Progress Snapshots

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Fan Purchases

We have made the most of the beacon 30% off sale and purchased our fans for the bedrooms and the alfresco area. For the bedrooms we have 4 "Fanaway" fans:


And for the alfreso area we have decided to make a bit of a feature out of the fan and bought the Tahitian:
Can't say we wont be prepared ;)

Tile selection

Made our final tile selections today. Scary stuff really. So many choices at Westside Ceramics. After 3 trips and a few mind changes, we decided on the following:

Main living area and hallways (Big tiles) / Laundry/bathroom floor tiles (Single tile - Resort Coffee):
This picture doesn't do these tiles justice as the main living floor tile is really a more off white/beige colour than peachy as it looks like here.


Bathroom wall tiles:



Bathroom Mosaics (Single strip as shown in picture in both showers):



Laundry splashback: (Will be laid horizontally)



Kitchin Splashback ('Ash' in colour): (Will be laid horizontally)



Patio/alfresco outdoor areas (Actual size of tiles will be 300 x 300):

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Block Progress

In the weeks that followed, our land release area was registered on schedule as well as settlement taking place making our block officially ours ;).





Getting documents ready to submit to the ponds board was up next, with all the requirements involved in allowing the plans to go through, alot of thought had to go into planning out the landscape plan. (We will add this in a later post.) We were fortunate enough to get approved on our first application within 3 weeks of beechwood  submitting it and we were off to the council. Due to the christmas period and some lazyness coming back to work after new years, which was sorted out with 6 rather heated phone calls to the council, we had approval from them with no problems on our side of things in 6 weeks!

Now currently waiting for beechwood to finalise their documents and draw up the contract for our build. Selections of tiles, carpet, paint and all other interior accessories are in the process of being selected. Updates as soon as they arise!

The adventure begins...

Once the additional addons and changes were made on the tender, our deposit to beechwood was paid and the fun began of choosing our exterior colours whilst our first set of official plans were drawn up. A trip to austral bricks was made to choose the bricks, roof tiles, render, gutters and fascias.

Our selections are as follows:

Bricks - Urban One, Latte (Off white mortar and flush joins)



Roof Tiles - Bristile Classic Coal with shingle profile

Gutters - Colourbond Monument




Fascias, window frames, downpipes and garage doors - Colourbond Paperbark



Render - Colourbond (colouring) Evening Haze


The facade that these colours will be used on is the Vogue 1 which looks like so:

The Catch-up Post

Hey Bloggers,

Firstly, let us introduce ourselves. We are Natalie and Ash Durham with a pugalier puppy named Roxy and we have purchased a block of land at The Ponds. As it stands we are about 5 weeks or so away from action happening on our block with the recent development of the approval from council. Before we get into that though, we'll start at the beginning of our adventure at The Ponds.

We first decided to make the move to building at The Ponds after evaluating our position in our first home. It was a 3 bedder, single garage brick veneer home in Dean Park. We owned the property for roughly 4 years and thought it was about time we made our move into a better property. After extensive looking around at pre-existing homes around surrounding areas, we decided that there just wasn't anything ticking all the boxes we wanted in our next house. On came the thought of building.

After venturing through a few options, we found ourselves loving The Ponds area. Central to family, friends and work, land at the right size and price and the quality of homes being of a high standard, we immediately felt at home. Starting the grueling task of then deciding which block, in which release, of which size was our next battle.

We're quite eager people and were naturally very keen on getting something to be able to begin our long and exciting adventure. This brought us to the fun task of selling our existing residence to be able to manage the start of our new chapter. Fortunately the designing ability of Natalie allowed the house to sell on the first day of hitting the market fetching over our asking price. Over the moon at this point? No doubt!

Shacking up with the parents wasn't something we thought we would be doing after getting married, thank god we're loved. This allowed us to continue with placing a deposit on a block of land and then continuing our search of choosing a house to put on it. We had started looking at display homes prior to the purchase of the block, but didn't think too seriously of them until we had a block to put it on. I know some of you would be thinking, "That's the wrong way around." and our parents did say that too, but we had a fair idea of what we wanted and were confident that the block would happily house the dimensions.

4 bedrooms, double garage and 2 bathrooms was the criteria of our choice. Anything after that was a bonus. A theatre room was a big selling point for Ash as his mass collection of DVDs would fit perfectly well with it ;). After many viewings of display homes through the ponds, kellyville and eventually Oran Park, we chose beechwood to be our builder of choice. The chosen plan of the Cabernet ticked all the boxes and beechwood provided the best value for money out of the couple of choices we had to choose from.


In further plans and changes to this floor plan, we have added an alfresco area to the rear of the living area, moved some doors and windows and modified the kitchen and laundry layouts. An updated version of the floor plan will come in a later post.