Spotlight, Masters & iKEA

House mode!

With buying a new home, comes the joy of thinking of thousands of more ways to spend more money on the house.

We have spent many weekends exploring and short listing items for our house. Our approach to things is that it is good to explore to see what is out there and be able to buy things over time - not having to rush at the end when you want to move in. The other advantage is that we don't need to budget every single item to get post build and set aside money for uncertain costs of items.

Buying over time allows us the benefit to purchase items on sale when it suites us, which has been good with end of financial year sales. The highest priority items and the best deals are the ones we have purchases so far and will continue to chip away at household items over the coming months.

If you haven't guessed already, we are pretty overzealous and a bit to pro active with our purchases and ideas!

IKEA

IKEA has been handy for a few light/small purchases - we have picked up a few utensils and storage items (rails to mount under the kitchen cupboards for utensils and baskets)

Masters

The cleaner and more polished version of Bunnings - we picked up the white goods we needed here. The base price of two of the three items was the lowest around. The last was painlessly priced matched to a good guys in-store special. Delivery was reasonable and shall arrive soon to be stored for a few months at our current location.

Spotlight

The store of never ending specials - we have previously picked up some of the pre-made roller blinds for key areas of the house that will need them immediately (bathrooms, bedrooms, etc). We are also looking at a basic rug from there and possibly some outdoor blinds in the future.

Stratco

Exploring their range of pergolas and patios - many grand ideas and we don't even have a house - easy to get ahead of yourself. The thought with this, was to explore mounting options should the area be concreted, as well as developer/council approval for such a structure.

Furniture 

We spent some time trawling through the good furniture places in Frankston-Dandenong Rd. We managed to find a good deal on some bedside tables - one of the few furniture items we were lacking. The only other addition was a kitchen table, which we managed to find a reasonable priced 7 piece at Amart.

Future trips

Now that we have knocked over most of the bigger ticket items, its only a matter of some utensil and nice fittings for the place - not having to worry about sourcing the large items will be nice - we can focus on other things / watching the build happen!

Build Date Announced - Independence Day

Late on Friday afternoon, we received a call from our Carlisle admin person - who informed us our start date would be the 4th of July. (Going to be easy to remember in the future!)

It was great to know we had a start date, unfortunately we had hoped to have started the week we received the call.

We had fast tracked our side of things (and Carlisle working through there's) to ensure we could be in before Christmas - however it seems it had not been possible on there end. The most unfortunate side of this is that we will miss out on the extra FHOG increase - which would of been a great bonus - but you can't win them all.

We hope the build goes well and that the weather holds out for the key initial stages. I hope to document each stage well within the blog and we are looking forward to it immensely!

We are already exploring options of a patio before the house has been built - which is pretty bad as we are finding many ways to spend money before we even have a slab!

Land Settlement (Land Lease)

The Friday that we had been waiting for had finally come. Settlement was due to occur mid afternoon.

There were a few hiccups along the way prior to settlement (Broker not pulling their weight), however they were sorted out just in the nick of time.

We had ensured that our deposit was sitting in the offset account well before settlement (advised is at least a week prior to allow funds to clear, etc) and ready to go.

The conveyance company called not long after it had settled to inform us that it had all settled without any issues. Our land loan now officially begins - many years of debt to be had!

The house build, is due to happen in hopefully a months time, and once completed, will allow the loans to be combined into a single loan to pay off. For the moment, when the house loan begins, it will be interest only.

Land Lease had also upheld there part of clearing up the land, as on the day of settlement they had sent a crew out to the site to clear all the rubbish we had flagged with them. They had done a top job and the grounds were looking great.

The pegs at the front that were there, had been highlighted with spray paint and the ones that were not at the back had been booked to be redone (By Land Lease, at no cost to us).

 

Throughout the whole processes, Land Lease has delivered excellent customer service & support, along with building and maintaing a great estate - attracting a good range of businesses and ensuring there are facilities for the people of the area - something that the majority of surounding estates have completely neglected.

Land - Pre Setttlement

The time had come for us to inspect and verify the condition of the land prior to settlement taking place.

A big mention to Land Lease for clearly letting us know about these things when we purchased the land. Throughout the process they have been open about the information about the land; provided us with the information about their responsibilities and have been very responsive and followed up matters in a very timely manner. If we bought land again, our preference would be for a Land Lease estate - they have invested well into the area and provided excellent support throughout the process.

We drove down to our block to inspect it. The site had lost some of the rubbish that was there a while ago, but had unfortunately gained a fair amount of rubbish from builders dumping on the site over the time.

The site now had two decent sizes of concrete messes dumped on the grass, plenty of litter, gravel and temporary fences left lying over it.

The other important thing we had come to do, was, check for the boundary pegs & site measurements, to make sure they were all there. We managed to find the front to pegs after brushing aside some overgrown grass. The measurements of the block all looked to be correct, however the pegs at the back of the block had been removed/built over. Some fencing had been done at the back/landscaping, so it was to be expected.

The rubbish & missing of pegs has been passed onto Land Lease, as they will clear the land of rubbish once off & ensure that the pegs are onsite once off as well (they can get damaged/sink/missing with works)

We are awaiting to hear back when they are sorted out and it will come very close to settlement. (It was advised we do it about a week prior, so hopefully not much happens prior to settlement and hopefully the build too!)

Carlisle Contract

The contract day was finally upon us. This would mean our 100% commitment to the project, our first installment payment and hundreds of initials/signatures! We were lucky as we received the contracts two days before the contract meeting, normally it comes the day before.

The appointment begin with a briefing on the HIA contract (Basically terms & conditions, as well as your obligations, with the stage payments all listed) & the house contract itself (couple of centimeters thick!)

The house contract contained the color selection document that we had seen at tender, revision 2 with the updates made, soil tests, permits & Carlisle insurance documents. It also contained the much sought after working drawings (needed for bank valuation and our own personal perusal!) 

We still had some items to follow up from tender, of which the Carlisle person handling the Contract was happy to go upstairs and have them costed - while allowing us time to read the contract in detail and review the selection to ensure they were correct.

At contract, as I had confirmed with Carlisle, we were allowed to make small changes - such as those to the electrical (position, additional power points, lights, etc). After some deep pondering, we had decided to add a fair amount of extra power points - as I had deemed we had not spent enough on extra power points! We aimed to cover areas for vacuuming / lighting (mostly hallways) and to ensure there were not gaps large areas without power coverage. We also added one on the pillar near the alfresco doors - to allow it to run a cable outside (should it be needed on a temporary basis), without the expensive cost of another outdoor power point / lack of walls space out there for one.

While these issues were looked into/costed, we signed all the paperwork - about a hundred pages for each copy of the contract - so the meeting was efficient, that once we were happy and briefed on the contract, we were left to sign at our own pace while costing and further alterations were done.

We also raised an ongoing issue (battle) over the setback of the house. This had been going on for months now - as the developer had given the OK many times about the house being able to be brought forward (porch is excluded from the minimum frontal distance), however Carlisle had been resistive on the majority of occasions.

We raised it at Contract, with emails to back us - which the Contract person was happy to pass on and have approved. We will probably hear back in a couple of weeks when we have the building drawings.

At the conclusion of the meeting, we paid our 5% first installment payment (Clearly stated in HIA Contract). For first time people, be aware that this cost is normally paid by yourself, not the bank - which we had to inquire about prior to the contract day (and lucky we did!). The first of several cheque's to be paid to Carlisle homes.

How our loan for the house is working is, we pay the installment payments until we use up our deposit / available funds and then the bank takes over from there - counting our installment payments as our 'deposit' towards the house (not like the land loan - were it is the conventional pay them the deposit and they pay all the money to the vendor).

Site start was still estimated at about a months time, to be finalized in the coming weeks.

We also have a few things to follow up ourselves, with the local council - such as asset protection & infrastructure levy - costing around $2k in the area we are in.

Carlisle Tender

 

The next part of the Carlisle process was to formalize our decisions on items. This was also our opportunity to see the costing of our requested/inquired upgrades. Basically an accept or reject of options selected and costings of inquired items.

As part of the Carlisle process, they will only cost/reveal the cost of non standard variations / non costed upgrades at Tender.

The process is very methodical, going through every option in the color selection and extras that you have included. We found it to be layed out well and easy to read. Any clarification was easy to obtain from the Tender presenter, and like all Carlisle experiences, they knew their product and what were delivery to the customer. The rough costing given at color selection was pretty close and we were happy with the working/rough figures we had been provided with.

At this stage, there was no real signing, just having the documented presented to us and ensuring it was accurate. A few adjustments were picked up that had been either included when we had asked them to be removed / omitted. There is a lot to cover in every aspect and detail - so we had no issue going through each itemized part of the house.

As per the easy to follow Carlisle process, we also paid our second deposit, of $2,000. (Totaling $3,000 now)

Following the the Tender appointment, we elected to have the Contract appointment as soon as possible - which we managed to get it two weeks time.


Options we elected to go with:

• Cat 2 carpet - unfortunately cat 3 came in at well over 1k - which was a luxury extra we could live without
• Insulating the external garage walls (R1.5) - cost was very small and would be a pain to do post build. Not overly concerned about its lower rating.
• Some more electrical - double power
• Surge protection to switch box
• Slimline power points
• Extending the lounge (Theater room!) by 80cm to make it 5m in length - cost was minimal.
  

What we rejected:

• Sound insulation for the theater (internal walls). This would also of had the flow on effect on cabling post build.
• Evaporative cooling - even after removing it at every stage, it kept coming back!
• 20 amp for future Air-con
• Glass door for pantry (extra lighting / see at a glance what is in stock - cost was ~1k)