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

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