy installation is to lay an entire line of boards, then lift & click it into the previous line of boards. Easy to do, if you have 2 boards - impossible if you have a long line of boards 4 or more! To solve this installation problem, I decided to grind off the end tongue of every second board, that way we could install 2 boards at a time and tap them together.

We then just kept adding rows - we staggered the start of each row by approx 1/3 or 1/2 of a board. With the random design of our floorboards, keeping the joins consistent isn't necessary - good for us! When it comes to placing the boards in the kitchen, we'll use wood-glue to seal up the joins during placement to minimise problems of water spillage.

Finally we decided to wrap things up around 8pm (local laws state no power-tool usage after 8pm, or before 9am) and I figured I'd annoyed the neighbours enough. Plus today was Halloween - saw lots of kids walking up & down the street, but probably scared off by the noise my drop-saw was making! Luckily for us too, our neighbours dropped in for a stickybeak this afternoon and loaned us a circular saw - thanks Anthony & Suzanne!

So, this is the end result for about 6 hours of floating floor installation by a couple of inexperience n00bs to DIY flooring. My parents dropped by and were impressed so far - certainly better than the dusty concrete slab we were putting up with before! Essentially we've got the entry done, and hoping to complete the sitting room and study tomorrow now that we're getting the hang of things!

Just to repeat - installing floating floors isn't easy or simple! We slept for 12 hours last night exhausted, and that was only after slab preparation and the first 2 rows of floorboards. Will probably get the same amount of sleep tonight as there's another big day ahead tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who have ordered our soft-closing door dampers from tim-and-tina.com! We're about halfway through our initial order of door closers and hope everyone is having as good results as we have experienced!

T&T

so.... here it is - tim-and-tina's soft door closers now available!

2010-10-24T22:47:00.003+11:00

phew, what a weekend! We ordered flooring (yay!) and a lounge (finally!), sealed the grout in the bathroom, but more importantly, took another video with another example of how the door dampers (soft closers) work, and how you install them!

Next video - an example of a door damper freshly installed in mum's kitchen, while she was still cooking!

Want one (or two, or fifty?) Go to our new website tim-and-tina.com and check out the detail about our soft-closing door dampers there!

T&T

Tim and Tina's first video blog!

2010-10-22T19:24:00.005+11:00

So, due to totally underwhelming demand (no-one asked for it!), here's our first video blog entry! Though of course, Tina (my long suffering silent partner in this whole blogging thing that has gone on way longer than intended) refuses to be in the video or say anything. What's that whole thing about hearing your own voice on a video, surely I don't sound like that...

... anyway, here's a short walkthrough of the kitchen area. My video smarts are pretty dull, so it was recorded on an ipod nano, not edited in any way. I tried it on my iPhone but because it records in HD, 2 minutes of video equals 200mb of data which is not feasible on our current wireless internet plan (another reason we need unlimited ADSL!)

Have a peek at our kitchen, and if you're after our special soft closing mechanisms - a little project I've been working on for the last few weeks - stay tuned on this blog for more details on how you can order them too!

T&T

Fence replaced, telstra connection?

2010-10-20T23:23:00.002+11:00

Our long-suffering neighbours will be glad to find the fence replaced - because the garage was being built 150mm inside our boundary, the existing old fence had to be pulled down for the slab & bricking to be done in the area. The new section of fence is about 10m long, and has a mini retaining wall section in our side of the boundary, as there was about 30cm of site cut in the garage slab area. On the left side of the pic, you can see the rear roller door, plus an extra water tap added. The plan is to concrete this rear section all the way to the back of the house, to allow for extra car parking/washing plus a shed.

And I've been puzzling over this for a while... probably want to set up an unlimited ADSL2+ connection to the house, and I'm not even sure we have a phone line connected to the exchange. We have the standard 2 internal phone points, and we do have a Telstra box mounted near our gas meter with a conduit running into it... plus all these extra wires hanging out the side of the house. I know one of the black cables is a standard coax lead-in for cable internet (or Foxtel) as we added a lead-in as an electrical upgrade. The white one looks suspiciously like a Cat5/6 or six strand phone connection. So, do I have a phone line connected - can I just call TPG, iinet etc and get a naked ADSL connection established? How can you tell - comments please! And before you ask - we haven't had a landline phone in 5 years, so I don't even have a phone to plug into these internal phone sockets!

T&T

Evaporative cooling installed

2010-10-19T22:21:00.003+11:00

Fortunately the rain and hail held off today, and the crew arrived at 8am to start work installing our evaporative cooling system.

There were 4 blokes on the job, and managed to get everything installed by midday. This is the Braemar 550 with 7 vents. The one thing about the Braemar is that the unit is simply a huge box - some other designs have a sloping lower edge so they sit a little closer to the roof. This makes them appear visually smaller - but has the side effect of being a tiny bit noisier too. Anyway, the shape of the box wasn't really a factor in choosing this unit, since we're not going to spend much time staring at it from the street. At least it's a matching colour (Slate Grey) to our roof tiles!

Still got a pile of old ruined fence sitting in the front - the fence guy injured his back and hasn't been back on our job for a week so far.

The end result - the boss was good enough to spend a bit of time discussing vent placement and where things should go for the best result, so I was happy for him to advise us. The main thing was that we want as much flow as possible down through the stairwell, and it's not necessary to have the main vent directly over the stairwell void. This is because this big evaporative unit pushes a huge amount of airflow into the house, so the main thing for whole-of-house cooling will be keeping the upstairs windows only a little bit open, all the upstairs doors open, and the downstairs windows wide open to get maximum air exchange.

So now we can bring on Melbourne's heatwaves without fear! The smaller bedrooms have a 12" duct, the master has a 14" and the ensuite a 10". The leisure area upstairs has a 16", and the stairwell void, a massive 18" duct. Getting some window blinds is the next priority. I rang the bloke today about the flooring from the last post - he said he'd call me back, never did. Anyone who's been following the blog knows how shitty I get about bad customer service...

T&T

Flooring - narrowing down colour choices

2010-10-17T10:10:00.005+11:00

Did a bit of window shopping yesterday - headed back to Fowles in Clayton to check out their floor display. Plenty of laminates and timber floors to look at, but not so many in the greys that we're after. There was another flooring place nearby, and we picked up a couple of samples from there as they had two that are close to what we're wanting.

These samples are from Tarkett, a German brand. Also sold in Bunnings, but they only have a few samples from a different range. Both of these samples are commercial market laminates, and the one on the left has lots of variation. When you combine it with a few other boards, the visual board width varies, so some boards appear twice as wide as the other ones. There are also "imperfections" printed into the laminate (not in this sample board); so this board would look perfect in a funky clothing store, or maybe a laneway cafe. The board on the right has a lot more consistency and has a definite black/charcoal tone to it. Matches the charcoal stain on our door, but over a larger open area perhaps will be too dark.

Closer.... and you can see how the darker board shows up footprints - but then again, with our current slab exposed we're getting heaps and heaps of dusting. The lighter board shows up hardly any footprints at all. You can also see the click system they use, similar to all the laminates in the market where you can just "click" the boards and they lock into place. I think we're leaning towards the lighter one, as it suits our grey neutral colour scheme better, and shows dirt/dust less.

So, just like evaporative cooling vs refrigerated aircon described previously, all the various floor systems have their pros and cons - for us, the main thing is the colour and appearance of the floor, and we can't find the look that we want in a real wood or bamboo floor (plenty of reds and browns, no greys) - so far only laminate. Haven't looked much into vinyl planks, but I imagine they'd be able to produce a grey vinyl plank with no difficulty.

Anyway, not going to settle on a colour yet as there's plenty of other retailers to check out - though we're hoping to have picked one and have it delivered to our house before the Melbourne Cup weekend. Plus I need to get stuck into preparing the slab for the floor; which means many painful hours on hands & knees, using a hammer & chisel to knock off all the excess plaster and gunk that has built up on the slab.

Had a little dinner party with some old friends last night, and got a Lemon Meyer tree as a housewarming present - awesome! Always had plans to get one (to supply the necessary lemons for Coronas) so hopefully today we'll pick up a big pot and some advice to keep this thing from dying - we don't have a good track record with plants, but I think we'll put some effort into keeping this one alive!

T&T

Evaporative cooling booked in

2010-10-12T22:01:00.005+11:00

So far in Melbourne we've had a couple of moderately warm days - mid 20s or so? In our house, we found the ground floor very comfortable - not hot at all, which is a big benefit to the thermal mass of a big concrete slab. Upstairs - bit of a different story. Quite warm, even with only 2 west-facing windows. Definitely need some proper cooling for when the massive Melbourne heatwaves hit!

Anyway, this is something we planned for back when designing the house. The cost for refrigerated AC as provided by the builder was something like $20,000+, and the large running costs of AC are a bit offputting. We pulled out the tiny Breezair evaporative cooling unit that was in the old house we demolished, installed it in the top floor of my parent's house and was surprised at how effective it was.

So for anyone wanting a quick comparison between evaporative and AC, here goes:

AC pros: Gets very, very cold, even on the hottest days.
AC cons: Expensive to run, recycles the air.
Evaporative pros: Cheap to run, cycles fresh air through the house.
Evaporative cons: Possibly will struggle on the very hottest 40+ days.

And the arguments to and from could run for years - if you're so inclined to read more, check out this great lengthy discussion on Whirlpool. I love being ice-cold with AC, but I figure we might only need it a few days a year. So the plan is to install the evaporative cooling upstairs and maybe add in a split system AC downstairs if we find we need it. We paid for upgraded roof trusses, roof water & powerpoint for future evaporative cooling installation, but after speaking to a few evaporative installers, they said it doesn't really make much difference. Oh well!

Anyway, I'd booked in a few quotes today.

Coldflow were meant to be first, but seeing as they couldn't even be bothered turning up or calling to explain why no-one came, they're immediately off the list. If their attention to detail and customer service is this bad even before making a sale, why would I ever bother buying anything from them? Thumbs down. Weather World didn't want to send someone out, so they emailed a quote for a Breezair 210 with 8 outlets based on floorplans I emailed them prior.

Finally, Maroondah Heating & Cooling had the final visit of the day, and got the job. Damien had a peek up into the roof, spent some time measuring up the rooms and discussing the various options available. Ultimately we settled on the Braemar 550 with 7 outlets; with specific attention to the size of the outlet in each area plus placement of the unit itself, he reckons we should get pretty good cooling to the whole house including downstairs - here's hoping! Installation is booked in for next Tuesday. Chose the Braemar instead of the Breezair as they're made by the same company (Seeley International), but the Braemar have fewer problems due to their fan design.

And for those still at decision-making stage, should you get evaporative cooling done through the builder? Well, Metricon wanted $5500 for a 5 outlet Bonaire Summerbreeze, which was undersized for our house. Our quote for a 7 outlet Braemar was over $1000 less than that, with the top-of-the line unit.

*warning rant beginning here*

Finally, while he was up in the roof cavity Damien confirmed for me what I had suspected - my antenna isn't connected to the Starserve system, with the coax wires just dangling out in open space. Good job by the data installers, real good job there.

Unfortunately here is another area that Metricon is failing in after-sales customer service, having reported to my SS, my CSC and to the girl who did a follow-up courtesy call that my antenna hasn't been connected, what's been done about it? Nothing, zero, nada, zilch. I'll be writing a rather pointed letter come three-month review time, because after paying about $1500 for an antenna, Starserve and a bunch of TV points, you'd think you'd actually get a working product rather than something dead-on-arrival. And the worse thing is, a technician could splice the cables together in about 5 minutes to solve my problem. Instead, I get to complain endlessly to everyone who walks into my house about a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place - "Yes, I know I've got rabbit-ear aerials on my TVs, because my antenna isn't connected". So, to everyone building, make sure your antenna is connected to whatever TV outlets you've paid for, because when's something broken, it's probably going to stay broken for a while. Not to mention all the other issues from the "completion" inspection - all little fiddly things which could be easily fixed but aren't, and I guess they'll just be added to the 3 month problem list.

*rant expired*

T&T

Flooring decisions - what colour and what to put on the ground floor?

2010-10-10T23:32:00.006+11:00

So we had our carpet installed last week, and loving it - deep charcoal colour and feels great underfoot. Our main problem is still what to use on the ground floor? It'll have to be a timber-style flooring, but to use real wood, laminates, vinyl planks, bamboo...?

Whatever the actual material, the look of it will have to suit our house - grey neutrals. This dark charcoal/black timber look in the next picture is a pretty good indication of where we're heading.

The issue then becomes - is it too dark? The dangers here are that the dark floor will show every bit of fluff/lint etc. Maybe a lighter grey floor would be the way to go? This next pic is of brown toned floor but with plenty of grey tones in it. Quite nice!

We've been through plenty of chain-store commercial carpet places, you know the ones I'm talking about. Big thumbs down to the d!ckhead working at the carpet place on whitehorse rd near Adriatic - what's the point of acting like a snob and talking down rudely to your customers - reckon being arrogant will get you a sale? Give up your day job mate!

Anyway, if anyone can recommend some good places to check out varieties and prices on timber/laminate flooring in Melbourne's east, please comment below! Needing about 130sqm of the stuff just for the ground floor - anyone got that amount leftover they want to donate to us?

T&T

Home Theatre room: Fixed!

2010-10-05T16:25:00.004+11:00

Spent the weekend repainting the HT room walls. First off, got a couple of sample pots from 3D Inspirations in Nunawading. Here's another great tip - if you want advice on paint, go to a paint shop (NOT Bunnings!!!) The paint shop knew exactly what I was on about with neutral greys, and had the whole Dulux Specifier colour chart there and gave great tips on colours to choose.

Anyway, on the left is Dulux Milton Moon (PG1F2) and on the right is Timeless Grey (PG1F4). A little too light, and a little too dark.

And the one I chose? Endless Dusk (PG1F3), exactly in-between the two colours above. The next pic shows the huge difference between Endless Dusk and Musing. However, decided to keep the ceiling Musing as it actually looks much better with the grey next to it on the walls. Also bought that step-ladder with folding paint shelf on it, very handy to have!

And the final result - much better! So the colours here are Musing on the ceiling, Endless Dusk on all walls, White-on-White trim, and Granite carpet. Just the look I was after - mid Grey with white contrast - classy but still modern.

Now if only I can get in touch with our SS to get the antenna sorted out - 2 weeks in and still no antenna connection = no TV reception!!!

T&T

How I stuffed up my home theatre room, and how to avoid my mistakes

2010-10-02T07:37:00.004+10:00

No posts for a week - unbelievable, hey? The problem is, getting the keys to your new house is the end of one stage and the beginning of a whole lot more construction - couldn't sleep this morning so I've got a few minutes to blog. Been incredibly busy moving, cleaning, contacting trades etc.

Anyway, the problem all started last week when our carpet installation was delayed. Thought it might be a good idea to quickly pick a colour to paint my home theatre room - the problem word here is quickly. Don't do anything quickly as you'll regret it - unfortunately this tends to be my main problem, impatience and stubborness. Much love to Tina for putting up with me over the last few days while I've been moaning about "my" room.

Anyway here's a quick guide on how I ruined my home theatre. Starting with last weekend, laying down painter's tape and drop sheets to protect the trims and windows. So far so good. Also removed the batten light covers and taped up the heating duct vents. Sugar soap all walls and ceilings. Allow 2-3 hours for prep work and 24 hours drying.

Next, couldn't help myself - quickly plugged in the projector and did a preview of Top Gear testing a very practical family car - the Audi R8. I'm wondering/hoping this car will depreciate enough to make it a good company car in 3-4 years time - yep, definitely hoping! I had calculated that at a throw distance of 5m the image should project onto this wall with 40cm to spare on either side but my calculations were off a little - this image is definitely too small :) Good excuse for a new HD widescreen DLP projector with scope lens, as this old Benq is 5 years old and definitely not up to current specs. For anyone who wants to become a home theatre tragic (that's all you guys out there) I recommend avsforum.com for too much information.

Sample pot. This is Dulux Musing, meant to be a very subtle light grey. Doesn't look bad in this photo but lighing affects everything. And here comes mistake number one... only bought one sample pot and decided too quickly. Buy maybe 3 sample pots, paint them all on the same wall, and decide over about 3 days in different lighting before buying a big pot of paint.

My intention was to paint the entire HT a neutral grey, and use the wall as a projection screen. In our last house I had a 4:3 Brightview motorised screen, but have always believed a good painted wall in the right colour, in the right environment (properly prepared dedicated HT room) is more than sufficient for the average HT - for more nerd detail on neutral grey specs, click on this link.

Anyway, stupid me bought a 10L pot of paint and went blindly ahead to cut in all the corners. Oh BTW painting is not as easy as you think - it's hard on the muscles (especially ceilings) and getting a good finish is difficult. Pay a pro to do it and avoid killing yourself is a good alternative to DIY.

And then ended up with this.

A nice lavender home theatre. Great for your elderly great-aunt in the country in her "good" room, not so good for Tim's modern home theatre.

Plans for today? Go buy some sample pots, paint over a wall, and start all over again. I'll keep the ceiling as Musing as it looks OK, and painting ceilings is a real b!tch to do. I was thinking of leaving this colour on for a few months and then redoing it, but I'm definitely not happy with with the colour and it's easier to repaint now with no furniture in, than later on.

And of course, we had carpets put in yesterday in this room so now I have to buy heaps of drop sheets to protect our lovely new carpet. More pics later, if I'm not busy overpainting my lilac walls.

Finally, I think sometime during the week the blog ticked over 100,000 hits - never thought it'd get so much attention! Thanks to all the readers who have followed our blog, and still continue to suffer plenty of self-obsessed ranting and raving about stupid details. Though of course - if you've subscribed to this blog, you're probably building a house too, and are probably as detail-obsessed as we are!

T&T

Week One review - the good, the bad, the ugly!

2010-09-24T21:05:00.004+10:00

So we've had the keys to our house for one week now - how's it been?

The Good: It's great to have our own place again. What's the best things so far?

Garage with remote door, rear roller & internal access - it's all incredibly convenient, we've never had that before! Only thing is, I wish it was an 8 car garage... or at least had a workshop extension.
All the 2 and 3 way switches. Sounds like a minor thing, but having lots of 2 and 3 way switches means you don't have to walk all the way across a room or hallway to turn lights on/off.
Tall ceilings and doors. Make you feel small! I've got a feeling we'll have to watch the heating/cooling bill due to the increased internal space, but it's worth it.
Huge kitchen. We haven't moved much in, but all our stuff from the old house won't take up half the pot drawers. Plus there's this massive walk-in pantry about 50 times bigger than what we had in the last house. Lots of room for a fridge, beer fridge, and wine fridge (I wish!)
Great ensuite shower - we had it redesigned to be big with a rainfall showerhead, and it's incredible! The big size is awesome, and the rainfall showerhead puts out a beautiful spread of water and is great to relax in. Absolutely love it, and very glad we made this change to the ensuite layout. Nice mixer taps everywhere.
All the colours worked out beautifully! It's hard to choose all your house colours 3-6 months before the house is even started, but things look fantastic. Might start on painting the home theatre room dark grey this weekend.

The Bad:

Had handover with a couple of minor things wrong with various locks and handles, haven't heard from our SS yet about fixes to that. Plus we weren't given a key to the manhole, which we can't open.
Doing our clean of the house for the last week, you notice a lot more things once you move in. Mostly you'd never see them, as we've up on stepladders cleaning the tops of window reveals etc, but a couple of paint blemishes are a bit more noticable and we might just repaint or cover up with a mirror or something. I think once we move some furniture in and start enjoying ourselves, it won't be an issue.
Carpets have been delayed, so we're squatting in the study until carpets are in and we can move our bed up into the master bedroom. No big deal.
Driveway and crossover still not done... various delays with our concreter. Lots of dirt in the garage as a result, but not a big deal either.
Stupid fence guy is still missing-in-action a good 5 weeks after he was meant to replace the side fence. I'm sending him an email to say if the job isn't done in the next week, we're going with someone... anyone else who will turn up and get the job done.
Stairs are awesome but we definitely have to repaint the walls around it as a lot of stain runs on the wall. Knew this was coming but still a bit of a pain.

Another tip for everyone out there who are installing wired networking with any builder - I bought a cheap network tester for about $5 delivered from China (do a search for "network tester" on ebay if you want to buy one), but due to incredible slowness it arrived too late for our inspection - it only came today! Order this thing at least a month before your inspection date if it's coming from China!

Basically, one end plugs into the hub point powered by a 9V battery, and a seperate bit plugs into the other end. A series of little lights go from 1 - 8, and if everything lights up, all should be good! Our data points were left unlabelled, so this is an easy way to identify which data point goes to which room. All our network points appear to be OK except for the one going to the family room - when I plugged in the jack, the whole jack disappeared into the wall - looks like the data guy didn't secure it properly. Anyway I fished it out, and on testing it appears that the #1 cable isn't connected, and the #4 & #5 cables are joined together as both light up instead of sequentially. I'll test it more thoroughly once our router and internet is installed, it may be a 3 month maintenance item to fix the cabling point and replace the faulty jack.

The Ugly:

Erm... not really much to report, really! I was dreading some of the horror stories I've heard from other people once they had moved in. Some of them I recall include bathtubs/sinks flooding the whole room, being locked into you master bedroom because the door jammed, gas leaks from hot water systems, toilets backing up because the sewer pipes weren't connected right - but for us, no disasters like that (touch wood!!!)

The only really annoying thing is I think the antenna hasn't been connected to the Starserve unit, as there's no TV signal from any of the 7 TV outlets in the house. Would be nice to watch TV once we've finished moving in properly! Should be an easy fix, will get in touch with our SS and see if he can get the data or antenna guy in quickly to fix that.

T&T

Carpet delayed, Metricon house for sale in Balwyn North

2010-09-23T19:43:00.003+10:00

Got a call from Fowles today, saying that our booked carpet installer had an injury on the job today, so we won't be having our carpets installed tomorrow. A minor setback for us, but having experience a work injury a few years back, I just hope the bloke involved recovers 100%. So maybe sometime next week or week after - they'll call me back to confirm a day.

And what did we do, the day after handover last week? Went to check out a home for sale (of course) in Balwyn North - a Liberty that was finished about 3 months ago.

Quite a nice facade. Uses our bricks in 50mm, timber windows all around, and a big light aggregate driveway that extends in front for extra parking space. Zero maintenance gargens all around are great too. Up and down lights on the ground floor plus eave downlights are really nice for external lighting. The only issue for me is that the ground floor is below street level, set down a metre or so - bad feng shui!

Nice big kitchen. Tower wall oven allows more pot drawers.

The bathrooms all have this colour scheme - it looks OK in this photo, but in real life is horribly dark and claustrophobic. Tiling goes all the way up to the cornice, which wasn't offered to us when doing our selections.

A steal at $2.25m or so - includes a pool out the back too! If you want more details on it, click here. Looks like it's a private sale, so no auction date to attend.

T&T

Staining stairs, Day 3

2010-09-22T20:48:00.003+10:00

For the final third day, Mark was working from 7:30 to about 3 filling in nail holes and other defects, resanding and applying the final coat of stain and tread.

Love the end result - a real feature in the centre of the house. Like a masterpiece of woodwork (which it is!) these stairs are functional, but also look incredible!

So if anyone wants the best quality result for your hardwood stairs, give Mark a call at Propolish Stairways (if you want a contact number, see the comments section below). Free plug for a great tradesman! One very important point about staining stairs - you get what you pay for. Anyone can say they sand and stain stairs, but without the proper preparation and attention to detail, you'll end up with a bad end product, which may not be able to be redone. And with about 17 hours of labour put into our stairs, very happy with the end result. Plus you will also want to have a certified product - we have certification that our stairs meet all safety standards for hardwood treads. Depending on your stair design, how much preparation is required, what the working environment is like, you could pay up to $2000 for a professional job like ours - so don't call Mark if you want a cheap result, but call him if you want a great result. No-one ever said building or finishing a house was cheap!

T&T

Staining stairs, Day 2

2010-09-21T22:52:00.002+10:00

Mark was back for another long session on our stairs, from 8am to 1pm. We had the first two coats of stain applied today.

The stain brings out the grain lines in the hardwood, and with the custom mix of stain we chose it's slightly lighter than our front & rear door stain.

Tomorrow will be the final sanding and final coat of stain, and on Thursday we can remove the protective tape. For anyone who is building with raw hardwood stairs, ideally see if you can get them stained before carpets go in - apparently any new carpet will release fluff everywhere and it's very difficult to prevent the fluff getting caught in the new stain.

T&T

Staining stairs, Day 1

2010-09-20T22:19:00.004+10:00

Mark turned up at 7am this morning and unloaded his ute of tools, and apparently worked all the way through to 5pm! Our stairs are Vic Ash hardwood by Slattery & Acquroff, and today Mark did the sanding plus first coat of sealer.

What do you think? Modern but still elegant, and a great dark feature colour against the wall colour. There are some sealer runs on the walls, but with three coats to go, we'll see whether we need to repaint the walls. I think we'll keep the wall colour the same here, which doesn't distract from the feature stairs themselves.

Close up details of the hardwood treads - woooo love it! The colour so far isn't quite as dark as our front/rear door stains, but because the stairs are hidden in the centre of the house with no natural light hitting it, probably better not to go any darker than this current shade. Two coats of stain goes on tomorrow, and a final coat and seal on Wednesday, and we should be OK to walk on it Thursday.

Also got a call today from Metricon head office to see how handover went. I did mention our antenna isn't working, and they said to call our SS end of the week if he hasn't got in touch with us by then. Otherwise, very happy with how things went!

T&T

Handover pics continued

2010-09-19T21:29:00.006+10:00

It's Sunday night, about 48 hours after getting our keys. Spent all weekend cleaning and moving in basic items, the place now looks a mess all over again with half-opened boxes, rags & mops everywhere, temporary foldup tables and chairs... but anyway, here's a couple of pics taken at handover on Friday, before all the moving chaos began.

The front door - part of the promotion when we signed on for the house. 1020 x 2340, clear glass, stained Intergrain Charcoal. 750mm Gainsborough pull handle upgrade. Not sure whether we'll keep the clear glass, or add some obsure tint - I quite like the clear glass at the moment. Bricks are Austral Melbourne series Hawthorn with offwhite flush mortar - absolutely love them! That portico light, we'll change to a sensor light... getting all the plain light fittings changed will happen, but it's low on the huge list of things to do.

Entry hallway, and the feature upgrade stairs. Cantilevered hardwood with continuous handrail. and stainless steel balusters. The downside to these stairs is that they look awesome, but you can't really have any under-stair storage due to all the supporting framework under the stairs. Currently in raw finish - we have the stairs guy booked in tomorrow for sanding & staining over 3 days; if he does a good job, we'll put his details up. We will probably need to touch up or repaint the walls surrounding the stairs after staining (as the stain will run onto the walls), so might even change to a feature colour around the stairs - we'll see how much stain bleeding there is and decide after that. Three step lights illuminate the treads and look very very nice! We didn't add in a light over the stairwell, as it wouldn't be very visible from the ground floor. Some designs like the Liberty have the stairwell turning 180 degrees, and I think we would have added a stair light in that case.

Laundry. Got to have one, but will be trying to avoid spending any time in here unless absolutely necessary. We decided to put the taps on the all above the washing machine position, so the taps are easily turned on/off when the machine isn't in use. Usually they're in the cabinet right at the bottom, a bit of a pain to crawl down and turn off. Had plenty of experience with split washing machine hoses that were left on all the time, that end up flooding the laundry and beyond, so turn off your taps when not in use! We also put in a floor waste under the washing machine, just in case. Colours here: floor tiles are Tecnico Charcoal 400x400, wall tiles are Linea Grey 200x300, cabinet is Laminex Polar White with Laminex New Graphite benchtop.

Standing in the family room area, looking towards the kitchen in front and dining to the left. Needs more furniture, and more food, and lots more beer & wine. Ceilings are Dulux White on White, walls are Dulux Natural White. Of course, at night with downlights or fluoros on, everything looks creamier than in daylight.

And finally, we cracked open a bottle of champagne - this was given to us by the real estate agents when we bought the old house back in May 2009, and we'd been saving it for handover day!

We had handover with a missing kitchen drawer handle, and a bloke came around Saturday afternoon to replace it, so that was pretty good. There's a couple of problems that need to be sorted out soon rather than at 90 day maintenance (mainly we can't watch TV because someone forgot to connect the antenna to the Starserve system!), but we're pretty sure John will get in touch with us soonish about them, as he's on our street all the time building our neighbour's Chelsea!

And for all you housebuilders out there - when you do get handover, with shiny new keys in your pocket, driving up to your house with the facade lit up, parking your car in your garage and walking into your house - it makes all the planning, waiting, stressing, moving, mortgage payments all worthwhile!

More handover pics another day!

T&T

DAY 269 - HOUSE HANDOVER DAY!

2010-09-17T22:37:00.005+10:00

And we have HANDOVER! The house is OURS!

We're far too tired to write the huge amount of text this entry really deserves, so for now, there's just this teaser picture - yes, we got a really nice keyring too! We'll update this post and add to it over the next few days.

Short summary: We swapped our final cheque for keys at 6:10, and over the next 5 hours worked madly to get enough basic things into the house so that we could spend tonight in our bed, in our house - no, in our home. We're tired, but it's worth it - we've been waiting about 16 months for this day, since we originally bought the old house that used to be on this plot of land!

Many thanks to our tireless site supervisor John A, who spent many hours day and night to get our house in tip-top condition for today. It really comes down to the tradespeople who build your house - the chippies, plumbers, sparkies, brickies and everyone else, and definitely your site supervisor who is in charge of it all. We appreciate all the hard work and personal attention you've put into our house, and we'll be enjoying it for the next few decades! Also huge thanks to Monique who managed the first half of the build and did a stellar job there too, Mendo who was probably the best CSC Metricon has ever had, and all the way back to Ainslee who we signed up with.

Thanks too to all the readers too who have followed us so far on our home building journey, we've appreciated all the comments left on the blog and also hope you've been entertained along the way. This isn't the end, just the beginning of the next phase - stay tuned for more details and pics from today, handover day!

Lots of love

Tim & Tina

Day 267: Working... late!

2010-09-15T22:11:00.002+10:00

After dinner and some late-night shopping madness, drove past our house - can you believe our hard-working SS and trades were still going at it, at 10pm?!

Only had my phone on me, but the facade lights look great when lit up. Will have to get some better pics with my SLR.

Spoke to John earlier today, and there should be a mad rush of activity in the next few days - scratched kitchen handles to be replaced tomorrow, and finishing painting top & bottom of internal doors, amongst other things. My job tomorrow? Get to the bank and make sure (again!) that our payment side of things is still on track.

Not often you'd find a tradie working past 3pm, and not often you'll see your SS on the job when most people would be getting ready for bed - top effort!

T&T

Handover cheques and house insurance

2010-09-14T17:21:00.003+10:00

Luckily I had a day off work today, as I spent most of the day on the fax & phone. Most of that time was spent on hold, waiting for Heritage to sort out their issues - anyway, the good news is, at 4:50pm I was finally able to log on to our account correctly and get the right amount drawn out to my other bank account for a bank cheque to be prepared! Still a bit peeved that things weren't working last night, but because this final payment is a little tricky to organise maybe that's why things weren't going smoothly.

Also called AAMI to organise insurance on the new house. Interestingly enough, the original insurance we paid was based on a 50 year old weatherboard/asbestos cottage that was lucky to be 10 squares.

And with our new 43 square brick veneer 2 storey house, the annual insurance premium increases massively... by $41. I guess not many houses burn down nowadays, so the risk of the insurer actually having to pay to rebuild our house is almost zero. Also added on contents insurance; haven't calculated what the actual content value will be, so will recalculate and re-insure contents at the end of the year.

Been planning to get our superduper home alarm with video surveillance/recording, mobile notification and internet remote monitoring installed once we've settled in. Sorry - not giving away any more details on this for obvious reasons! But if someone drops a coin on the footpath in front of our house in the middle of the night, we'll be able to tell if it's heads or tails!

Stopped by the house today, and noticed the overflow has been drilled into the rainhead. It was suggested to hide it around the side of the rainhead so it wouldn't be visible from the street or side of house, which was a good idea.,

Getting superexcited about handover now, not long to go! I even bought a shower caddy thing today - the plan is, Tina gets exclusive use of the ensuite shower (and niche!) while I use the bathroom shower; at least for the first 3 months, so we can see if there's any leaks or problems that need to be fixed at the end of the 3 month maintenance period.

Stair guy called me today to confirmed he's booked in our job for after handover - it's 3 solid days of work, with the first day being 7am to 5pm for preparation, taping, sanding and hopefully the first coat of stain. Given the amount of hours of work involved, his quote actually seems quite reasonable now - so we're just hoping the final result will be good! Will also need to buy some small pots of our wall colour - Dulux Natural White - so we can touch up, or repaint walls where the stain will run. Or maybe change the walls adjacent to the stairs to a feature colour, depending on how much repainting is required.

T&T

Getting ready for handover...

2010-09-13T21:43:00.003+10:00

Organised for after handover.... driveway, stairs, carpet.

Not organised before handover... final cheque.

Though the T-shirt should really read "I HATE BUILDING SOCIETIES" because at the moment, it's Heritage Building Society letting us down. I think they recently revised their internet site, because when I logged on tonight to organise funds for the final cheque for our house, it says we have all of $0.00 available to withdraw - but on the main page it says we have 100% of our loan available. After being stuck on hold for 30 minutes, a nice young man admitted he couldn't figure out what was wrong, and someone will get back to me tomorrow.

Not good enough! Not only do we get to pay a big upfront application fee and ongoing monthly fees, but then we can't get access to our loan! Hasn't been a problem up to now (of course) so I'm back on the phone to them first thing tomorrow morning - and I'm not getting off the phone until the problem is fixed!

I should go to a branch and get it sorted, right? Easy - if they actually had any offices in Victoria *grumble grumble* stupid building society based in Queensland. So just a heads up to anyone thinking of a home loan or line of credit - forget these guys!

T&T

Day 262... PCI!! PCI PCI PCI!!!

2010-09-10T20:07:00.003+10:00

So, today was the day for our completion inspection! We turned up at 9 and met up with our SS John, and another SS (Andrew).

Long story short - PCI went very well!!!

Been quite a while since we've been in the house, and it had been cleaned pretty well inside and out. Almost all the items from our independent inspector's checklist had been addressed, and the ones that weren't done were not major issues for us anyway. Started off inside the house, working out way through the ground floor before tackling upstairs, and finally ending up outside.

We did finish up with a page of defects, but they were all very minor things like paint touchups, scratched handles, a jamming robe sliding door, a bowed ensuite door, checking/painting all internal doors for top & bottom paint sealing (quite a few doors had been adjusted by planing but not repainted afterwards), one articulation joint unsealed, straightening up a crooked downpipe and things like that. All easy to fix, and I can't see any reason why we wouldn't have our keys next... ooo, nearly let slip the handover date there! It's coming real soon!

Apparently, our house went through QA this week and received a score of 98.5%, which sounds good to us and corresponds to the very few defects we found today. Our Certificate of Occupancy was also emailed to us by our CSC, and this is where you've got to love private certifiers - looks like it was approved in 1 day! We also have our statement for the final amount to be paid, so first thing Monday I'll be contacting the bank to sort out a very big cheque to be exchanged for keys at handover.

Not that it's the last big cheque we'll be parting with, there's plenty more trades that we need to employ. We had a stair specialist come in today at the end of our inspection (who does the Metricon display home stairs as well as lots of commercial stairs, including Ikea) to give us a quote on doing our stairs. It'll take quite a few days and isn't cheap, but should last the life of the house. Had to rebook our carpet installation (again) to allow time for the stairs to be done after handover. Still trying to get in touch with our concreter for the new driveway and crossover - it's looking less likely it can be done next week, but if not, it can be done anytime after handover. Plus where has our fence contractor gone? He was meant to fix our fence a month ago!

And the funny thing is, we were so focused on checking out our house that we didn't take any photos today! Here's one we took earlier - our dog Hannah can't wait to move house!

And here's another photo I took earlier - I bought a "power point and earth leakage tester" and plugged it in every socket inside and outside the house to check everything was grounded and connected properly (and everything was!), it also checks that your RCDs work properly. I don't have a need for it anymore, so if anyone wants to buy it ($30 new) I'm selling it for $20 including postage within Australia (Paypal or bank deposit) - first to leave a comment, saying you want it, gets it! Make sure you leave contact details like an email address.

So, right now... feeling pretty exhausted after spending 3 hours at the house this morning, then all afternoon at work. Actually very relieved to be nearly at the end of the house building process - it's been 80% excitement at watching the house spring up from nothing, and 20% stressing about whether our colour selections would work, and whether things were going according to plan or not. But right now, you couldn't wipe the smile off my face with a baseball bat!

T&T

Day 261: PCI date confirmed!

2010-09-09T19:13:00.004+10:00

Spoke to our SS yesterday, and it looks like our completion inspection should be going ahead - tomorrow morning! Our inspector went to check out the house back on Day 241, so we're expecting the items from his list to be fixed by now. Alex did make a point to tell us he wouldn't be checking for things like paint defects and other minor cosmetic things, because the painter hadn't come around for final touch-ups at the time of his inspection. So I guess the main things to check tomorrow will be things from Alex's list, plus any paint defects, plus checking things like doors, sinks, drainage, lights, powerpoints etc - basically all the things identified from our earlier post. I've allowed 3 hours before I've got to go back to work in the afternoon :( but we might finish earlier than that if things look good.

Also got a bloke recommended by our previous SS dropping in, to give us a quote on sanding & staining our stairs after handover. Been trying to get in touch with our concreter regarding the driveway, but haven't had any contact lately, so not sure if he'll be able to do our driveway & crossover next week. If not, no big deal, we'll get it done sometime after. Still haven't really been able to decide on a colour, we'd like to see real-life examples (rather than just pictures) of the driveway before we confirm our colour selection.

And handover? We might have an idea of when we get keys.... but we'll keep you all guessing for now!

T&T

Driveways; selecting the right mix/colour

2010-09-07T19:27:00.002+10:00

So we think we've picked a concreter to do the driveway and crossover, and he suggested a house in Blackburn we could check out, that was done recently in exposed aggregate.

Not really what we're after with the light base colour- probably want something dark in a charcoal.. like these?

This is called "Moon Dance", whatever that means.

And this one is "Dromana". Both these just random pics found from google images, but if we email them to our concreter, hopefully he can suggest an aggregate with similar mix/finish to these. Of course, these aggregates have a pretty rough surface - not a good playing surface for kids to fall on!

Also got a call from the stair sander guy to confirm he's meeting us on site Friday morning after we inspect the house, to give us a quote on sanding & staining the stairs and to see what stain colours are available. Haven't heard from our SS yet to reconfirm times, but will call him tomorrow to check our appointment is still on!

T&T

More furniture window-shopping

2010-09-05T21:28:00.005+10:00

So today we decided to head all the way down to Frankston-Dandenong road, where a whole lot of large furniture shops are located. Every shop had plenty of very ugly furniture - but the point was to find the one or two diamonds in the rough that were worth a second look!

View Larger Map

Now that' we've firmed up a little on what kind of lounge we want for the family room - 5-6 seater with a chaise, it's just a matter of finding a good quality one at the right price. I won't say we're there yet, but getting closer! I don't think we'll put a deposit on one until after handover, as we really need to measure the space available to see what will suit the room. Nothing worse than buying a lounge that would be too big, or too small for the space it's meant to be in!

T&T

Thinking ahead - what to do in the backyard? Driveway decisions

2010-09-02T20:46:00.003+10:00

We're not that interested in gardening, weeding, planting, watering, trimming, cutting, mowing or any other form of outdoors torture, so whatever we do outside the house should ideally be zero maintenance. Wonder if there's anything like "below-zero" maintenance, like a tree that also cleans our windows and washes our cars?

Anyway, we don't have a huge backyard, it'll be about 15m wide and 7m deep with a little slope towards the rear fence. We'll get a big deck from our outdoor room extending past the roofline - still not sure if I'll attempt to build it myself and risk serious loss of limbs from unavoidable powertool-related injury, or pay someone else to risk bodily harm for me. Anyway, apart from the deck, we need to cover up our neighbour's rather hideous garage walls (yep, two of them) that are on our boundary. Most likely use a bamboo screen as in this photo below.

Also really liking the dark bark or whatever it is around those green things (I think they're called plants). Plus the rocks around the scrawny tree - they probably don't need water or trimming, so they're in. As for grass, undecided on "real" or plastic grass - not sure our little Jack Russell will enjoy rolling around in recycled polypropylene!

And for the sides of the house - one side is behind our double garage, the other side has the laundry - thinking of just sticking down some crushed rock or gravel, similar to the above picture.

Also received one quote so far for our driveway & crossover - it's a pretty big driveway at 11m x 5m wide. Exposed aggregate is only $900 more than a coloured concrete (not as much of a premium as we thought it might be) so we'll probably go for a dark grey/charcoal exposed aggregate driveway. Still waiting on one more quote to come in before booking that job in.

Oh yeah - and Tomorrow: When The War Began is on general release today; it's a pretty good screen version of John Marsden's book - go see it!

Margo & Davo from At The Movies seemed to like it too, and you know you're not allowed to disagree with these two legends...

T&T

Day 252: Organising driveway and wider crossover

2010-08-31T17:52:00.004+10:00

Met up with a couple of very friendly blokes from Whitehorse Council today - Alan who was reviewing the asset protection permit (checking for any damage to the footpath etc during the build) and David, who was in charge of assessing a wider crossover for our house. Anyway, the builders only damaged one additional footpath square (two were damaged during our demolition) and David has approved our full-width crossover - 4.8m to match our double garage opening!

I called up two concreters for quotes, and fortunately both turned up today (same day service!) to measure things up. Hopefully will get their quotes in the next few days and book one in.

Our SS and construction manager were also at the house today just checking on progress, and things are looking good for completion and handover.... soon! If we're lucky, the concreters may even be able to fit in our driveway and crossover just before handover, which will make moving in much easier and less messy. Our construction manager said that as long as they contacted our SS to arrange a day to do the driveway (and protect the garage door from damage) then we should be allowed to do this work before handover - very accommodating!

Now the main decision to make is what kind of driveway? Maybe a plain and simple coloured driveway in charcoal, or (as one of the concreters recommended) exposed aggregate? Opinions anyone?

Haven't been to the house for about a week, but it looks like some external painting has been done - our meter box is now Woodland Grey to match our downpipes, and sealed all around. Looks good!

And speaking of downpipes, the painters have also painted the stormwater connections at the bottom of the downpipes - nice! I think normally they are left unpainted, so it's nice to see the painters going the extra mile to touch that up - one less thing for us to do after handover.

Our SS says that someone is working on getting our powder room exhaust externally ducted (since there are no opening windows in that room); looking at the wall we can see a couple of bricks removed in preparation for the wall vent.

And finally, as he was leaving, John threw me a little present...

Pretty funny! Will come in useful one day when in the garden trying to destroy the army of weeds that have taken over the backyard.

T&T

Completion - nearly there!

2010-08-30T23:17:00.003+10:00

Got an update from our SS this afternoon, looks like the upcoming PCI and handover will be pushed back a week to allow the final finishing touches to be done. That's fine - we're happy with allowing more time to fix the various items our inspector identified. And it gives us more time to select and order some furniture - though it seems all the furniture places we're going to are quoting 8-12 weeks from placing a deposit to delivery!

Anyway yesterday we checked out the homemaker shops opposite Northlands - one in particular stood out from Focus On Furniture, called the Zurich.

It's definitely massive - at first we were thinking of just getting a 3 seater plus chaise for the family room, but this one would almost exactly fit the width of the family room wall. Imagine the far end with the seat backs with a window above it, and the chaise which is closer to the camera is near the kitchen... still hard to imagine! Also has some neat storage areas at either end of the lounge, and comes with the ottoman (but not the table). Price is about $5500 before negotiation and 10-12 weeks for delivery.

The next one we saw was at Harvey Norman, the "Dural".

Slightly smaller than the one above, similar kind of layout though. Price was originally $4600, then $3999, then $3750 after a 20% promo discount on the original price. Colours available not as good as the other sofa, and not quite as comfortable. About 8 weeks to delivery, but made in Oz.

I think we'll have to wait until we're in the house to measure everything up before commiting to a lounge, mainly so we can check dimensions and proportions properly. *sigh* we'll have to rely on old hand-me-down furniture for a few months more yet!

So, does anyone have any suggestions on other places we can visit to get ideas for sofas? We have some others on our visit-list including Frog Sofas, Nick Scali...

T&T

Inspecting display homes - what kind of quality can you expect from your house?

2010-08-28T21:40:00.006+10:00

This afternoon took a little drive up north to Mernda to have a look at some display homes to see what kind of finish was on them.

Surprisingly, some of the display homes (I won't say which builder!) have some pretty poor detailing when you look up close - one of the houses we saw, I swear the bricking on the balcony pillars was done using all the crappy brick sides facing out! For those who haven't looked at a single brick closely, there's at least one nice "face" side which should be facing out, and at least one "crappy" side which is usually facing "inwards" and hidden by the frame. Lots of overspray in one house, where the gloss paint from the door architraves was all over the adjacent wall, and no-one seemed to have picked that up. Bad brickwork was everywhere, lots of bricks not flush with each other plus mortar blowouts. Bad tiling in wet rooms, with tiles not flush, sticking up enough to catch your feet. Plenty of doors that didn't close properly, with latches not catching and holding the door shut. Feature wall painting done badly with ragged edges. Anyway, the point is, don't think your house should be of "display home quality" because your house should be a lot better!

Anyway, some photos... one of the Metricon display homes we went into had the right solution to the little question about doors opening against each other. In this pic, the door to the bathroom opens towards the door to the shower.

To stop the door smashing into the shower door, a little stopper is put on the back of the door itself - a simple, elegant solution, and it works. If our bathroom door is left "stopperless", we can just pick up one of these stoppers somewhere and fit it ourselves easily. Actually, we'd probably go and buy a whole lot of nice designer stoppers to replace the little rubber bumpers stuck on the plaster, a lot more durable I think.

In another house, saw a super cool, almost built-in wine rack in an alcove near the kitchen.

Quite clever - each 2 bottle holder section can link into another, secured with a single metal rod running down the centre of it all. Readers - has anyone seen this kind of wine rack before and know where we can get it from? Or can suggest any other funky wine holding solution?

And finally, a couple of the Metricon display homes in Mernda have rainheads (the little box above the downpipes, used for draining flat roofs or balconies). Our inspector picked up that our rainhead coming off the balcony doesn't have an overflow, which is just a hole cut into the rainhead to allow excess water to gush out the side. Both these rainheads have overflows - though even these are probably a little undersized, as they're meant to be the same diameter as the downpipe. Anyway, a pretty easy fix for our house as it just needs a hole cut in the side of the rainhead - takes about 3 seconds using a drill and fine-toothed holesaw bit - but another thing to check off the list at PCI.

The point is, the overflow hole is there to provide an escape route in case there's sooooo much water coming through the gutter, so the water comes out the side rather than backing up and flooding the flat roof or balcony, which then would end up flooding your internal walls - a bad thing! Who would've thought a little hole would be so useful!

T&T

Stairs: Organising sanding & staining

2010-08-27T21:50:00.003+10:00

So we upgraded our stairs to cantilevered hardwood stairs and stainless steel balusters; but they come in a raw finish. We want them stained charcoal to match our front and rear doors - in fact, we want things to look pretty much like this picture below;

...with nice dark wood floors through all of downstairs, and dark stained stairs & handrail. Got in touch with a guy recommended to us from our earlier SS, and hopefully he'll get back to us with a quote. Ideally we want the stairs sanded and stained pretty quickly after handover, and before the carpets go in. Hopefully won't take too long - stairs will need sanding first, then a few coats of stain with drying time in-between each coat. Maybe a day's work?

Also the picture above is from the Nolan on display in Point Cook, which apparently has just been sold. Don't know if it's still open as a display home; we only visited it once. Just looking at the picture above, it's got huge entry (external) doors placed to the sitting room on the right - expensive! The bulkhead in the entry hallway is about $1000 option.

T&T

Certificate of Occupancy ordered

2010-08-25T22:13:00.003+10:00

According to myMetricon, our Certificate of Occupancy was ordered yesterday - yay!

What does this mean? It's one of the final steps before the house is complete and ready to live in, and should mean that plumbing, glazing, electrical, insulation, and termite protection is all installed & up to scratch (according to our council's website). Hopefully shouldn't be any difficulties in getting this Certificate, another thing to tick off the list!

Alsoo got a call from our local Council guy about our crossover - we want to put in a wide double crossover to match our double garage, so I'll meet with him next week, and hopefully someone else from the council who will tell us how much of the footpath needs replacing.

On another note, we saw Easy A this evening. Surprisingly very enjoyable - normally I only like movies with lots of shooting, explosions, fast & loud car chases, but despite lacking all these essential elements, Easy A was pretty good!

Though for some reason I can never figure out why all American high scoolers look about 27 and all seems to own cars, and have all the money in the world. Emma Stone is great as the lead character, Lisa Kudrow reprises her usual monodimensional acting, and Malcolm McDowell - the last movie I saw him in was Star Trek: Generations. Oh yeah, and Emma Stone is hot.

T&T

Non house related: Movies to watch!

2010-08-24T10:05:00.004+10:00

So, we're pretty big movie-going people - that's why we're building this house with a kick-ass home theatre room (one day!). We've been invited to a couple of movie previews soon (thanks heaps!), so thought we might give a heads up on them.

First one will be Easy A tomorrow night. which so far has received 8.4 out of 10 on IMDB, which is actually a really good rating to achieve on that website!

Brief summary; hot chicks, gossip, romance. More geared towards Tina than Tim, but has Emma Stone in it, which gets two huge thumbs up from me - mainly because she was in Zombieland which was one of the most awesome movies of 2009 that no-one saw (with Woody Harrelson in a totally non-sucky role).

The next movie preview is TOMORROW: When the War Began next Monday.

Really looking forwards to this one - I mean, who didn't read the John Marsden books as a kid in the 80s? Plot synopsis: Kids go away on a remote camp holiday, and when they come back home, they find "unknown" (but probably Asian) invaders have taken over. And my brother & sister both tell me they know Chris Pang who plays Lee Takkam (last bloke on the left in that movie poster). Should be awesome - let's hope so, as an Australian screen adaptation of an Australian book series!

Also saw Inception last week... now, I'm a huge SF fanboy (with all the Star Trek series on DVD, HD-DVD and soon to be on BluRay, and don't get me started on how Joss Whedon should seriously be president of everything) but WTF was that movie about? Seemed like it was scripted to be deliberately confusing in order to get people to watch it again at the cinema, or at least buy it on disc. Might have to re-watch it sometime..

T&T

Day 243: Carpet chosen and booked in

2010-08-22T21:07:00.005+10:00

Went down to Fowles in Clayton to confirm the carpet we've chosen to upstairs and the home theatre room. It's a Godfrey Hirsch solution dyed nylon, colour is called Granite - a kind of mid-grey charcoal. It's been very difficult to choose a grey carpet, because so many of them look grey in the shop, but brown when samples are in our house!

Looks good, a modern neutral colour that (hopefully) won't date at all! After that, headed all the way down to Cranbourne to check out their Homemaker Centre, and then stopped by all the display homes in Lyndhurst to have a look at their interior decorations and landscaping ideas.

While there, having a look in one of the bathrooms, it reminded me that we have to check how the door that opens from Bed 4 into the bathroom will be "stopped". Most doors open against a wall, so a little rubber bumper is stuck on the wall to stop the door handle banging on the plaster. But from our Bed 4, the door opens against where the shower door is, kind of like in the photo below.

But if you look at the tiled floor, you can see a little half-mushroom doorstop; which will stop the door handle smashing the shower glass. However in our case it's slightly different, because the bed door opens towards the shower door, and the shower door opens out towards the bed door... confusing! Anyway we'll check for that later.

T&T

Day 241...

2010-08-20T22:57:00.006+10:00

First of all, thanks for everyone who left comments on the last blog entry wishing us good luck for the inspection today! It was very touching to see how many people are following our build journey, and good luck to everyone who is building as well!

Now, as it turns out, we didn't have our "official" completion inspection today as our SS wanted some more time to get everything up to his standard, and the QA people hadn't been through yet.

Are we complaining - definitely not! We've said all along that quality takes priority over speed every time, and it's a good thing that our house isn't being rushed for no reason. So we'll have our official walkthrough in a few weeks once our SS believes our house is ready.

Anyway, we had our independent inspector Alex walk though the house today since we'd booked him in on Monday, and his opinion so far? A few little things to fix as expected, but overall, even in its current unfinished state, our house is of generally good quality, no major problems, and good brickwork! Alex also took the time too walk us around the outside of our house to explain the working of things like articulation joints, weep holes, and other construction items, which was very educational to know about. So if you feel like you want an inspector to check on your house build, or an established house, we'd recommend Alex at Urban Property Inspections - tell him we sent you!

And while we were there, a truck rolled up and packed up all the temporary fencing - our house looks incredible without all the wire fence (and portaloo!) removed! Front garage door is down, it's Surfmist to match the fascia, and cladding colour.

Got to find a way to hide the neighbour's exposed garage wall on the boundary. Also going to need some quotes on a double-width driveway, getting a wider crossover, and replacing some cracked footpath squares. And ideas for landscaping, a front fence... rear landscaping, deck... and getting my fencer to replace the fence alongside the garage! We'll also head to Fowles Clayton on Sunday to put a deposit on carpet for ASAP after handover, and also probably head down Cranbourne way to check out some places for timber, laminate, vinyl, bamboo floors - though we may have to wait on putting in floor coverings for the ground floor until the bank balance recovers!

Also got a call from Tru Energy to connect/transfer gas & electricity to our name; so things are moving along now!

So while we have an updated schedule for the final inspection and handover, I think we'll keep that a secret for the time being.. helps build up the suspense, doesn't it!

T&T

Completion inspection date confirmed

2010-08-16T22:32:00.003+10:00

Left a couple of messages with our SS this morning to call me back to confirm our inspection date and time - we were unsure of whether it'd be the 20th (this Friday!) or next Tuesday 24th. I'd booked both days off just in case, but since work is crazy busy I need to be working at least one of those days.

Got a call back at closing time to confirm - it's ON for this Friday August 20th at 1:30pm! Wish us luck, readers! We haven't been inside the house for what feels like decades now, excited at seeing the "finished" product. Hoping there's not too many defects to be picked up. Now it feels like the business end of things, have to start arranging insurance, driveways, flooring, window coverings etc, as well as finding out about the final amount and adjustments.

Finally, a pic from the weekend - sorry about the weird angle, was holding the camera above the temp fence and couldn't see where it was pointing, but it does show our facade up/down lights; two on either side of the french doors, and one on each balcony pillar. They look a bit smaller than we expected, but that's probably because the balcony is a lot bigger than we thought it'd be. The colour of the balcony has matured nicely too - when the paint was first applied it was insanely bright purple, but it's calmed down to a nice modern shade. You can also see some unpainted plastering in the portico and the portico light fitting in front of the door, which we'll change over to a sensor light, one day... oooo, and the big pull handle on the front door!

T&T

Progressing to PCI and fencing

2010-08-15T09:50:00.007+10:00

Was speaking to our neighbour yesterday - they've put up with temporary fencing facing them all year, and I just wanted to tell them we were organising a new fence to be put up ASAP. Good to have nice neighbours and ours are great! Though it's difficult getting hold of tradespeople for a quote, been waiting about a month for a quote on the fence and it's only just come in.

And while we were there, noticed that some more exterior things had progressed on our house - looks like the garage ceiling and portico has been plastered, the garage doors are installed and the fluoro lights in the garage have been put in, as well as the facade lights; all good things!

But where we have gaps around the windows on the ground floor, it looks like they've put in wood infills :(

At our first independent inspection, our inspector picked up on these gaps too;

7. A timber infill is to be installed over the alfresco sliding door and aluminum infills are to be installed over the gaps located on the aluminum windows.

The rear bipart doors are timber, so a timber infill is needed. And the windows are aluminium, so an aluminium infill is needed. This was picked up at the preplaster inspection when we had Monique as our SS and she agreed that aluminium infills would be required; obviously this wasn't passed on to our current SS.

Also just sent a quick message to Ed on the Homeone forums, he's a guru for window questions as he runs a window company.

My enquiry: "Hi Ed - we're got ... issues, small gaps on the sides/above windows. We have aluminium windows and it looks like the builder has used timber/wood infills which haven' been painted yet. Should aluminium windows have aluminium infills to match (is there any specific regulation pertaining to this?) Thanks Ed!"

His reply: "No rules, just common sense. Powdercoated aluminium is easy and never needs maintenance. None of my customers use timber. Aluminium is readily available in matching colours. Ed"

So another issue to flag with our inspector for PCI.

Also looks like our Certificate of Occupancy is now scheduled to be ordered on 17.8.10 (was meant to be ordered 13.8.10); so will have to confirm with our SS for when the PCI is going to be scheduled.

T&T