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.