It's been a while!

Ok, it has been a long while, but a lot has happened. We moved house and settled on our old house which was disaster after disaster. There was a 3 year old with a broken finger, the buyer claiming we had removed things from the house that never exisited, and the ANZ refusing to go to settlement because of some notes a broker had placed on our mortgage. Luckily it all turned out well and we are now living happily in a rental house two streets from our block of land.

We also had settlement on our block of land, which was another long string of disasters which included a trip to the city to get the documents signed and submitted in time for our settlement because if we were late we would have missed a $5000 rebate. Luckily it all came together and we got the rebate thank you to Choice homeloans for their persistence in the matter!

We went to our tender appointment and Porter Davis were fabulous with my obsessive attention to detail regarding the cupboards. We left feeling very happy with everything.

The tile appointment with National Tiles was not quite as brilliant. It was very rushed and we were out of there within 2 hours. But I am happy with our selections. We only ended up with 3 different tiles in the whole house but I think that's a good thing, less is more! We spent about $600 on tile upgrades though, but we budgeted for $1000 so that was a bonus. I'll add the list of all our colours separately.

The electrical appointment went really well, we'd allowed for $4000 and by the end had only spent $2700 so we were desperately trying to think of things to spend it on, and ended up adding the wiring for a projector and home theater system and some nice lights to our powder room, then we were over budget by $200 but that's alright.

The colour appointment was on the same day as the electrical and we were very happy with that, we did a few upgrades, Cat 3 bricks, door and cupboard handles, 40mm benchtop to the island, cat 2 Caesarstone to the bathrooms and powder room and a few other little fiddly ones. PD's standard selections were pretty good and I think we slapped together a pretty decent colour scheme. There was many months of preparation for it though, lots and lots of brick viewings and kitchen planning, but in the end I am very happy with the whole thing.

We have also had the contract appointment which also went very well, PD are 100% with customer service, everything was great. Hubby couldn't attend so they were happy for me to take the docs away and return them signed the next morning. The only thing missing for the contract and our 10 pages of variations was the robe handles we upgraded. Which PD said they would wear the cost of as it was only $3 and the effort to do a Post Contract Variation wasn't worth it! So that was a bonus.

On site the big news is that we got a tap last week!!! Very exciting I know. I had a vision of keeping an extremely detailed blog on the whole building process, but I don't think I will manage to be quite as perfect as I would like, I promise to try though!