The shed slab

Wondering when the guys will be up to assemble the shed.  They said it is usually a week after the delivery of the bits, but I'm still waiting for the phonecall.

The round window

Well, there has been a fair bit of progress, but I haven't done an update for a while because honestly I was a bit disappointed with one of our "findings" and I really wanted this blog to be all about the good stuff.   But hey, if there were no challenges, then the outcome would be not so satisfying, right?  (Just say "Yes."  Humour me here, please)

The builder rang me to advise me that one of the windows in the upstairs bedroom wasn't going to fit.  The way the design guy had drawn the different elevations and the floor plan did not agree.  Long story short - does anybody need a new window?  We have a spare.  But hey, doesn't the round window look great?  Well, duh, it is bigger than it is supposed to be.  It is only supposed to be 600mm round and it is 900mm (outside frame), so yeah, it looks frigging awesome and it isn't SUCH a big deal that the other window in the same room wont fit, because this was another stuff up that kind of counteracted that.  (BIG sigh - you know, you heard me do it).  I was going to put stained glass in the round window, but the view looks like a postcard, so I'm giving up on that idea for the present.  Neil reckons that room looks positively tiny, sticking out like a sore thumb up there.  I reassured him it's only because none of the surrounding brickwork has been completed yet, except for the chimney, which is also awesome and they've done a brilliant job on.  I am including my instructions for how I wanted the chimney to look.  They've done it exactly as I wanted.

The builder also told me that the guys who are installing our wood heater have said I can't have a chimney pot - I have to have a cowl.  AAAAARRRRGGGHHHHH.  Not impressed.  After having a week or so to cool off over it, I reiterated this severe disappointment to the builder when I saw him on site (I'm really pissed off about this) and he said he would see what he could do - check regulations and whatever, but I am preparing myself for disappointment here.  Cowl = UGLY, UGLY, UGLY.

Breathe, Sarah, breathe.  Count to 10.

Now for my really good bit of roof.  Check this out!!  Yee-Ha!!

And here's my reference shot for progress

Looking good, huh?  I can see that more bricks have been delivered and that stack of odd bricks we saw last time?  Well, they were just cheap fillers to do the inside walls that will be plastered over.  Don't know why they didn't get more of them, but yeah, whatever.

The start of the downstairs frame

We went up today to check out the progress on the shed slab and we found this:

We thought the internal brick wall was going to happen first, but yeah, whatever.  There's a pile of different bricks (in the foreground of the photo) that weren't there last time.  We thought they might be for the internal wall, but there isn't enough of them, now that we've got home and done some calculations.  Now I'm thinking they might be refractory fire bricks for the inside of the chimney.  I guess we might find out next week.  We went around measuring bits and pieces, window and door openings.  Neil thinks the walk in wardrobe looks way too small.  Here he is standing in the master bedroom.

I have a bet with him about the current width of our wall oven and kitchen bench.  When we were measuring bits up he did not believe me when I told him what the measurements of things in our current house are.
Update - Yeah, Sarah wins.  (Like it was ever in question)  Woo Hoo!  Don't question me on measurements of fittings.

Here's the corner of the Lounge room.

And the view out another of the Lounge room windows.

So anyway, bit of an afterthought, but here's the form work set up for the shed slab.

First bricks and electricity meter

Yay! Some of our bricks have arrived and there's a meter in our meter box now.  I counted the bricks and by my reckoning it's a bit under half what we will need.   Current schedule is to have the frame up and roof on by Christmas.  Fingers crossed, but all dependent on the weather at this stage (I think).  You can also see some of our framing timber in the background and what looks like the upstairs flooring.
The slab for the shed should be happening in the next week or so (also dependent on the weather).

There's a muddy trail through the loungeroom where one of those kangaroos has dragged his muddy backside.  At least he had the decency to do his business on the ground beside the slab and not on it.

Here's a photo I like, which shows how big our site cut is.  Neil sitting on the top of the site cut.  I got the photo just before he poked his tongue out at me :)

House plans & elevation diagrams

Here's the plans for what we're building.  There are a couple of minor errors, but they're basically correct.

The slab

On Thursday, I called the builder to find out how things are going and they told me that we had a slab, so we drove up there today to check it out.  In the mud around near the front door, I found footprints of one of the natives who had also been checking out our slab and then we saw them down at the dam having a drink.

We have water tanks

The tanks arrived on Wednesday and we had them partially filled on Thursday for the guys who are going to do the slab and just to weigh them down in place.  Looks like the mesh for the slab arrived as well.

The water delivery guy said the driveway at the first corner was a bit squashy and he couldn't get his big tanker up there, so he did 2 smaller loads.

Some more photos of Sleepy Hollow

Not exactly the start, but I have to start somewhere

We started this journey back in 2008 when I was made redundant from my job in March.  One of the advantages of being temporarily unemployed is the available time you have to go gallavanting around the countryside looking at vacant blocks of land.  A disadvantage, is having evidence of income when you find said block of land and want to buy it and further, build on it.  Fortunately, we have equity and I found a job.  Yes, even in the depths of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, some places were still hiring and Neil had retained his employed status throughout.  I had planned to be out of work for about 3 months, but it ended up being a little bit longer than that.  Enough said.

We bought "Sleepy Hollow" in December 2008 after looking at, I reckon, over 50 properties around Victoria.  Criteria - within an hour commute to the city, sealed road, creek frontage, quiet area, good views, acreage, planning permit for a dwelling, not too steep, with some established trees, no chance of losing our good views by future development, North facing house site, electricity available.  I wrote up a spreadsheet for 28 of the properties I looked at which had some potential, or at least fitted some of the criteria; listing pros and cons.  Some of the cons for us were "Boring, flat, no trees, no view", which to somebody else would have been an ideal block.

Sleepy Hollow didn't tick all the boxes, but we kept coming back to it, to compare other blocks against it.  In the end, we made an offer and it was accepted.  We immediately thought "Crap.  Should have offered less."

But we can't dwell on that.  We've got a 32 acre block with a fantastic Northern view, on a sealed road, in a quiet area.  It's a bit over an hour out from the city on V-Line and doesn't have a creek frontage, but it's ours (and the Commonwealth Bank's for a bit).

Before we get to buying the block though, there's a small back-story.  I had an idea in my mind's eye of the house I wanted to spend the rest of my life in.  It was not the house we were living in.  I broached the subject of moving out of the rat race to the quiet country and building this house of my dreams.  I was not met with complete refusal, so it was promising from the start.  I roughed out some ideas on paper for a floor plan and presented them to Neil.  Neil was very clear that he would be quite happy to live here where we are right now.  There was no reason to move as far as he was concerned.  But when I told him that I didn't see myself living in this house for the rest of my life, he was open to suggestions.  I started searching online for floor plans of houses.  I found www.eplans.com.  BEST WEBSITE EVER.  Not only did this have some really cool ideas for floor plans, it had pictures of the finished houses.  Neil is decidedly not an imagination person, so being able to show him what things looked like was fantastic.  I think the clincher was when I showed him the house with the balcony.

I found some free software called Envisioneer Express so I could draw up some floor plans using bits and pieces from the houses on the eplans website.  It was good fun and we had some animated discussions about good ideas and bad ideas.  We ended up with a floor plan that we were both happy with (as far as I know).

Friends of ours put me onto Google Sketch-Up so I could translate the floor plan into a 3D drawing of the finished house.  Yay technology!

Finding a builder is a story for another day, but suffice to say we broke ground on Tuesday to do the site cut for the house.  Neil and I were on site on Wednesday morning when the house and shed locations were set out on the site, to make sure they were going to be built where we wanted them and facing the right way.

It's all very exciting at the moment.  Oh, and I introduced our plumber to the idea of a pot filler tap. :)