The tiling is complete

Our tiler came back today and finished off the bathroom and ensuite. He has now laid the feature tile, the tiling around the bath and completed the grouting. I must say, it looks pretty good if I do say so myself. I am very impressed by the feature tile. I was concerned that it wouldn't look any good but now that it has been laid, I am extremely happy with our choice.

 

I am really pleased with how the tiler also laid the white tile all the way around the vanity instead of leaving a gap as was intended.  He had done an amazing job.

 

Exterior painting

The painters continued on with the skirting and architraves today. I could see them via the internal camera. 

However, little did I know, they were also working on the exterior. Today they got the eaves, downpipes, cladding and front door painted. 

When I went past this afternoon, to my surprise, the garage door had also been installed. I can't tell you how excited I was to see that. 

It now looks more like a house. It is all coming together so beautifully and so quickly.

J gave our SS a call this afternoon to find out whether they would be replacing the aluminium strip at the front corner of the house along the cladding as it is a little bent, and to J's happiness, our SS advised we are about a month away from completion. That is the best news ever!

The painting and tiling will be completed this week, next week should see the plumbing, electrical and air conditioning fit off done, the week after I believe they will start on the tiling to the main floor area as well as carpet installation, then the Tyrells inspection will take place, followed by PCI.  Exciting!! I can hardly wait. 

Monument downpipes

Surfmist eaves and Dune lintel

Dune cladding

Dune garage door

 

 

 

 

While I was there I quickly popped in and managed to get a photo of the ensuite tiles. I was hoping to see the floor but as he had just finished grouting it today, it was covered with black plastic.  

Grouting

The tiler started grouting the floor tiles today. They look awesome. I really can't wait to see the entire house finished now. 

Discontinued carpet and colour changes

One day, out of the blue, I came to the realisation that the tiles in the MIL's bathroom were very similar in pattern and colour to the tiles we chose for our bathroom and ensuite. I wasn't a fan of her bathroom, so I mentioned this to J, who surprisingly agreed with me. We weren't sure though, if we would be able to re-select so many months later, even though our house wouldn't be built for months to come.

So we decided to take a drive over to Di Lorenzo and suss out the situation.  We were advised that we would be able to make one change only, which was a relief.  We still wanted a large tile for the bathroom walls which limited us in colour and texture.  In the end, we both agreed on a gloss white tile. However, we didn't lock in our new selection on the day, we thought we would sit on it for a few days. This turned out to be an excellent decision. 

While we were there, we just happened to pop over to the carpet section, and to our surprise found out that our carpet was no longer on display and was believed to be discontinued.  Tilly advised that I send her an email and she will follow up and confirm.

Well, instead of looking at this as a negative, we took it as a sign that we had originally made the wrong choices and this was going to allow us to correct them.

The following day I received an email from Tilly advising that our carpet had definitely been discontinued and we would need to come back in and re-select.

This is where our decision to hold off re-selecting our bathroom tiles worked in our best interest.

The other thing that I had been concerned about was our choice of floor tiles. We had selected a ceramic tile, but after talking this out with people at work and having seen the flooring at the display homes, J and I both wished that we had upgraded our tiles to porcelain.  

Around the same time, I started questioning our kitchen colours! Back in December we finally found a colour for our Polyurethane Gloss Finish and locked it in with Alex at Kitchen Culture. At our original tiling appointment we opted to remove all tile splashbacks, deciding to have glass splashbacks installed in the kitchen and laundry after handover (a family member worked for  a reputable splashback company at the time).

This is what we had in mind for our kitchen.

This is the colour we chose for the kitchen. It actually looks a lot more like the colour above, but the scan didn't work out too well.

I obviously had too much time on my hands and began questioning all of our earlier decisions. In my opinion, a kitchen like the one above would date too quickly. I wanted something a little more timeless. After googling endless kitchens in various colours, I decided that I wanted a white kitchen. I would still have the red splashback, but white would be a far better choice.

So with all of this in mind at our tiling re-selection, we ended up changing, not only the bathroom wall tiles and carpet, but everything. We chose a brown porcelain floor tile for the entire tiled floor area, chose a white tile for the bathroom & ensuite walls, a new silver and aluminium feature tile and we upgraded our carpets to the Triexta Carpet.  We were extremely happy with our selection but not looking forward to receiving the quotation! 

Some pics.

Triexta Natural Haven Earth Brown Carpet

Porcelain Tile with Carpet

Porcelain Tile under different light (a little more accurate colour)

New Feature Tile (to run horizontally)

After doing a little research on bathrooms, we decided to include a niche over our bath. This way we avoid all the clutter around the bath.

A word of advice when it comes to the shower or bath niche. Make sure you measure the tallest bottle or item you plan to put in the niche and make your measurements based on this. We opted for 300mm high, tile to tile (not frame to frame).

Electrical & tiling appointments

Our second and final day of selections is here. 

We weren't too sure what to expect at the electrical appointment and therefore were not fully prepared. We met with Malinda whom was very nice and patient with us. She called our job up on the screen and we proceeded to go through each room and decide where to position each power point, tv socket, light switch etc.  We didn't anticipate spending more than a couple of thousand dollars on electrical upgrades, but ended up spending over $5,000! Its amazing how quickly it all adds up. 

Some of our upgrades consisted of the following:-

• Switch wire for 7 x fans throughout the house
• Provision for 3 x wall mounted TV's including extra noggins and bull nose wall plates
• Under cupboard light boxes (for kitchen cupboard downlights)
• Double floodlight for backyard
• Double Fluoro light for garage
• 4 x junction boxes (for outdoor lighting to front facade)
• 2 x dimmer switches
• 8 x additional double power points
• 3 x additional single power points
• 1 x additional outdoor power point
• 3 x additional TV points
• 1 x additional motion detector for alarm system
• Additional battens for future pendants over the kitchen island and downlights in a number of the rooms
• Pre-wire for NBN
• TV antenna
• Upgrade alarm to the Navigator package

At the completion of our layout the computer played up and our job was lost. Malinda advised she would do another mock up after we left and email it to me for checking.  Of course if this was going to happen, it was going to happen to us.

We left HOG and headed over to Di Lorenzo (after a quick stop for lunch at the Bella Vista Hotel).

At Di Lorenzo Tiles we met with Elisa for our tiling.  We believed we were completely organised for this appointment as we had spent countless days and hours at Di Lorenzo contemplating various colour schemes. Admittingly, all the preparation in the world doesn't remove the second guessing that comes with making major decisions. 

We decided on a larger wall tile in the standard tile selection for both our ensuite and main bathroom, and standard floor tiles for the bathrooms and main floor area. The only upgrade was our feature bathroom tiles. There were additional costs to lay the larger wall tile but apart from that, we managed to keep the costs down.

We then met with Tilly for carpets. We upgraded our underlay to the blue rubber underlay at $8 per m3. The standard underlay was almost as thin as a sheet of paper.  We chose carpet within the standard range as we agreed that we would re-do our carpets in a few years.  This appointment was very quick as we had already decided which carpet we wanted prior to this day.

Having finished our colour selections, we were excited to get the land registered and building under way. It was all a waiting game from this point on.

Pics of our tile selections...

Bathroom & Ensuite wall, floor and feature tile

Bathroom floor tile (matt) with mail floor tile (shiny)

Carpet

Research for our flooring & bathroom selections

We must have gone to Di Lorenzo half a dozen times leading up to our appointment, just to try and cement our ideas.

I never thought that choosing a colour scheme for your home would be so hard. The selection of standard bathroom and flooring tiles at Di Lorenzo is actually pretty good. The feature tiles though, we didn't find anything that really grabbed us.  In the end, we chose a feature tile that was not part of the standard package.

We spent hours wandering around trying to decide on what we liked.  I think it wasn't until the 3rd for 4th visit that we came to a decision on what we wanted. The feature tile we weren't too sure on at first, but we finally decided on Option 2.

Option 1

Option 2

Flooring (shiny tile for main floor area) & smaller tile for bathroom, ensuite & laundry

We wanted similar internal colours to those used in the Drysdale 27 on display at Homeworld Kellyville.  Below are some photos taken of the flooring in the display home.

These are the samples we had to choose from.  We ended up going with the carpet on the left (in the first picture below).