Demo done - DA approved

We would have to be the wolds worst bloggers.  Have not posted anything in about a month.

The Demo is now finished after a whole lot of problems.  We bought a dump,  it was just buried under the ground.  They found a 22m driveway under 30cm of soil, lots of bathroom tiles that i don't think all belonged to the house we knocked down and assorted bits of household crap.  The demo ended up costing double what we were expecting, but considering we ended up having to get rid of two houses, one that we knew about and the one under the ground, it didn't end up too bad.

From the bricks you can see on the right, up to the truck

there is a driveway under the ground

Out empty block.

We had to get AHD (Australian Height Datum) flood  levels done, before we could put our plans into council.  We are fine, just had to make sure our nice new house didn't end up under water.  The DA was put into council on the 6th July 2011.  Lets hope it all goes through with no major issues.

On the 19th July we went into Kurmond to do all of our internal colours and fixtures.  We had a pretty good idea of what we wanted, but it is very stressful trying to think how all of these things you are picking will all look like in real life in your new house.  We also had to do our electrical layout.  We had done a lot of this at home.  We had worked out where we wanted out light fittings, down lights and power points, but forgot to work out where to put the light switches.  After we left out 4hour meeting we realised we forgot the light under the stairs. (we have now fixed the missing light).

So this is what we have picked for our externals.

This is what will go where

Garage doors
Caoba timergrain

Roof tile profile

Dune - Window frame, Fascia, Downpipes and Water tank
Monument - Gutters and external Balustrade

Zelda - around garage doors
Silkworm - cladding and around front door

Austral Metropolis Topaz

Roof tile Ebony

The Drive way will be a Cove finish in Gunmetal.  The front door, and post on the balcony will be stained Jarrah.

This is the 1200mm pivot door we picked

Internal colours
Main Colour Portland Stone
Feature wall Athena

Internal Doors

Counter tops in Kitchen and Bathrooms
Kitchen - Crisp White

Internal door handle

Kids Bathroom and Powder Room
Ensuite - same wall tile.  Darker floor tile and different
Feature tile.

Checking the DA's on Friday 22nd and found that we had issues with the DA.  Rang the council and we were told that the house did not fit into the building envelope.  Kurmond had addressed this in the application.  The only other issue was a large tree in the front of the house, we did want a double driveway to the gutter, but council will not let us remove it.  Rang council on Monday to find out what we needed to do, but by then they had looked at the application properly and everything was fine.
Council will not let us remove the tree, so we will have to have a single layback that opens up to the double driveway.

This is the tree that we have to keep.
At least it's a nice looking tree

We got the Consent Approved on the DA on the 28th July 2011.  Next step Construction certificate.  We have been told this should take around 2 weeks.  It would be great if we could see things happening by the end of August.  Fingers crossed.