Some progress

The outside courtyard is underway with excavation done in order to construct the planter box walls for the pre-existing hedges and new ones that will come with the landscaping.

The two sets of glass stacker doors are finally in plus the bi-folds that lead out to the seamless alfresco.

Also from what we can see most of the internal boarding has been done. So overall we are progressing slowly.

Scaffolding has come down

So two weeks have passed and the eaves are now finished and the scaffolding has come down. There doesn’t appear to have been any changes to the internal, but we do know that the Gyprock and timber floorboards should be in very soon, maybe after the glass stacker and bifold doors are installed?

On the outside our brick façade around the garage is now complete including the electrical wiring, so now it just needs the Shale Grey acrylic render.

Slat eaves are going on

The eaves have started to go on and boy do they look shmick! We decided to have all of our wood work in a composite wood (Eko wood supplied by Ekologix available at Bunnings) so as to reduce our maintenance bill. This material feels and looks like wood but it is a product of bamboo and recycled plastic.

No oiling or painting is required and it will not fade – good stuff!

Rough-in complete

We now have confirmed the air conditioning vent shapes and locations. All of the rough-in appears to now be complete, gas, air conditioning, vacuum points, electrical & plumbing. So hopefully the gyprock is next.

Below are some photos of what the current internals look like without walls:

This is the view from our dining area which is situated near the alfresco and is part of the lounge/kitchen open plan area (north side of the house).

Some serious Cat 6 data cables!

This is the southern side of the house with a view from our media room, into the laundry, main bathroom, bedroom 3, ensuite and then main bedroom.

Rough-in has begun

The skylights went in on Tuesday and we have now confirmed the internal gyprock angles for the skylights and all of the recessed niches within the bathrooms. The plumbing has also been confirmed as well as the electricals – position of tvs, data, hdmi, power and optical cables where required.

Let’s just say this house will be more wired up then an office as we have multiple data ports in every room.

Below is a photo of the internals with all of the framing completed.

Roof is on!

Well this week the roof tiles went on, with the gutters the week before. The skylights will be installed next week and then I’m assuming all of the external doors will be installed apart from the main entrance pivot door; which will get us to lock up. So this means we are still on track for completion this year. The next major steps are the internal walls – rough in and then gyprock with a targeted completion of the end of August. In the meantime we have been confirming the colour and material for our eaves, screens and decking and the colour of our garage door.

Finally our site meeting

Today is the long awaited site meeting! We went through the house room by room, ensuring taps, cupboards, doors, bulkheads and so on were as we wanted them and this took us 3 hours and we still didn’t manage to get through all rooms! We agreed to meet back again in roughly a month’s time so that we could reconfirm what we discussed and go through a couple of more items. We are so close to having a roof on now and it was stated that the next 4 weeks were critical to us having the house completed before Christmas.

We ended up changing a couple a number of things, i.e. the direction in which doors opened, bulkhead positions and so on. We also decided to change the surface of our garage façade to be acrylic render and our alfresco to be composite wood decking rather than tiles. By changing our alfresco to decking we were then able to raise this area up with minimal cost to get that seamless indoor outdoor look where the floor heights are level. Also a sample of the outdoor tile that we were planning to use was brought to the house and unfortunately it really didn’t give us the look we were after - lesson learnt to bring samples out of the show room/warehouse and onsite to see how it looks. In the end we have selected another tile that I have seen in a friend’s alfresco so I know exactly how it will look.