Tools down for 2013

Today we received a final update for the year from our builder, 95% of the excavation is complete with only the front courtyard section to be dug out. The excavators did hit rock so the large circular cutter was brought on site to slice the bottom level.

Two land levels have been created as half of the house will be double storey whilst the other half will be single storey though on the same level as the 2nd floor due to the slope of the land. There is still a large amount of spoil to be removed and the rest of the excavation to be done, but all of this will be taken care of early January so that the concreters can lay the slab mid-January.

It's Gone!

Well the house wasn’t gone in the timeframe hoped for in my last post, in fact it took another week due to a couple of rainy days delaying the job. Anyway we drove past the house today to grab a few photos of the empty block and this is what it now looks like:

We’ve been receiving weekly updates from the builder since the project began and have been told that the excavators are now booked in for Monday 16th of December and boy do they have a big job on their hands, let’s hope that they don’t hit too much rock. In the meantime surveyors have been on site to mark out the new house corners.

Somehow I don’t think the slab will be down before Christmas as it was originally hoped for.

Slow Moving

Things have been moving really slowly over the past 2 weeks due to the rain, but the demolition finally started last week with the asbestos removed from the eaves and the back sunroom with only the garage left to go. In the meantime we’ve been finalising the external and internal inclusions so that the builder can place orders prior to Christmas so that we have a head start in the New Year.

With any luck the house will be gone by the end of the week and the excavation process can then start. So apart from this there isn’t much to report.

Rain rain go away

We drove past the house on Sunday to see if the asbestos removal had begun and unfortunately it hadn’t. The demolition start was pushed out to the following week of the 11th and of course it had to rain for two days straight! At the same time we tried to follow up with our Gas retailer “Energy Australia” as to whether the gas had been disconnected at the street – big mistake, they were going to follow up with Jemena and get back to us, which they never did, so on the second phone call a couple of days later we were told that there was a huge email trail and that they would follow up again with Jemena as their system was telling them that only the meter had been removed.

In the end we called Jemena directly to find that they had no correspondence between them and “Energy Australia”, so who knows where EA have been sending their emails too and they had recorded it as a street disconnection. They told us that they would be confirming this with the technician that performed the work and would ring us back. Yes we’ve heard this before, so a couple of days later and no call back, we rang them again and they’ve told us that the street disconnection has definitely occurred. I guess we will see when the excavation machines come in and hit a pipe.

We started shopping around for a new electricity provider after Ausgrid issued a new NMI for our home, this was a nightmare as well, with sites like “iselect” having out-of-date information – deals that no longer exist and incorrect connection fee amounts, in the end we used the government site: www.energymadeeasy.gov.au to find the cheapest deal for our new “Smart Meter” that hadn’t been installed yet, only to find that some energy retailers don’t actually perform new connections and that you need to go with a retailer that can set you up and then switch across. So we’ve gone back to Origin on a Flexichoice plan (no lock in contract or exit fees) that we can then switch from into a better plan.

Bring on the demolition

We advertised a demolition sale on both Gumtree and EBAY and managed to sell a couple of plants plus a built in wardrobe, but unfortunately the big ticket item "the kitchen" did not sell; so you could say the sale was a partial success. On the day we also dug up our favourite tree "a weeping maple" from the front garden and moved it to a pot in the hope that it will survive and be replanted in our new home in a year's time.

We agreed with the builder "Brilliant Homes" that handover of the property would occur on the 1st of November even though the kitchen and a number of other items, bathroom vanity and laundry tub were still to be sold. They were happy for us to continue to sell and access the site right up until the start of demolition which was currently penciled in for Thursday 7th of November.

On the 1st, as planned the builder "Rocco" went to inspect the premises and mark up the grounds ready for excavation. The markings were spot on as agreed - save front/side and back hedges with everything else to go.

We drove past the house on the Sunday to check that the gas meter had been removed; which it had been, but it didn’t look as though the disconnection offsite had been done (no dug up pipes), so a follow up to our gas company was required. That day we also ended up selling the kitchen on EBAY with the buyer agreeing to come and remove the kitchen on the Tuesday, just 2 days before demolition.

On the Tuesday, not only was the kitchen removed but most of the site fences went up and a port-a-loo appeared ready for the first phase of demolition being the removal of asbestos from the eaves sunroom ceiling and garage roof.

In the meantime we have received a number of emails from the builder confirming our inclusions/joinery, which is great to see as we definitely want to make sure that everything is as we had originally communicated and planned.

Vacanting the premises

So the last 3 weeks have been extremely busy, packing, moving and un-packing and then settling into our new temporary home. I was totally amazed at how much stuff we had accumulated in the last 4 years, when everything is taken out of cupboards and packed into boxes and gathered into one area you can really see what you're dealing with and it's a lot of stuff!

Anyway half of our contents were moved on the 8th to our temporary home and the remaining were moved into a 3x3x3 storage room on the 20th. During these 3 weeks Optus came and removed the cable connected to the house, whilst Telstra opted to leave the cable for the demolition crew (to cut and wind back to the pole). We've also requested for our gas company "Ausgrid" to disconnect and remove the gas meter along with all the pipes to the street. This is scheduled for the week of the 28th. We gave the builder authority to disconnect the electricity on our behalf when signing the contracts, so that's it for utilities apart from water.

As promised below are some additional photos of the property we are working with, basically it's an average sized corner sloping block for North Willoughby. The original house was a 1950's orange full brick residence, 2 bedrooms (one large, one smallish), 1 bathroom and a WC off the laundry, with separate rooms for the kitchen, dining and lounge. There was also a sunroom that appears to have been a back verandah at some stage that was enclosed with cladding facing west, so it was a fridge in winter and a furnace in the summer! The double garage was separate to the house right at the rear of the property, but was quite unusable, with a narrow entryway and doors that had to be manually opened/closed. The house was originally fine for he two of us plus a large cat but when the newest family member arrived we soon realised that it wasn't going to cut it not even with a renovation.

 

Front entrance




Side view - which is planned to be the new entrance




Back view

 

We finally signed the contracts!

Well today we finally signed the building contracts for our new "Brilliant Home". What a long journey it has been to get here. We first started looking for a new home builder back in 2010 searching high and low for a someone to knock down and build a double brick home on our sloping block. After visiting Homeworld at Kellyville and Homequest at Bella Vista we soon realised that a project home builder wasn't going to give us a double brick construction with the quality inclusions we wanted. So we turned to searching the net and this is where we found our custom builder "Brilliant Homes".

It wasn't until exactly 2 years later that we had plans ready to submit to council for DA approval. The DA process took at lot longer than expected and it wasn't until January of this year that we had council approval to proceed. Let's say we learnt the hard way and in future if we ever build again we'll go straight to a private certifier rather than through council.

Anyway, 8 months later our construction certificate has now been granted, our contract reviewed and today we signed the many pages of documentation that will be our new home. The removalists have been booked for next week so the next step is to pack, pack, pack with the plan to move half of our home into our new temporary apartment and the rest into storage so that we can sell everything else
off before the bulldozers come in.

 The photo above is the street side view of our current home that will be demolished and replaced with a "Brilliant Home". More photos will be included in my next post.