Top storey render fully painted

17/10/09: I can't believe it, the top storey of our render is fully painted. When I spoke to the painter yesterday he told me they would be finished at about 1:30pm, when we arrived at 1:45pm he was still there. We started talking to him and he told us that he was the only one working as his side kick wasn't going to work this Saturday. He told us that he would be working all day so he could do the two coats today. He then told us that he had to finish it today as he was told the scaffolding would be coming down on Monday, woo hoo. He was still there when we left at around 3:15pm

When we were talking to him about the colour of the render he told us that it would dry about three shades darker than what it looks like at the moment, which we knew as we had painted the back of a coral sign before colour selections with sample pots. He then told us he would be back on Tuesday to do the bottom storey, then a few weeks later he will do the second coat on the bottom storey. He also told us he would be our painter for the inside of the house too.

Our eaves have been painted plus some other little surprises

16/10/09: Today I received a phone call at around 2:00pm, whilst I was at work, it was from the guy that is painting our house. He told me that we needed to sign a form before he could start painting. I asked him how long he was going to be at the house for, he told me until 4:30pm. I tried to get in contact with my fiance but she had forgotten to take her phone with her today, after trying everything I rang the painter back. He told me that he would leave the form in the meter box and I would need to have it signed by tomorrow as he wanted to start painting the render.

After I finished work this afternoon I had to drive to the house to sign the paperwork. A little bit of warning that this needed to happen would've been appreciated. I don't know how they expect you to meet them onsite within two hours of a phone call when you both have jobs.

While I was there I went for a walk around the entire house including both floors of the scaffolding. I did this while my fiance wasn't there because she won't let me, she doesn't think it's safe. I did get some good photos while I was there, plus it gave me a chance to look for any issues with the roof, the gutters and the render.

I found a few other little surprises whilst on the inside of the house. One, that the ducting for the rangehood and the fan in the toilet have been done. the other when I went upstairs I found that almost all the holes for the light switches and power points have been cut out.

We can't wait to see the house tomorrow after the render has been painted.

Our downpipes have been done

15/10/09: I expected to see more work done on the house after not visiting for two days, but all we could see that had been done were that the downpipes had been put on.

The next two weeks are going to have to be very busy if we are going to be where the site supervisor is telling me we will be by the end of this month.

Eaves, portico frame & upstairs waterproofing done

13/10/09: We stopped by the house on our way home today. The first thing we could see that had been done were the eaves, as we got closer we could see that the front portico frame had been put up along with the rest of the frame in the garage.

I went for a walk inside but could see that nothing had been done downstairs - I can't wait for the scaffolding to come down. I thought I would take a quick peek upstairs, as soon as I opened the hatch I could smell a strong smell, almost like glue, I headed straight to the bathroom and as I expected the water proofing had been completed in all of the upstairs bathrooms.

Render has been finished.

12/10/09: We didn't get a chance to go to the house today, but we were up there on Saturday afternoon to see what had been done last Friday. We were pleased to see that the render had been finished, I guess it won't be long before they paint it, so they can remove the scaffolding and continue working on the inside.

All our light choices, as long as we don't change our mind

Who knew that picking lights for your house would be so hard? After several big days of shopping our light choices have been finalised and are listed below.

Due to the NSW Government's Basix requirements we need to have energy efficient lighting to a minimum of the 'entire house' according to our contract. What does this mean? According to the lady at the Basix hotline 80% of all lights in a primary lit room will need to be energy efficient, so if there is only one light it must be energy efficient, but if you have five lights only four need to be energy efficient. I asked about spotlights outside for security reasons, they told me that if it is outdoors it's not required to comply with Basix. What?

I agree that we should all save power but there are many other ways to do this rather than screwing people around with lights. For example; the light we have picked for our entry, which will only be used on very few occasions and for a very small amounts of time wont comply with Basix because it has 6x 40w bi pin bulbs. But if I go out and buy a massive 50" Plasma TV to watch for 4 hours a day every day that uses 400W of power they are cool with that. I could keep going on a rant about this but I'm not going to. You can already see how pissed off I am about this, because now we will have to put these lights in later at an extra cost to us, also the electrician will have to drive back to the house causing more emissions but that's ok, they don't care about that.

Anyway enough of that here are our light choices.

This is our main light to be used downstairs in the study, laundry, kitchen, living room, theatre room and the piano/sitting room, these will also be used upstairs in the TV room, bedroom 2, 3 & 4 and in the sitting room in the main bedroom.

A medium size version of the same light will be used in the downstairs hallway, the pantry, the upstairs hallway and as the main light in the ensuite above the sink.

A smaller version will be used in the downstairs toilet, the upstairs ensuite toilet and the entry hallway to the main bedroom.

This what we have picked as our entry light, the cords will need to be shortened so it will fit. We will need to install this light later due to Basix.

This light will go in our staircase and will match our entry light. Again, it will need to be installed after handover due to Basix.

Two of these lights will go in the dining room, one at each end of the table. Again due to Basix this will be installed after handover.

This light will go over the table in the meals room.

Three of these lights will go over our kitchen bench, they are DIY so we will fit them ourselves after handover.

This light will go in the main bedroom over the bed, this is also a DIY so will be installed by us after handover.

This light will go in our walk in wardrobe.

This light will go over the mirror in the ensuite, it matches the one in the wardrobe.

This is our air vent and light in one to go in the upstairs bathrooms and ensuite.

This light will be in our portico at the front of the house.

Four of these lights will be used out the front of our house, two on the portico pillars and two on either side of the garage.

These are our spotlights one will be behind the garage and the other at the back of the house.

Two of these lights will go in the garage, one over each car.

Now all we have to do is find out how much it’s going to cost to install all these lights and make sure we have them ready for when the electrician needs them.

Our render has been started

08/10/09: We didn't get a chance to go to the house yesterday, but after two days of nothing being done on Monday and Tuesday it was great to see that the render has almost been completed, there is only the front of the house left to be done. It was also great to see that one of the guys doing the render was still there at 5:30pm putting the finishing touches on what they had done today.

Nothing appears to have been done on the inside I guess this is mainly due to the fact that nothing can fit into the house because of the scaffolding blocking all the doors into the house. I did notice a few new things sitting on the roof though, the main one being the TV antenna and the other one being the vents for the bathrooms.

Choosing light fittings has been a nightmare

Choosing our lights has been one of the hardest things we have done for our house so far. About three weeks ago we made our first trip to Beacon. We walked in, had a walk around for about an hour, we got so confused we just had to leave.

After our first Beacon trip we decided to sit down with a plan of the house and tried to pick what lights would look good in each of our rooms. We came up with a short list that we could choose from Beacon. As this list was very short we decided to search the Internet to find a list of lighting stores. This is a lot harder than it sounds, light stores seem to not want to be found. I finally came across a store called Wide World of Lights that looked very promising, they included links to all their suppliers websites so you could look at a massive range of lights that they stock.

After looking through all of their suppliers brochures we picked a few other lights that looked as though they would suit our style. I sent WWOL an email to find out how much these three lights in particular would cost as they claim to have one of the biggest ranges of lights at the best prices. I told the guy at WWOL that I would be travelling to their store from a distance of around 200km away. He replied to my email the next day saying that he could give me there normal price via the email but to come in and they would do better. As these prices were already cheaper than most other online stores we could find we decided that a trip to their store would be worthwhile.

The following Sunday we decided to return to Beacon and get a quote as it was the last day of their current sale, we put our list together and got our quote sorted out. As this quote is valid for 30 days we decided that we would pick them up next week. I'll put a list together of our lighting choices soon.

The next day, being a public holiday in NSW, we decided to do our road trip to Wide World of Lights. When we arrived we were met by a store that was about three times bigger than any other light store we had seen. We walked in had a walk around and surprisingly couldn't find any lights we liked. We think this place may have still been stuck in another decade, he showed us a range of new lights coming in that looked like they were from the late 80’s. They only had one of the lights in stock that I had asked about which would have been nice to know before we drove 200km to the store. When we spoke to the sales guy he was so pushy he pissed us off. He gave us a price on one of the lights we wanted, it was $130 cheaper than what we had seen anywhere else, as we needed two this would be a big saving.

We continued to look around and still couldn't find anything, mainly because the stock was so disorganised. To give you an example we asked about an outdoor light for our portico, we told him what we wanted, he said "I have three you can look at, one is over here" (the very far right of the shop) "one over there" (the very far left of the shop) "and one over here"(in the middle of the shop). This was a complete joke, my fiancé just wanted to leave. She couldn't stand such a disorganised store and such a pushy salesman. As we started to walk toward the front doors he started yelling out at us "how lucky do you feel? Do you feel lucky?" What the hell did this guy want now? He said, "I found another outdoor light for you" We thought “oh crap we’re never going to get out of here.” We told him to just leave us to think, when he left we quickly walked out, never to return to this store EVER again.

While we were on the way to Wide World of Lights we noticed a Beacon store just a few shops down, I suggested that we have a look in there just to check if they had something else that we might like. They didn't, but we thought that we would get a quote just in case they were going to give us a better deal as we would be buying at least 30 lights from Beacon. He gave us the quote and it was about $150 cheaper than the other Beacon store, so it turns out this wasn't a wasted trip after all.

Our next stop was at IKEA, not just for lights but for a look around at other things for the house. If you have never been to IKEA you must go, they have everything you could ever want for your house and everything you didn't even know you needed. I think we will be doing our walk in wardrobe from IKEA.

Our next stop was Lighting Illusions at Homeworld in Helensvale, It was suggested to us by Rebekah, another Coral builder who is doing a blog and had bought her lights from there. As it turned out they were a stockist of one of the same lights we were interested in. We asked their best price and was told $60 more than WWOL, we told them what WWOL had quoted us and they came back with a price $9 less than WWOL. She gave us a quote as they didn't have them in stock, we will get her to order them for us next week. These lights will also be on my list of lighting choices in the next few days.

As we were walking out of Lighting Illusions we saw a shop across the car park called Lighting Superstore. They also seemed to have a great choice of lights but we were so over shopping for lights at this stage nothing really stood out for us. They did have a great bargain on the same set of spotlights we got Beacon to quote us, they were only $28 so we bought them there and then.

If you can believe it there are still three lights that we are undecided on at this stage; one in the walk in wardrobe, one over our bed and the one over the mirror in the ensuite. We know what style we want we just have to find a store that has them in stock at a good price.

One other issue we are going to have with a few of our lights is related to Basix, in NSW all lights in a primary lit room need to be energy efficient. A few of our feature lights will not be and cannot easily be chanced into energy efficient lights, this may mean getting them installed after handover. I will go into more detail on this in my lighting choices blog to follow in the next few days.

More brickwork done, theatre room insulation installed

02/10/09: I really thought that the bricks would be finished today. There is only a small amount left across the front and half way done the left hand side over the garage, it will definetley be finished early next week if the weather holds off.

When my fiancé went inside she saw that the theatre room insulation had been done, they have pushed a few of the speaker cables through to the wrong side of the wall when putting the insulation in so I will have to fix that up on the weekend as I believe they may be starting the downstairs plaster next week.

When she was leaving she noticed that the bags of render had been delivered so I guess that it's safe to say that they will be starting that in the next week or two.

We have a big weekend planned as we are going to try and sort out most of our lights this weekend.

Preparation for final brick work

01/10/09: Today marked one month since the slab was poured, it was one busy month. It was so busy it seems like forever ago our house was only a bare block.

It seems as though today they finalised the scaffolding and moved the bricks up to the top of the scaffolding so the brickwork can continue. We can't wait for the bricking to be finished.