Housearama

The lounge room wall with a high power point for the wall mounted TV. They will also install some conduit in this wall to be able to run any other cables through the wall =) Should be most excellent when done! Oh, and the crazy streak of red otherwise known as Alyssa.

Network, phone and power. Am wondering if we’ve done the wrong thing here – hope that we can still plug everything in without the cables all interfering with each other!

My hole in the wall between the kitchen and pantry – otherwise known as the appliance cabinet. We have double power points on either side of the door both inside and outside =) That’s 8 appliances without even needing to run a power board!! Oh, the things I will make when I don’t have to fight for space and power!

I’m SO in love with this!! THIS is the water hoses for the bath tub. What you can see in this funny looking mess of hoses is the hot and the cold leading to the mixer, and from there to a diverter that determines if water should run from the normal bath spout, or from my wonderful bath-hob-mounted-retractable-shower. I might even actually ENJOY washing the bath tub when this is available to rinse with!

Masses of cables!!! And these are just the beginning… I think these three photos show most of the lighting, and pretty much nothing else!

Much, much, MUCH more to come =))))) This is the start of the lighting, all of which will be terminated in one of the spare bedrooms where our cBus controller will live =)

We have aircon!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No power or water hooked up to it yet to run it, and no controller to tell it what to do… But it is there!

Looking up:

Looking down:

Ok… I’ve been slack…

Firstly, I forgot to mention in the last post that we’re officially past the halfway mark!! Our contract states 240 days, and Longridge have not applied to us to count any time off over the Christmas break, nor have they requested extension due to weather.

I’m not sure how much they could have really asked for over Christmas anyways, given that the roof was finished on the 23rd of December and there were people back at the house in the first week of January.

So… Onto the house. What is happening?

The gas pipes are all in place now with the exception of the line for the wok burner. The SS has been made aware of the situation, and we’re waiting to see when it gets done.

The power meter is in, however our sparky had forgotten to tell ETSA that we switched to three-phase, so they were only prepped for single phase when they came to connect us to the grid. The job has been rebooked, although we don’t know when for. The internal cabling is yet to be started (although the power cable has been installed for the (automatic electronic pilot ignition for) instant gas hot water booster that we have as a backup to our solar hot water system). That may have been the gas or plumbers who did that, though…

And speaking of plumbers… ALL water lines for the house have been installed!! We now have a fully functional tap at the front of the house.

Here is where I have to say – if you want something in your house deviating from the “norm” then you should ALWAYS GET IT IN WRITING. If possible, have it drawn on the plans, and make sure that you ALWAYS have a copy of it with you when visiting the site.

As mentioned in previous posts, we were very specific in our requirements for the plumbing. In the ensuite alone we have:
1) two showers – one being a rain head with a vertical drop arm directly from the ceiling, the other being an adjustable height shower on a rail
2) very specific placement of mixer taps for the rail shower – this shower is away from the shower door, and you’d basically have to stand directly under the water flow to be able to turn it on if the taps were in the standard location (directly under the shower head). So we had it specifically drawn onto the plans where the location of the taps should be

And the main bathroom has a diverter on the mixer for the bath tub so that you can have the water come from a normal bath spout (which is a swivel goose-neck spout attached to the hob so that it can be swivelled away from the bath to prevent banging body parts into it whilst in the tub), and divertable to a retractable shower head, also situated on the bath hob, near the spout. The mixer and diverter in here was to be placed on the eastern wall of the bathroom for easy access to it when bathing young children.

NONE of this happened with the first round of plumbing as the guys simply didn’t have the information. The ensuite taps were placed directly under the shower head, the rain-head shower was situated on the wall. The mixer for the bath was put on the southern wall, meaning that you have to lean all the way over the bath to be able to switch it on (and there’s not enough hob there to be able to put in the spout, anyway).

So I spend some time with my trusty house plan (a big version that shows everything), and the selections documents, and go through everything with the plumbers. By the time they left for the day the only thing not done was the repositioning of the rain-head shower. It has since been moved, so not waiting on any of that now =)

We have also had more leaking from the water meter – both on the SA Water side of it, and on the house side. This means that we needed both SA Water and our plumbers back out to look at it. One call through to the site supervisor to inform him of the problem, and he assured me that he’d have it looked at. Next day it was all fixed!! Colour me amazed. And happy =) Seems like we really have turned a corner =)

No photos of the plumbing and gas lines… I usually take pics with my iPhone, but they’re not of sufficient quality to actually show much unless I take a close up – in which case it’s just not that worth looking at. Once the power and data cables go in there should be HEAPS worth looking at, and highly visible with ANY camera! Am hoping for some more graphical updates within the next week =)))

I was reminded today of the original house that we designed.

This was something that Chris and I had agonised over for months, and built many versions of it within Second Life in an attempt to really nail down the design that we would be happy to live with. What we ended up with was something that really fitted us, and our plans for a family.

We worked with an architecture firm to basically put our design into a CAD package, size the rooms and (most importantly) work on the elevations to make it something spectacular. They succeeded amazingly in this task. The design of the interior really didn’t get changed at all, but the facade was something that I couldn’t have come up with on my own in my wildest dreams!! It was truly beautiful. They listened to everything that we said, and they took it all on board and came up with absolute perfection.

Although we didn’t build this house (the final costings came out at more than double our budget), I can’t recommend EnvironArc Design enough. They are wonderful.

Our changes to the Longridge design was basically our attempt at taking a project home and turning it into this house. We managed to get the same spaces, although not at the same scale – and in some ways it works better. Part of me still wishes for MY design, though…

Without further ado…

No idea if it is connected yet, but we have our power meter box complete with power point!! Willneed to bring something out layer to test =)

Oh! And some dude was here last week installing the gas pipes! =))))))

The hole for the HWS booster gas pipe was drilled in the wrong place, so we have surplus holes in our wall, but apparently it is easy fixed… At any rate, we’re just thrilled that our house is being worked on! Didn’t expect much this month

Wow! Just wow =)

And our roof window – we have three of these… Chris isn’t so thrilled about the black section under, but we’ll wait to see if that is the final finish according to our builder – they *may* paint it to match the roof.

More pics =)

No work being done today. Yet. There is still this afternoon, but not really liking our chances. They still need to finish off the roof. Trim bits, add capping, etc

Here’s a shot from the front of our house this morning. This is where they left off yesterday. They did a amazing job to get such a huge amount of roofing done! Looks awesome =)

We weren’t expecting this as all the tradies are meant to be on leave! More pics later =)