Week 2 - Frame and Roof Trusses

We have been told this week will be a slower week than our first and that it looks like not much is happening but it is.

This week our frame has been completed, all the walls are up and we have walked through to make sure everything is where it should be. We have noticed that there is not frame up to the entry of the study. The original plans have the study open as you walk in the front door however we have closed ours in using sliding doors as we need a closed in office space and we also didn't like that when people fist walk in the home, the first thing they can see is computer equipment and printers etc.

We have been told that there are a few small things that need correcting with the frame, so we are hoping that this is one of them. We will watch this over the next week and make sure its fixed and has been picked up already.

We have also had our roof trusses go on this week, now it really looks like a house, what a big space the roof is.

One thing we have noticed now that we have a frame up is that our alfresco area is much bigger than we originally thought. We are now deciding if we build onto it as much as we had planned after handover or maybe we just build out another 3 meters instead of wrapping it around the house, which was our original plan.

Next week we have been told that we will have our first onsite meeting with our supervisor. We have also been told that the roof will be on by the end of next week.

Frame complete and roof trusses are on - Front the back of the house

Frame and roof trusses - from the front of the house

Week 1 - Plumbing, Slab and Frame

We turned up on the 20th June as today was the day our slab was starting. We have said from the very beginning, we wont believe this is real until the slab is down, so its a big thing for us.

We could see all the plumbing was is and we had a surprise lot of our bricks sitting there too. Not enough for the whole house but a few pallets.

This was pretty cool to see as we could now see and visualise where things will be in the house.

The next day on the 21st June, we drove by again to see that the concretors had been there and that all the waffle pads were in ready for the slab to be poured. Again this was great because we can now the size of our home and how it is placed on the land.

On the 22nd June, Slab was down!
The day is finally here, we have a slab, foundations of our home has been laid and this journey is about to begin. We took the kids and had dinner and champaign (soft drink for the kids) at the block to celebrate. It looks huge!

Friday 23rd June. Today we were told by our supervisor that the frame will arrive today and that the frame will go up on Monday. Wow we could not believe that this part is happening so fast. We were told that the chippy would be onsite today to probably receive and may lay the frame out ready to start at 7am on Monday morning. I drove by late afternoon to see if the frame had been delivered and to my shock and absolute surprise we almost drove by not realising it was out block. Our frame was UP. I think it was safe to say that the frame was delivered. The Chippy was there and all the wall frames were up and he was just finishing off the the day. I couldn't believe it.

What a great 1st week of building. to think this time last week we had an empty block and now we can actually see our house take shape. Pretty exciting.

We have been told that next week the chippy will be back to finish off the frame and that the roof trusses will also be put on next week.

Plumbing

Waffle Pads


Slab


Frame


Frame

Site Scrape

Site scrape  - 7th June 2017

We have had a call from our Site Supervisor, to introduce himself and let us know that our site scrape will happen on the 14th June and that our slab is booked in for the 20th June. Finally, we are staring.

Much to our surprise, our supervisor called back the next day to let us know that the site cut has been moved forward to the 7th June, however, the slab is still booked in for the 20th.

Driving by our land on the 7th June, we are now able to see that the site scrape has been completed and we are feeling pretty excited that we can see progress, even though only small, it's the first part of our physical build and we can't wait.

From Admin to Construction

Now that we officially own the land, Plantation homes have now completed the site and soil test and lodged our plans to council.

We have received an email from the building certifier that Plantation has contracted to let us know that they will be the building certifier at our lot and also it states #12. Yay, we have an actual house number now. 

Given we are building to the boundary on our left side of the property, Plantation supplied us with a form we needed to get signed from our adjoining neighbor for permission to carry out works on their land to build the garage as it is on the boundary of our lands. Given we didn't know who our neighbors were we sent the form to Stockland and asked them to forward it on to the neighbors to sign and send back to us so Plantation could start. because of privacy laws, Stockland could not give our the neighbors details to us directly. Basically, if we don't get the form signed Plantation are not able to step on site and makes our build difficult. 

2 weeks later we still had not heard from the neighbors so we called Stockland to make sure the definitely sent the form to them where I was told that they girl who would have sent it was on leave but they could actually give me the contact details of the neighbor as it was a builder and not a private home owner. I called the builder and within 1 hour I have the signed form back and submitted to Plantation. 

From our view, this was pretty annoying as Stockland could have given us that info 2 weeks ago and we would not be held up like we are now with the building. 

With this form now filled in, Planation were able to finalise our contract variations and site plans.

Land Registration and Settlement

When we purchased the land back on the 1st October 2016, we were told that our land is due for registration in February 2017.

Early February, we received an email from Stockland to say that "we are still on track for an early March registration". I was a little confused as we were told February and we have heard nothing since, only this email that states early February. We thought maybe we heard the dates wrong originally and whilst a bit bummed, we excepted it and eagerly awaiting early Feb.

Come mid Feb, we received an email again from Stockland now stating "we are still on track for end of February registration". I called Stockland to find out what was going on and they told me on the phone that they are waiting for some final sign offs and would keep me posted.

Come 24th February, I open my email from Stockland titled "An important update on your land", Yahooo its finally time....NOT! yet another "We are still anticipating registration to occur in Mid-March."
Now we are wondering if this is actually ver going to happen.

By now we are just going with the flow, as Dan points out, we are not yet paying mortgage repayments so lets just leave and not push the situation. 

Finally 29th March 6 months after we signed the contracts to a piece of dirt, we get the email "Your lot has registered".

We quickly cal the builder to let them know it has registered and we hear from our Solicitors to let us know that settlement has been booked in for 12th April 2016. Attached to this email is a breakdown of final costings that the solicitors will be paying on settlement day. I check it al off and notice that our part of the final payment is 3K more than we were originally told by our finance. This is 3K that we should have in our bank as our remaining deposit. We are 3K short!

I call Rams who are our finance and after much back and forward it seems there were extra things that were not added on in the initial costing breakdown. Soooo, yep we need to come up with 3K within 2 days before settlement. We did not have this so needed to extend settlement by 2 weeks so we could get this extra together. 

We finally get this outstanding amount together from our pays and we settled on on 19th April at 4:00pm. Yay, that piece of Sunshine Coast dirt officially belongs to us.

We get a letter from Rams to say our first mortgage repayment will be on the 1st May. Things are serious now and we couldn't be happier.

Here are some pics of our land and our street from the footpath in front of our soon to be home. 
Also Dan and I and our youngest having a celebration.

Valuation

What a bloody stressful 3 weeks we have had.

Our valuation was booked in for the 17th January. Becuase we have purchased our land off the plan, the valuer was booked in to do a site tour along with others in the area on the same day.

We got the notification on the 18th January that the valuation has fallen short. The house was valued correctly however, there was a shortfall of $10k for the land. The problem was, that given our block is one of the larger in the area and it's a brand new development, there was no real comparable data for the valuer to do his assessment.

After the valuer going back and forward with the land developer to see if they could get him to up the valuation, showing him other comparable data (that was obviously NOT good enough for him) he would not budge.

This is where I went into panic mode as we only had a few options before it was all over, no house, no dream!
1. Request a 2nd valuation (I was told the bank may not allow this to happen)
2. Negotiate with the land developer to lower the price of land by 10K
3. Change our finance company so we could have it re valued under a different loan (not an option for us

We requested a 2nd valuation which was accepted. Phew!

We have just found out on Friday 10th Feb that the 2nd valuation has come in a-okay!
We received our letter from our finance company that we have now gone unconditional.

Now we are just waiting on the land to register which should be in the next few weeks.

Approvals

Now comes the slow part of this whole process. Waiting for our land to register!

Now that we have finished all the fun stuff and signed all the contracts with Plantation, we wait for our little piece of dirt to register so we can finally build on it. Land registration is in February so we still have around 2 months to go...as long as it all goes to plan and registers on time.

Last week we were given the news that our covenant application was approved by the developer Stockland. This means they are happy with what we are planning to do with Plantation and our Landscaping plans were also approved. So we are ticking all the boxes for our covenant.

Today we submitted our final quotes to our finance company so we can get the valuation done. We were told this can take around 3-4 days to get the valuation back. We have heard back already to say that the valuer can't actually gain access to our land until mid-January given the land doesn't actually register until February. This means that we need an extension on our finance.

When we signed our contract with Stockland we had a 90-day clause in it given the land wasn't registering for some time. I have just emailed off our Solicitor to ask them to gain an extension on this. I've been told this happens all the time and is easy to do. Here's hoping!

On an exciting note, the development we are moving to opened up the main road that runs through the development on the weekend. We went for a drive and can see where our block will be. It's all taped off and under construction at the moment but we can see our piece of dirt and that is pretty exciting. It was cool looking at the sites that were opened at the weekend and all the families standing on their land for the fist time. That will be us soon.

Tender, Colour and Electrical

We have been super busy over the past 2 weeks.

We drove to Brisbane on Wednesday for our contract / tender appointment. Here we finally got to see our home on our site plan with our plans around the correct way. All the plans we have seen to date have been flipped the other way so it's nice to be able to see exactly what we are doing.
The appointment went for 2 hours, we were told to allow for 3 but given we didn't really have any changes, I guess there wasn't as much to do as first thought.

We changed a few things like closing in the study, adding a broom cupboard inside the laundry linen, changed to gas hot water, moved the garage door into the house from the hallway to the laundry and moved the outdoor tap location. All in all the only thing that cost extra was to close in the study.

We left that appointment very excited, we finally have plans!

Friday came and we drove back to Brisbane to Cosham studios for our colour selection. Again we were told to allow 3 hours but were in and out in 2 hours. I guess it helped that we went in there really knowing what our options were and what we wanted. We had a few little ad on's here but nothing too serious. We added a wood look garage door instead of the colourbond, we upgraded our wooden front door to verticle glass as we don't like the idea of people out on the street being able to see into our home. The verticle covers more space. We also upgraded our paint to a wear and tear paint. We added in a shelf in both showers, We added Jasper coloured Aluminium frames to the windows to match the colouring of the house. We did originally have in a Bin Drawer to the kitchen cupboard too, however this came back to us at a price of $500 so we decided to take that off and will do an Ikea job ourselves after handover.

The following week we had our electrical appointment, we did not have to travel to Brisbane for this as Your Home Electrical has an office at Moffat Beach...phew!
Once again we were told to allow 3 hours but we only took just over an hour. Again I think it helped that we had already been through our plans and really thought about where we wanted powerpoints and lights etc. Plantation already offers a very generous  amount of power points and light fittings. The only extras we put in were fan lights, downlights and an extra light out the front as a feature light. We had a 2k electrical allowance in our tender and we came in under that...until we added in the 7 fan lights. We could have had these done after hand over for much cheaper but we figured we will have so much to do after hand over this is one thing we didn't want to think about.

Kitchen Colours From top to bottom 
- Overhead cupboards
- Splashback
- Benchtops
- Cabinetry
- Flooring (Walnut Wide plank)

Outside Colours
- Colourbond Roof (Dune)
- Jasper Gutters and Facia
- PGH Frost Bricks
- Wood door and garage door
- Jasper aluminum window and door frames

Ensuite and Bathroom Colours 

Ensuite Vanity 

Bathroom Vanity 

Plantations Information Session

Today we travelled to Cosham Studios, Plantations colour selection studio in Brisbane for our Information session.

We arrived at 10am and were pleased to learn that there were only another 2 couples that were booked in too, which meant there were fewer people than we had thought to look through all the selections in the studio.

We were given an info booklet and on one of the pages, it had a list of the selections we need to choose items for. We were walked around the studio and shown what are the standard options for selection and what are upgrade options. By the end of the tour we were told to go around and start thinking about what we want, make note of what colours and items we would like to include in our new home.

I did not realise at the time but as we were being shown around, Dan was already taking notes of what he liked and didn't. Straight up this made me nervous as I thought for sure we would have different ideas on what we liked and didn't.

As we started to walk around I would ask what he had written down for a specific item and to my surprise its exactly what I wanted too. There were only a few minor things that we wanted something different to each other and in these cases we either found something else that we both thought was okay or we were able to come to an agreement that we were both happy with. Overall we left that session feeling very well prepared for our upcoming contract and colour selection appointments.

Contracts

We arrived home from our holiday today to find a few emails in the inbox from our legal team and Plantation. It seems they were all busy while we were sipping cocktails cruising the South Pacific.

Our legal team have sent us a copy of our land contract and a heap of items to read over! But essentially it's all good to go come February when our land registers. YAY!!!

We also have an email from Plantation introducing us to our Customer Service Administrator. She has booked us in for our Introductory Information Session at Cosham studios, Our contract signing and our colour selection appointment.

We have also received an email from Your Home Consulting letting us know they will be in contact in a few weeks once we have our colour selections etc completed so they can book us in for our electrical appointment.

We have been to a few of the plantation display homes to get an idea of what we like and don't like. We have decided to go with Neutral colours, browns and very earthy tones we want to create a Balinese style theme through the house as much as we can on our very tight budget. Plus our current home where we rent, everything is White! White tiles, white carpet white walls, white kitchen, absolutely terrible with kids, so dark is favourable for us.

We have visited our local PGH Brick centre to get an idea of what brick we like. we discovered very quickly that everything we LOVED was not in our budget and the ones we did like were not permitted as per our land covenant :( At the end of the day, out of around 12 brick selections that are in our budget we can only select from 3 that are in line with our covenant. We are not fussed on any of them but it is what it is. I liked the Savannah with off white Mortar but Dan liked the Desert Sand with off-white mortar. I think so far we will go with Dan's choice as it does tend to blend in with the roof and gutter colours we like and given the interior will be dark it would be good to use a light brick for the exterior.

The roof colour we like is Dune with a Jasper gutter and Surfmist fascia. We have cladding on the front of the house over one window so will do that in either Dune or Jasper to tie it all in.

We are super excited to get our colour selections underway next week and take us one step closer to actual home ownership!

Our brick selection so far of Desert Sand with samples of Dune roof, Jasper gutter and Surfmist Fascia

The Beginning

In June 2016 we decided to take advantage of the Government grant for first home owners in QLD. They are offering 20K to first home owners as long as you build a new home.

This is fantastic for anyone, who like us, struggles to save a deposit with 2 kids and rent payments plus the day to day living expenses.

We originally looked at a builder called Integra homes who are offering a no deposit build...that's not one cent you need and you can be in your own home. We applied and within 24hours we had pre-approval.

2 weeks later after visiting their display villages across south-east QLD we chose out home, chose our land on the Sunshine Coast and had all of our inclusions picked. Next step was to submit our final costings to the finance broker they use and get it all signed off.

This is where we hit our first snag with finance. I am Self employed and have been for the past 8 years. Unfortunately, my accountant did a fantastic job last financial year and bought my tax down. This, however, looks bad for the banks when it comes time to borrow money. Becuase of my low income (on paper) our borrowing capacity went very low and would mean needing to move around 30min away which is not an option for our kid's schools etc.

It was at this point that I thought to think outside the square. We were able to borrow a small deposit from a family member and add to what we had in the bank (about 5k). that with the 20K government grant gave us a healthy deposit. I then called RAMS and by chance, they had a different lending criteria for self-employed and we were able to borrow a healthy amount again that would see us in an area we liked and only 10min drive from school.

We looked around for around 2 months, getting quotes from different builders, doing a cost analysis to see where we get the best deals with their inclusions and extras. After much going back and forward, Wayne from plantation homes Bells Reach came to the party and had an offer on the table that was outshone by all the other builders.

We had decided to build with Plantation homes, we knew what home we wanted which was the Retreat Nouveau Q2. We would have loved the Nouveau Q1, however, the budget did not allow for this so now we just had to find land to fit.

After speaking for months with Bronwyn at Stockland, Bells Reach she let us know that there was one final block within our budget that would fit our home. We were able to put this on hold once we had pre-approval from RAMS which was now in process. Within a week we had a signed contract and paid our 5K deposit to Stockland. We now officially have a block of land.

We organise to go in and see Wayne at Plantation homes to finalise that process and paid our first $1500 deposit. We were told that it takes around 5 weeks for Plantation to get us in the system so we can organise a tender appointment. Once we have this we can take it to RAMS and apply for our "real" finance approval.

This is really happening.

Land Purchase 1st October 2016