Slab Plumbing Done

All the pipes and drains now seem to be in. The next step is the Waffle Pod, our slab is scheduled for next Wednesday so we are not sure how we are sitting for that.

A pile of rubbish

Unfortunately the company who did our demolition left lots of building waste such as bricks pipes and concrete hidden under the soil. As we are supposed to provide a "clean" site our builder has piled it all up for us to get rid of. As we have already paid the demolition company we have had no luck with getting them to come back and collect the rubbish. They believe it was left over from a previous job at the back of the property. This is complete garbage as the house that was on the block had been there for 35 years and we paid them to clear the site, grrrrr.

Anyway as our builder already had a bobcat and trucks on site we asked how much to take the rubbish away. We thought considering about 50% of the pile is soil and our huge site costs of nearly 37k which included removing lots of excess dirt, that it would not be too expensive. Wrong, they quoted $4000 to remove the pile! We could not believe it! Obviously we decided to look into it ourselves and found someone in the yellow pages to remove it for $1600, it is amazing that we can find someone to do it so much cheaper and we have nothing to do with the building industry, the builder claims they do not make any money on site costs. Now we have removed three truckloads of rubbish mixed with soil and we are very annoyed that the builder will not give us a credit for the loads of soil that they no longer have to cart away.

Retaining Walls

Retaining Walls have been completed. They have done a very nice job of these, they look better than we expected. We will probably paint these Jasper later, mum has done these with hers and they look great. Unfortunately because of the easement at the back of the block the back one could not be put along the fence line so it cuts our already small backyard in half! The black things sticking out are the screw piles and the grey concrete you can only just see are the concrete piers.

Site cut complete

The site cut was finished today. We have realised how small our backyard is going to be. Bit of a worry!

Issues with Boundaries

Back in November PD had a re-establishment survey done to check the fence lines were on the boundaries of the block. The other day we were out looking at the block and our right hand neighbour came out and told us that she could see from the boundary pegs that our fence is on her land and she wants us to move it. Well straight away we called PD to get a copy of the survey and sure enough the left and right boundaries are out by about 40cms. We have the correct width of land but the fences are just not in the right position this is probably the case up the whole street.

On bringing this issue up with PD they came back with the fact that because our left neighbours have built their driveway over our boundary we cannot build our garage on the boundary as originally planned. As we can't build on the boundary we have to build 1 metre from it so we will have to cut 1m out of our garage, what!!!! PD had this survey since November but took no notice of it and now can’t build the house we want.

Anyway after days of there being no solution but to cut off the garage or ask the neighbours to move their expensive new driveway (not going to happen) we came up with the idea of turning the house to be a bit more angled on the block (so the house will not be parallel with the street) and we can fit the garage. Yes it was us the laymen who came up with the idea not the professional builder. If fact our customer service representative could not understand what we were talking about so we had to send the following picture. The outer box is our land and the inner box is the house, initially the right side of the house was aligned with the boundary. After that she got it!!!

Demolition Complete

Demolition was completed today. This is a photo taken earlier before the machines left. Demolition was supposed to have been completed before Christmas but due to flooding just before the Christmas break it was not able to be finished and we had to wait for them to come back from holidays

The house we are going to demolish

Here is a picture of the house are going to demolish. Yes there is nothing wrong with it but it was in the way!

During the start of this year we spent months looking for a house to buy but we could not find anything that we liked. Once we decided to build we had the lovely job of looking for land. As this is an established area there was none available except for overpriced blocks under high voltage power lines! Once we decided to buy an existing house and demolish it we put a few offers in on places that were already on the market and always lost out. Since the Real Estate agents were no use in finding us what we wanted we decided to take matters into our own hands.

We printed up some colour leaflets on our inkjet printer with a family photo and a blurb saying that we are looking for land to build our dream home, the price we were willing to pay etc. We delivered about 100 of these in streets that had blocks facing the right direction (so our alfresco area could face north) and that were big enough to fit our house. We used google maps and the landdata site to find out dimensions.

Sure enough out of the 100 we sent we finally got a phone call from a lovely man we will call T. He said he had been thinking of downsizing and liked the idea that a new house would be put on his block rather than other people moving in to his family home. Also he did not have to spend any money of agents fees and advertising etc. We met up and came to a price we were both very happy with and 60 days later we had our land!