Day 49: Ground floor framing complete, site supervisor meeting.

A day off work = a good day to inspect the site! I turned up first around 11, and caught the chippies hard at work in the sun finishing off the ground floor frame. The head guy there was Josh, and when I pointed out that I should be having higher door frames to accommodate the taller 2340mm doors, he agreed and said it'd be an easy fix. Good one boys! Gave them a slab of coldies for their hard work. Here's the thing - if you're nice to your tradies and bring up little issues early, you'll probably get a good resolution to your problem. Of course, this is dependent on you having the time during the day to get to your site, which isn't always possible.


This pic taken in the afternoon, they finished the job around 2pm. The entry doorframe is too low - only about 2000mm instead of 2340mm, so that'll be fixed later. Not bad for 2 days work!

View from outside the sitting room, looking towards back of the house. On the left is doorframe to garage internal access, then study behind that. Centre of photo; cavity slider door to rear of house. The internal access doorframe is set too low, another one to be fixd up later. The crew had already fixed the frames to the study, laundry and powder room


View standing in kitchen. To the left is walk-in pantry, walk in linen to right of that, then doorway to hallway. Lots of angled wood stuck across doorways, maybe just to hold the frame together until the supports are all set in?

We also met our SS Brian in the afternoon - nice guy! As for progress, he reckons more ceiling trusses will be delivered tomorrow, and the chippies back later in the week to set them up. Then first floor, then roof trusses - expecting frame to be complete by end of the month! Windows should be in around end of the month as well. And then, lockup (tiles and bricks) maybe a month later - ie end of March! Yay for progress!

He also asked us if we had any issues so far to be looked at, so we brought up these things:

1. Door frames too short = acknowledged, and already on the way to being fixed.
2. Powder room toilet position very close to door = will be fixed, as the doorframes are larger than the actual door size required, so there's room for adjustment.
3. Laundry floor waste in wrong position (under cabinet) = will be fixed so it is under the washing machine.
4. Site cut at neighbour's boundary leaving about 300mm of vertical soil = will need tiny retaining wall, will be raised as a variation. Hopefully not too expensive!
   
5. Huge mound of soil at back of site from site cut = will be levelled. But some medium sized rocks, we'll have to pay (not much) to be removed.
6. Some minor changes to electrical plan - want to move a couple of lights, shouldn't be a problem.
7. No temporary power pole required = we had a $1000 powerpole included in our contract, but because we organise the power pit, we'll get this amount back as a credit towards final payment.
8. Small chip in corner of portico concrete = will be repaired, brickwork for piers to balcony will cover most of it too.
   
9. Some water pooling in front yard area - leaking tap? = plumbers will be coming in the next week or two to run in water to the house, and will correct and leaks from the main water line to the block.

Pretty happy with our SS so far - certainly we've had heaps of work done since resumption of activities mid-Jan, and the next couple of stages will roll through pretty quickly he reckons.

We've also located a few more Metricon houses in our area, so when there's a slow day with no work to blog about, I'll post photos here - helpful if you're trying to choose bricks etc for a nice facade!

wushukid: Peninsula is a fantastic design - the open area above the dining room is incredible! Bit expensive for us to go for though :(

stefan petersen: thanks for your comment! There are pretty big windows, and the family room window faces east, so some nice morning sun. It's about 3m from the side fence, so hopefully no shadowing will occur. We walked through all the ground floor rooms today, and our earlier perceptions of rooms being too big or too small are gone - everything feels in perfect proportion now!

T&T

Day 48: Base stage paid, and frame started!

Paid the base stage invoice today - can you believe CBA wanted $28 to do an electronic transfer to ANZ? Anyway, ended up doing it through netbanking for free - stuff you, banks and your fees!

Got a call from Tina on the way home from work, and she sounded excited - for good reason too, as she was already walking around our ground floor frame, which was halfway done!


Not bad work by our tradies, suffering in 34 degree mad heat - I'll bring them a carton of beer tomorrow I think! Also spoke to our fantastic neighbours, who said the chippies started about 7, and worked through to about 3, solid effort that!

The next picture shows our sitting room.




Now that the frame is starting to go up, it's so much easier to get an idea of the size of rooms. My perceptions so far is that the sitting room and laundry seem a little smaller than I thought they would be, and the study is bigger than I thought (good!). Powder room seems about right - because we made some modifications to the floorplans, our laundry/powder room is different to standard Nolan.


In the previous picture, from bottom to top: Powder room (with one pipe for sink waste), then laundry (two pipes), then the two little areas are for walk-in-linen and walk-in-pantry. Then the kitchen (with 2 pipes for sink) and dining room, then outdoor room!

This next picture shows my room in the house - the home theatre/man cave. Tina can have pretty much every other room, but I've got big plans for this room! Though one thing we need to check with our SS tomorrow is the door heights - we have 2340mm doors everywhere, and I think the door frame to the HT is too low. It's basically the same height as the bipart doors to the rear (right) of the HT, which is only about 2000mm high. Should be an easy fix at frame stage to rectify.


The next pic is a view of family room from kitchen area. HT room is to the right, and to the left is entry hallway. We'll put our plasma TV on the left, so you can see it from the kitchen and meals area.


Finally, welcome to all the new readers to the blog - seems to be quite a few fellow metricon builders out there, some ahead of us and some just starting out. Please feel free to ask questions, and to comment about things that we should be checking (in particular, we'll have to get around to organising an inspection at preplaster in a few weeks/months?)

Ben&Dana: Hi, welcome to our blog. Jealous that you're at lockup already! We looked at a Stanton display home, somewhere in the northern suburbs I think - we like how the informal area of the house (kitchen, meals, family) takes up the entire back half of the ground floor! We did get our building permit mid October, but due to delays in demolition, we really didn't started until mid January, though the site scrape was Dec 22nd.

R&T: I think you said you had a bit of a fall on your block? Sure, a big slab will cost more $$$, but it'll stop your house sliding off onto someone else's land :) Should get nice views too! I think I've found another Nolan being built in Mitcham, will blog about it if I'm right!

wushukid: Hi! What design are you building, and what area? It's interesting to find readers of this blog are building all over Victoria, and NSW as well :)

Today's frame start has been sooo exciting - I just wish I could stand the heat to stay a bit longer - had to go home after a few minutes to change!

T&T

Metricon Liberty for sale; Mont Albert. Redevelopment for fun & profit!

Of particular interest to us is the building of a volume builder's house (eg Metricon, PD, Henley etc) in established suburbs. While their houses are more often seen in estates (simply because... well, that's where people tend to build more houses!) there are certainly plenty of redevelopments going on in established suburbs.

Just drive around any established suburb for half an hour and you can pretty much bank on seeing some vacant land with temp fence, or 3 townhouses going up where one house used to exist, or one huge new place being built up. For us, we chose to sell our old house, buy a crappy house on a good street, and redevelop the site with our dream house. Doing this ourselves saved literally hundreds of thousands compared to buying a new house that some else developed (for more info check the Dec 09 blog entries about the Nolan auction in Lawford St).

Of course, it's not an easy process if you've never redeveloped a property before - weve both learned a lot about the redevelopment process, that's for sure! And by doing this blog, hopefully giving some help to others who are going through the same process.

So anyway, getting back on topic, we like to see new houses by project builders go on sale, because we all get a chance to stickybeak, but also to see how other redevelop projects have gone.

We were driving down Whitehorse rd the other day, and there was a house that I always thought could be a Metricon design, as it looked very similar to some of the facades on the website. Yesterday, driving past, we saw it had a "For Sale" sign up - so of course, after a bit of investigating, we were able to find it on Domain!


A "double balcony" is an interesting look - not sure how often it'd be used on a busy road like Whitehorse Rd though! Bricks could be Austral Nougat, quite light. Nice big flat eaves complement the wide balconies too.


The kitchen displays the typical Metricon L-shaped island bench layout. Additional cupboards over the fridge recess, and banks of 2 pot drawers either side of the stand-alone 900mm cooker (be interesting to see whether it's Baumatic or something else). Looks like a cavity door to the butlers pantry too. I'm not sold on the floor tiles - the ones in Lawford St were much better (though probably much more expensive). The white stools with the backs look nice but maybe a little too high? Also note the microwave perched on the bench near the cooker; you can option a microwave recess in the island bench which hides the microwave nicely - we got it included in our promo deal, its a pretty standard inclusion now.

(And by the way, this house is a Liberty 42 floorplan)


Main bathroom. Actually, it's similar to our tile selection, except we went with a lighter grey floor tile. Get rid of tha upright cabinet taking up all the floor space and it'd look much better!


Rear; outdoor room with lots of decking. Look over the rear ground floor windows for standard infills; we upgraded to brick infills - I just don't like the look of the stuff over the windows!

Of course, there's no price provded on Domain. The important details are that it's in Mont Albert, on a huge block of about 1000m with right-of-way access to the backyard, and the house is maybe a couple of years old and (should be!) in great condition still. Though it's on busy Whitehorse Rd, opposite a bunch of fairly unattractive shops (no cafes or newsagents), I'd reckon this would go for at least $1.7m - what are your thoughts?

Anyway, I'll be at the first open for inspection next Saturday 13th and at the auction on Saturday 27th, maybe I'll see some of you there. Say "Hi" if you run into me - asian guy with glasses [yeah that narrows it down!], probably clutching a detailed set of construction plans for our Nolan. Renee & Tom I expect to run into you again! :). Details and more pictures are here on Domain

evie & ian: Welcome to our blog! What stage are you up to in construction of your house? We are planning to get an inspection done at preplaster and final handover. We got a slab invoice on Friday and I'll pay it on Monday.

Phew, what a massive blog entry, hope you guys like it! And by the way, there's a new feature under this post where you can click on a Reaction to give us some quick feedback. For example if this blog post was Helpful, click on the relevant button and we'll know to continue posts like this. Of course, if you want to leave a specific comment (which we will reply to in a following entry) click on the Comments link and type away there. The more feedback and comments we get, the more we feel our blog is useful to people!

T&T

Day 45: Base invoice received

First of all, let's go on a minirant here about HP/Compaq and their shitty quality products. You'd think a multinational brand like HP would be able to build a laptop that doesn't break their hinges after a few months, randomly freezes, loses sleep/hibernation modes and have a battery life longer than 50 minutes, but apparently not. And let's not talk about the fact that HP have decided that a 2 year old laptop (that was top of the line when new) is simply waaaaay too obsolete to be worthwhile supporting under Windows 7. End result, don't trust, buy, or recommend HP/Compaq. Meh! My old Acer laptop is still used by my sister with 100% reliability; and I bought that one in 2002 - far superior.

Aaaaaanyway....got an express post envelope from Metricon today, with just a few pages, but a big bill to pay - 20% of contract! It's interesting to note though, that the progress payments are based on the contract price that you sign off on, at the final contract meeting. We had about $15k of postcontract variations (mainly electrical, roof tiles, tile upgrades), but they will be added to the final invoice, along with any other changes that may come up along the way.

No work done on site today - weather in the low 20s and constant light rain. Again, good for concrete curing, but not so good for deliveries or getting work done. Maybe some framing to start next week?

sarahv: yeah, the old house was a nice house to live in - unfortunately it was on a very busy road, right next door to a petrol station, opposite a big bunch of units. Not a great location for a residential property, but not too bad for a medical clinic! Would have liked to have the house and land (about 700m) in a different location, but alas not to be. Fond memories, but can't wait for our dream house to be finished!

Day 44: Termite protection (?) installed, and delivery of wood

Today, the skies finally parted to allow a bit of rain to wash away yesterday's humidity. Apparently a bit of rain is good for the slab, so we're glad to see it today! We didn't expect much to be done for a few days, but arriving at the site after work, seems like people had already been at it today!


The sight that greeted us first was a few big piles of wood. Probably not enough for the ground floor frame, but certainly enough to get started! A couple of sheets of yellowtongue for the first floor as well.



Also, our slab now has a nice blue skirt on. Tina dug a bit of paper out of the bin, and apparently it's a delivery slip for termite guard protection, we think... the rain kind of ruined the paper. It runs the perimeter of the main slab, but not around the portico of outer garage wall (no timber there, just brick piers).

So far, we're quite happy at how things are progressing - lots of work has been done since the xmas/new years shutdown period! Certainly didn't expect anything done today - the problem is, now we might get disappointed if we turn up at the site and nothing has been done! MyMetricon was also updated today - a huge "Completed" bar across the slab stage of construction!

Of course that means Metricon will send me a big invoice for 20%, but who said you could get a house built for free?

R&T: Hope your selection process is going along well too... I'm still hunting on Domain for Metricon houses for sale/inspection, as we still like to stickybeak at other builder's houses. Especially looking at "real people's" houses, not just the over-the-top display home. We saw a Porter Davis house in Bundoora for sale, just off Grimshaw St, and it was done pretty nicely! Also; have a drive all along Shannon St, as you'll see another Nolan being built with Hawthorn bricks, in case you haven't seen it already!

JT: Welcome to the blog! Donvale is a beautiful area, we had a house in Mitcham that we sold to buy our redevelopment site. You'd probably drive past it a bit, it's next to United Petrol on Mitcham Rd, and the new owners are converting it to an osteopath clinic - here's a photo we took of it the other day.



It's kind of a pity that they're converting it as it was a great house to live in (except only 2 windows in the house could open because the previous owner to us had painted them shut!).

I wouldn't worry too much about the "420 days" in your contract - from what we've seen of Metricon in our area they generally get the double storeys done in 7-8 months, and single storey in about 4. Also, we don't have Gena anymore, it's Joanne now :) We liked the Hampton plan, but because it wasn't on display we went with the Nolan :) I think you're right, in that the Sycamore has replaced the Hampton, but to be honest I think the Hampton is better, mainly because of the shared bathroom between Bed 2/3 - I think that's more practical than an ensuite to all bedrooms!

As for the kitchen, I just had a look at our onstruction drawings - there's definitely a cupboard door to the island bench (I think about $150 or so?) and the pot drawers appear to have a smaller top drawer and bigger bottom 2 drawers (I think we paid $880 to get a dozen pot drawers), though there are no specific dimensions to reflect that. Unfortunately I think it depends on the salesperson/consultant you get on the day as to what kind of options you can choose to get.

One thing about building - I think it makes my working days go faster, as I can't wait to be out the door and go to our land to see what's been done!

T&T