It's been a while since I have updated the blog, and on request of some overseas readers, I've decided to add another post to record our progress on the house.
Not much has happened regarding the interior of our home, but I did spend quite a few weeks at the end of Spring last year to turf our front yard and the front nature strip. We initially had pebbles and pavers in our front yard which I was not a big fan of, and the weeds were running rampant despite there being a weed mat underneath. With the help of some friendly neighbours, I was able to remove the pavers and the pebbles, in preparation for some soil and turf.

The nature strip already had a mix of grass (kikuyu & other random varieties) so I attempted to dig that out using a hoe. Unfortunately after struggling for about 30 mins and managing only to dig out about 30 sq cm of grass, I ended up calling the services of a guy with a rotary hoe to come out and tear the nature strip apart. See mess below.

After some rigorous research into grass varieties, I finally settled on a soft leaf buffalo grass called Palmetto. I ordered 30 sqm for delivery, along with a lot of lawn mix. Another neighbour (who owns a similar Breeze 25 house) assisted with flattening the lawn mix, and then a week later, the lawn arrived and was laid quickly with the help of yet another friendly neighbour. This lawn is now considered a community effort!

Here is what the freshly laid lawn looked liked.

After a few weeks of heavy watering, the grass was starting to grow really well and had its first hair cut. Over the Summer months, I have had to water it quite a bit because we've had some rather hot days in Melbourne. It has survived pretty well, and has actually been growing a little crazy lately - despite being one of the slower growing buffalo lawns, I've had to mow the grass at least once a week to keep it nice and neat.
Overall, I'm rather pleased at how it has turned out and I think it makes the front landscape of the house look a lot more pleasant and green.

How time flies! It's been 18 months since we moved in and we are enjoying living in our little home. There are still bits and pieces and improvements we have been making to the house, and amazingly, we seem to have run out of space for a lot of things so I have been doing some de-cluttering lately.
In preparation for summer, we have recently installed a retractable fly-screen on the back sliding door which will be great for keeping out the mozzies and also help with the air flow when we use the evaporative cooler.

We have also had a door intercom installed after a lucky competition win through Viv's work. It comes with an IP Gateway which means that if someone rings the doorbell, you can use your mobile or tablet device to log into an app and answer the doorbell remotely (or from the 7 inch display located in the living room).

We've also been slowly adding more furniture and bits and pieces in the house. After months of searching, we finally found a place in Camberwell that sells lovely textured rugs made to size, so we had one made as a hall runner. It's still very new and the 'kinks' haven't quite flattened out yet...

I'm sure that we will continue to be 'upgrading' elements in the house for years to come. It's been quite an amazing journey since the start of 2013 and we've learnt a lot about the building process and now the 'maintenance' process of owning a new home.

In the future, we're hoping to put some citrus trees in pot plants along the back fence and perhaps mount some colourful screens. Check out the progress shots and final pictures below.

After a few months of saving up our dollars, we have finally made a start to landscaping the back area. The decking was put on hold until now after a series of unfortunate events.

Kez and I visited the Homeshow a few months ago and came across a mob selling a composite decking material called Trex. We were rather impressed with it and liked the idea of a composite over pure timber as low maintenance was a priority. They had a nice selection of colours and the material itself is quite hardy  and doesn't require oiling every 6 months (that was a big tick for us)!
We managed to get a design and quote done, and it was finally installed over the last few days.

I particularly like how the back retaining wall is now covered up by a bench seat.

There is still quite a bit of landscaping to do in the back area and hopefully we'll have most of it completed before the summer months are upon us. The plan is to look at getting some fake grass at the very back (behind the bench seating) and some planter boxes along the edge. When we are feeling ambitious, we may also attempt to paint all the fences which will be a rather big job. The guy who poured our new concrete driveway is also installing a retaining wall for us and hopefully doing the fake turf as well.

So the new driveway was poured a few weeks ago and I am very pleased with the way it has turned out. The colour is much nicer with our rendered facade and the workmanship is ten times better than our previous driveway. Some of the front render needs to be touched up after the concrete demolition, but other than that, the house is really starting to take shape.

In addition to the driveway, the front landscaping has finally started so we have some greenery at the front now, as well as a lot of pebbles and some blue stone pavers.

We also decided to get some sheer curtains installed in the living area which adds a nice touch of softness to the room as well as ensuring the afternoon light doesn't feel as harsh when you are sitting there during the day. The curtains we ordered are called organzas.

Here are a few pics of the latest additions to the house.

Hopefully we can start looking at doing the back landscaping and getting some decking done in time for summer!

- Viv

It's been a while since our last post as things have been rather busy on the work front and we are also still settling into the new house.
We had our first housewarming / birthday party for Viv almost two weeks ago and had a great time filling the house with helium balloons!

The latest development on the house is that our driveway got ripped up, and is now getting re-done with hopefully a more appropriate concrete mix. The picture on the left shows the initial concrete driveway that was poured - if you remember the initial studio M selections post, our exposed aggregate driveway was supposed to be a colour called Labassa (a bit of a grey mix of pebbles). What we ended up with however, was completely different and in Viv's opinion, the job was rather patchy and poor in workmanship.

Below left shows a closer picture of the driveway we had, and the studio M sample is on the right - top or bottom right sample is the colour we chose.

I am not sure how the concrete mix was so different to what we expected, but in the end, our builder agreed that the driveway we received was not what was stipulated in our contract. With that, the existing driveway was torn up last week and left us with a muddy external for a few days. The new driveway was poured yesterday and getting acid washed to expose the pebbles this very minute.

The new driveway is looking good so far, and Nigel (our new concreter) has been very professional in explaining the process and what needs to be done. We will put up more photos of the finished driveway when it is completed.

In other news, we had the misfortune of dealing with another plumbing issue - this time a crack in a pipe that must have been made before we moved into the house (as it was discovered to be under the concrete driveway). Over time, the pressure build up caused the crack to get larger and one afternoon, Viv discovered a gushing stream of water coming out of the front yard. Luckily the plumbers were back to fix this pretty quickly, so hopefully we don't get any more plumbing issues. I have to say that our site supervisor was pretty quick to respond to this one and has been very good with fixing all our little 'issues'. Hopefully, this will be the end of it. More driveway pics to come.

Apologies for the delay in uploading some of the finished pictures. We've been busily spending our weekends purchasing new items and unpacking, along with working out where everything will live.

So here are some images, part #1.

So we've now officially been in the house for 2 weeks!
Since we haven't been able to get the NBN connected yet (more on this to follow), we've been using a Telstra wifi dongle so updating the blog with photos was difficult so now I am playing catch up.

Move day was rather hectic as we hired 3 removalists and a GIANT truck to come and collect all our stuff from Richmond. I knew we had a lot of boxes Richmond but this truck was definitely overkill - not even sure how it managed to navigate through the tiny streets of Richmond. The 3 removalists took 6.5 hours to get it from our apartment to our new house.

Once we had keys, I organised for an electrician to come by and install our pendant lights, outdoor lights (6 in total) and ceiling fan in the master bedroom. I also had stegbar come around and install the cabinets and mirrors for the walk in robe - this part is my favourite. Here are a couple of pics of the items (more to come later when we finally get connected to the NBN).

I also had a friend help out with installing some towel rails and toilet roll holders one weekend as the big M don't really supply these. Since moving in, we've had quite a few little issues to deal with but luckily our site supervisor has been pretty good at looking after us even though it's after hand-over. We did have a major plumbing issue though which was unexpected. Apparently when the retaining wall was installed (before the concrete slab was even poured), the installer had dug too deep and crushed one of the pipes. It took a couple of weeks for us notice that something was not quite right and the pipes were actually starting to clog up. After 3 visits from several plumbers, this is what happened.

Luckily there is no development yet behind us so the plumbers had to cut out the back section of the fence, bring in a monster machine and dig about 2 metres down to where the crushed pipe was to replace it - messy stuff. Kez and I had to camp out in a motel for a night before this was rectified, but luckily Metricon have been pretty good at sorting this out and have agreed to reimburse our accommodation expense.

Besides the few small issues that needed to be fixed, Kez and I are really enjoying the new house. The boxes are still largely unpacked, but bit by bit, we'll start attacking each room and putting up more pictures after things get sorted.

Viv

So the last two weeks have been rather exhausting as we have managed to pack up everything from our rental apartment and move into Coburg. Handover was completed last week on Friday, and the removalists came on Monday morning.
We are now officially moved in with boxes absolutely everywhere! Unfortunately I haven't yet been able to connect the internet as I've had difficult convincing any of the local ISP's that the estate is actually NBN ready. Hopefully I can get this sorted in the next week and I can finally upload some photos...stay tuned for more updates.

Viv

So we're finally on the home stretch!
On Monday Kez and I went to the house to meet our site supervisor for the first inspection. We were given a blue roll of tape to stick all over the house on any bits and pieces that needed a touch up.
Most of the things we found were just paint touch ups, however there were a few other bits and pieces that needed to be fixed before hand over.

These included:
- Small square on the matrix cladding of the facade needs to be sanded and painted
- Some mortar needs to be touched up on the brick work
- Kitchen cavity sliding door needs to be readjusted as it currently slides out a little crooked
- Antenna points and Cat 6 points still need to be brought out and terminated properly
- Upstairs toilet flush not working
- A few door handles need to be replaced
- Render needs to be touched up on the facade
- Still awaiting mirror splashback installation and block out blinds upstairs

As you can see in the picture, the concrete driveway is now complete although I'm not convinced the colour looks anything like what we chose (although not much we can do about it now). It's also a bit patchy in some parts so our SS has asked the concrete to come back and fix it.

Unfortunately we were too busy putting blue tape everywhere to get any photos. We should have hand over by some time next week so more pics will come! Just waiting on the occupancy certificate now and the bank needs to complete a valuation, and hopefully the keys will be ours very soon :)

Viv