Thursday 28 November 2013

November update

Many things have happened since the last time we published something. Last time we were waiting for registration. It was finally done on 6th of November. After that the settlement was done. As we are first home buyers we ignored heaps of things. For example we didn't know that the settlement is done by the lawyers of every party. We didn't need to move a finger.. which is good :-)

Settlement was done on 20th of November, now this 6th of December is our first mortgage payment... hahah. anyway that is the way it works...

In other news we received our tender from Wisdom Homes, there were a couple of small things to fix and we've got a unpleasant surprise. We are close to the bush, so we have in our land an asset protection zone where nothing can be built. We didn't know the exact dimensions.. well results that the APZ is pushing our house some meters back, and if you add the fact that we have to have at least 6m of setback.. well the house needed to be shrink... We are losing just 29cm, but those 29cm were reduced from our alfresco and living room. We didn't accept the tender straight away for that reason as we wanted to check how that would change the living room distribution. Well we went to the Ponds to see the Majestic 34 to get a better idea of the new dimensions. To be honest I don't think that was really helpful haha. Anyway, we gave it some though and we finally decided to go with the new dimensions.

We accepted the tender and paid the extra 3k, now they are preparing the plans and we supossed to have news in 3 weeks from now.

Some decisions we made in the last days:
1. Go for concrete tiles (Bristile Prestige tiles) instead of the Colorbond upgrade that wisdom offers.
2. Include some extra windows in bedroom 2 and 3.
3. We decided to put a door in the ensuite.
4. Add a door under the stairs.
5. Upgrade the bathtub.

Last Tuesday we received our Wisdom Wise pack, with contains most of the available options to choose from. Lots of options, our first challenge is to chose bricks, our weekend is already planned to check houses in new developments to see which palette is possible to replicate with the brick options that Wisdom supplies. Our intention is not to upgrade bricks... lets see if that is possible.

2 comments:

  1. Hey VP - just read your post, that's a terrible surprise, 29cm is nothing to be sneezed at that's for sure! Could you add the 29cm on the sides of those to make up for it, or not enough room? COLOURS! You are going to have fun, tbh you will probably upgrade bricks, but the next category up i promise you will cost you under 2k extra - so worth having a look at. One thing I found out later, was that some of the nice bricks weren't the same colour all the way through - some bricks get chipped during construction and say you chose a grey brick, once chipped you'll see horrible red bits everywhere. Go to the sample sheds and make sure it's coloured all the way through :) Do you have to pay extra for anything to comply with being in a bush fire zone - I've heard this can be very expensive (if it hasn't come up now, maybe when you go through council). Good luck :)

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    1. Hi, yes we've put an allowance of 24K as per WH's advice. We have a combination starting from 40. We expect that covers the whole thing. We don't have a list of items to be upgraded though. I just hope those upgrades don't change the overall look of the house.

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