Housearama

For my own reference, I wanted to add a full tapware list in here.  This is what we have selected for the entire house:

Kitchen:  Novelli Focus Sink Mixer w/ vegy spray (swivel) – code 7817-1

Ensuite: firstly, a diagram for the vanity area layout.  This should be applicable to both bathrooms.

• The basins for both the ensuite and main bathroom are the Novelli Oriana Bench Mounter Basin inc pop-up waste – code 6654pu-1 and there are two in each
• The tapware for the vanity area is the Novelli Focus Swivel Basin Mixer – code 7820-1 – positioned to be a little offset from center and to the outside of the basin as per the above diagram
• The ensuite shower has two shower heads, and therefore two of these:  Novelli Focus Bath/Shower Mixer – code 7808-1
• Chris wants a rain shower head: Novelli Diablo Vertical Drop Arm and Rose – code 8363-1
• I want an adjustable shower on a rail: Novelli Mondo 6 Shower and Rail Set – code 1914-1 – this will also be the same in the main bathroom (which will have a single shower)

Main Bathroom: Same basins, vanity tapware and shower as above, plus (corrected from previous post):

• Novelli Focus Bath/Shower Mixer w/ divertor – code 7810-1 for the bath tub – this is to be positioned on the wall at the end of the bath, offset from center and closer to the edge of the edge of the bath for easy reach for a parent who is bathing a child.  The solid lines in the diagram above denote the walls.
• Novelli Sierra Hob Bath Spout – code 0325-1 (because it swivels!)
• Con-serv Hob Mount with Princess handpiece to be positioned beside the spout, closer to the edge of the bath for easy reach for a parent who is bathing a child

Laundry:  Novelli Focus Sink Mixer w/ vegy spray (swivel) – code 7817-1

You will probably notice that the main bathroom tapware is a little different from my previous post.  I posted the ones that wehad chosen during our visit to the showroom, but the codes written within our selections are the ones within this post.  I’m think I’m equally happy with either, so it really isn’t a big deal to me, although it does highlight where things can often go wrong and lead to disappointment further down the track.  We had selected the deluxe versions of the mixers, the girl writing down the selections left the “D” off of the product codes.  As for the bath spout, we just told her to give us something very plain and swivelly.  We may chase it up and get them to change it, but not quite sure yet.  It really doesn’t matter that much.

We spent a couple of hours today with Richard from Moonlight Electrical at the local Clipsal C-Bus display centre and at a Ness Alarm/Security demonstration centre. We received updated plans for the electrical layout and should hopefully have a quote for the whole system on Monday.

We have 3 Velux electric openable skylights in our house to help with venting hot air out of the house on hot still nights. Happily it looks like we will be able to control them through the C-Bus system so we can have them automatically close in the morning so we don’t accidentally allow unwanted heat into the house as the day warms up.

For the living areas we’re going with the really nice looking Saturn glass style light switches. For the other areas we’ll just have the cheaper plain white switches.I think we’ll be reducing the number of light switch points and instead just have a couple of places where all the lights in the living, dining and kitchen area lights can be controlled.

Saturn Light switch

I’ve wanted to live in a place with keyless entry for quite a while and the new house will have it. Both for the front door as well as the door from the garage to the house. We’ll also be able to configure the alarm system so when its armed the lights in the house automatically turn off. No more accidentally leaving lights on when we go out. I’m really looking forward to being able to play with the C-Bus configuration. It’ll be really handy to be able to control everything from my laptop

We’re putting in a lot of data points – 6 just in my office, but from previous experience you can never have too many. Also had a look at a distributed audio system which worked well. Its not the most sophisticated system available, but will do what we want. We’ll have speakers installed in the courtyard area and bathrooms ceilings which run off a master audio source which will be connected to a computer as well as having a local plug-in point so we can use our .iPods. We decided not to go with the full audio/video network system as we’ll just use MythTV to distribute video and TV around the house.

The following images are from Accent Tapware.

I’ve always wanted one of these. I HATE cleaning the bath. I hate leaning over it and scrubbing it, then filling a bucket or container with water and rinsing down the bath to remove the bath cleaner. So I have always wanted one of these to just give the edges a spray. It doesn’t remove the need for the rest of the cleaning process, but it sure as hell makes the rinsing easy. I have always assumed there was a reason why they’re not very common, or standard in every build – such as cost.

It makes even more sense now with a baby. An eczema baby at that. I currently wash her hair over the sink as we need to bathe her with oil in her bath, so the bath water is no good for rinsing shampoo from her hair (and she has a LOT of hair, so we need to wash it!). Shower hoses do not fit over the bath spout in this house, so it’s back to buckets and containers or do it over the sink. A retractable shower head built into the bath would be MAGIC.

While the images above are not the one that we are getting (there was no decent example images of ours available), this gives an example of what we are having. These little babies start at $135 including GST – then you either need taps to run it or have a tap on your bath spout that has a divertor. There goes my cost theory on why these aren’t the norm… When you’re spending SO MUCH on building a new house, surely this isn’t a massive stretch for some, if not most? It’s really hard to find a supplier who knows what is available on the market because they all say nobody asks for them… Why?

This will be our bath tub setup:

The divertor is from the Novelli Tapware Focus range and matches the mixers throughout the house. The spout is from the Novelli Stadium range.  The shower is from Con-serv.   It’s not as pretty as the Accent one, but it looks a little more practical.

I’m not that thrilled with the gooseneck spout, but there wasn’t a lot of range on offer and this was one of very few that will swivel out of the way of a child who insists on attempting to stand up to grab hold of the bath spout.  I might replace it in a few years with something sexier…

We had a meeting for our kitchen selections a few weeks ago.  Before going along to this meeting, I created the kitchen that I want using Second Life (a 3D virtual world, although we are running a local copy of the open source version called OpenSim).  Below are pictures taken from within OpenSim to show what our kitchen will be like.  We took these images along to the meeting, and the lovely lady that we had our appointment with was able to easily create EXACTLY what we were after without any hassles due to such good visualisations of what we were after.  She said this made life MUCH simpler for her, especially given that we were after something much more complicated than the design of the kitchen included with our build.

These images have been slightly updated since the meeting to include the texture swatch from the benchtop stone that we have chosen, and also the door handles…

Here you can see the cooking area of the kitchen.  From left to right we have:

Oven:  Smeg SA996XR 90cm wall mounted oven

Cooktop 1:  Smeg CIR93AX 90cm cooktop

Rangehood 1:  Smeg SA550X90 90cm retractable rangehood

Cooktop 2: Wards/Cookon WS-1 Counter model wok cooker (commercial style wok burner)

Rangehood 2: Smeg P52/2 50cm Undermount concealed rangehood

The kitchen has been designed with the commercial style wok burner in mind, and contains a drop in the bench height for the section containing the wok burner so that the cooking surface is at the same height as the other cooktop and the surrounding benchtops.

This view shows the kitchen at a different angle to demonstrate the sliding cabinet door near the wok burner where we will keep our asian cooking sauces and the likes.  I already love the work-ability of this kitchen, I can just imagine how easy this will be to cook in  =)

There is also a microwave provision above the oven.  We understand that the average microwave is not 90cm wide, so we plan to use this excess space to house cookbooks 

This image displays the island bench.  You can see here that we have the two Fisher & Paykel single dish drawers, one at each end of the bench.  We have opted for this over the standard dish drawers because in our previous experience we hardly ever used the bottom dish drawer.  There were multiple reasons for this ranging from bad backs, it scraping against the floor and also the cats sneaking in behind it if it were left open and unattended for 3.248 nanoseconds or longer.  We also figured that the higher ones don’t enable small children to so easily grab things from the dishwasher when you attempt to load or empty it as Alyssa attempts to do with our current normal-style dishwasher where we live now.

We have requested an Oliveri Monet double bowl, double strainer sink, and are currently waiting on confirmation from the builder on this item.

The tapware is from Novelli, and is part of the Novelli Focus range.  This theme is carried throughout the house.  The kitchen and laundry both contain kitchen mixers with retractable vegy sprays.

There will also be a full height rubbish bin built inside of one of the cupboards.

This last image shows the cabinet on the pantry wall.  You can see through the open doorway into the large walk-in pantry, and you can also see how the appliance door will work between the kitchen and pantry.  The hole in the wall allows you to easily move appliances between the kitchen for usage and the pantry for storage.  There will be a roller door attached to this hole to close it off, with a sliding door to close off the doorway to the pantry.

Where possible, we have used drawers instead of opening cupboards with shelves.  The drawers add a cost of approximately $200 per drawer to the kitchen, and all have slow-closing mechanisms.  There are overhead cabinets above that reach to the ceilings (which have been lowered to a height of 2.4m in the kitchen as opposed to 2.7 in the remainder of the house).

The colours are basically white on white!!  Extremely high gloss white vinyl wrap for all doors (although the cabinet inside the pantry is just using standard white laminate).  The benchtops are in Essa Stone, and the colour is called Basmati.  The island has benchtops of 3cm thickness with sides that wrap to the floor.  The benchtops along the walls have a 2cm thick top.   There is glass splashback on the wall surfaces above any benches, and this is in the standard greeny-white finish.

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Sooner or later we will be building the remainder of the house within OpenSim.  We will update with pictures when the time comes  =)

Longridge Homes use a product called Hebel PowerPanel for the external walls in their builds. This is basically a pre-cast aerated concrete panel which they attach to the housing frame and then render and paint. It is much faster to install than bricks and mortar, and has much better insulating properties than standard brick. So we’re VERY happy that our builder of choice uses this as standard. Add to this that we have upgraded insulation to the very highest quality available, and it all adds to our happy greenification attempts. Yay!

So… Render… Colour… I’ve given this post a title about colours, so I should probably get to the point!

From the  Longridge Homes webpage, the drawing of the facade (ours will be slightly different on account of the change in width):

And here is our basic colour palette:

house colour palette

The roof, gutters, fascia, etc will all be in Colorbond, and we have chosen the palest possible colour in an attempt to soak in as little of the summer heat as we possibly can. This is a HUGE win to Chris, as I really didn’t want something quite so pale, and would have been much happier if we could have just gone with standard zincalume finish (although this is apparently difficult to get approved through Campbelltown Shire Council, and the nearest grey colour was vetoed by Chris as being too dark, and thus too hot). The colour that we have chosen is called Surfmist.  It is the colour shown at the top of the colour palette.

The external walls of the house will be in a Dulux paint colour called White Duck Quarter, with the front-most bedroom and one of the side walls in White Duck Half. The quarter and half are to do with the strength of the colour, the lesser strength being the paler. Full strength White Duck is not a dark colour, but these are significantly lighter and thus cooler in summer.   Over a large area, it should look really quite pale.

All of the internal walls and ceilings will be done in Solver Paper White. All external windows and doors have been upgraded to Western Red Cedar (natural oiled finish) and are double glazed, with the exception of the extraordinarily sexy front door – our concession to style at the cost of insulation.  From http://www.humedoors.com.au:

Oooooooh, I LOVE LOVE LOVE this door!!

Just so that it is clear that we’re insane…

We have added a number of elements to our house – just for the cats.  These are:

The enclosed, escape proof courtyard as mentioned in the house plans discussion.  There will be a cat door going from the main living area to allow them access to this yard.

The laundry will have a kitty litter enclosure built under the benchtop instead of standard cabinetry.  Looking from left to right along this bench will be washing machine and dryer, inset tub with cabinet below to allow a break between equipment and kitty litter, and then a large open space with no cabinetry to allow for multiple litter boxes.  This will have a 30cm high wall at the front to prevent spillage and flicking.

A “kitty-cat airlock” at the front door.  There is a rather long walkway between the garage and bedrooms to get to the front door.  Somewhere along here (close to the front of the garage) will be an additional high gate that will be designed to be escape proof.  Anyone visiting will have to get through that before they can get a chance to stand at the front door and let the cats out.  Likewise, anyone inside will have a chance to recapture the cats if they accidentally leave the front door open.  We have wanted to do this due to the large number of people who LOVE to stand in doorways chatting about the weather, and seem to think you rude if you say “come in or get out – the cats might escape”.  All those people who don’t have time to come in because they are in a rush, then proceed to stand around for half an hour chatting through an open door will no longer be a threat to my monsters 

Perhaps the looniest of all – and certainly the one that had Marco from Longridge  laughing at me the most – the ensuite.  The cats LOVE to watch when we’re in the shower.  In previous houses, we have had a skinny steel and glass frame surrounding the shower.  This can lead to over excited cats thinking that they can jump up there to watch, overbalancing, then scratching the bejesus out of the person showering (usually me) as they attempt to land on the showerer without getting too wet.  Our ensuite will have a 2m high wall between the vanity and the shower, and this will be about 20cm thick and long enough for three cats to hang around in complete harmony.  This will allow ample space for cats to sit comfortably while we shower, and the vanity leading to this area allows for a comfortable jumping distace so that NOBODY needs to overbalance from not judging the jump right.  Floor-vanity-”viewing platform”.  Easy.  Even I could do it!!

Of course – our bengal LOVES water – so this still may not save me…

Further to the discussion of the plans…

The house will have no heating installed, but we will have ducted evaporative air conditioning (which we are hoping to not need to use too frequently – good design should go a long way to helping with this). The measures that we have put in place within the build are as follows:

There is a LOT of glazing along the north side of the house. We are planning to utilise the thermal mass of the slab in order to capture the winter sun to provide warmth to the house, and as such will be going with either polished concrete or porcelain tile on a cement mix with minimum rubber/latex compounds that could prevent heat/cool transfer between the slab and the tile. This relies heavily on the fact that we have little or no eaves along this wall to interfere with the winter sun. It also relies HEAVILY on there being MASSIVE eaves to prevent the summer sun from heating the slab and thus further heating the house in the summer time.

We intend to build a pergola along this northern glazing that will go out to line up with the beginning of the master bedroom wing. Approximately 4m-ish. On this we will install horizontal, retractable blinds to effectively provide 4m of eaves during the summer heat. This in turn will keep the slab cool which will then in turn help to cool the house. And because the blinds are retractable, we are back to full sun for winter heating.

We have also added extra windows to allow for good cross ventillation – low opening windows along the northern wall with high opening windows to the south to allow for release of hot air. To add to this, we have also incorporated three openable velux roof windows to act as chimneys. We are looking at ways to possibly capture any warm air in these chimneys and redistribute around the house during the colder months – but this will likely be an after-build-completion thing.

To further the cross ventillation cause in the house, we have also added a window going from Bed 2 to the hallway that opens out to the rest of the house.

We have a large, western facing, glazed sliding door in the master bedroom. This area will be covered with a large alfresco roof creating a pretty decent eave along this wall, and will be complimented with a drop-down cafe-style blind to prevent heat gain.

The other major section of western facing wall is at the end of the house on what will be Chris’s office. There is no glazing here, but he REALLY feels the heat. In order to keep the sun off of this section of the house as much as possible, this is where we will install the above ground water tanks. We are looking at approximately 40,000L (give or take – depending on what supplier we choose to go with), which should provide a significant level of relief from the sun for the office.

Very pale colours on external walls and roof should also help to keep the house a little cooler in summer – to be discussed in a later post!

We also will have solar hot water, will look at PV panels at some stage in the future, incorporating CBus home automation and will look at further ways to minimise energy usage without impacting on home office/work requirements.

Chris was joking about installing a cat wheel (like a hamster wheel, but for the cats) as a generator to run the lights from =) Not sure I want my lights dependent on whether the cats are feeling energetic at that time or not!

Here’s a photo of our house plans (Copyright Longridge Homes). The photo isn’t that great – really need an A3 scanner.

And here is the original plan taken from the Longridge Homes web page (and turned to face the same direction as our plan above to allow for a better comparison).

The original house in itself is a GORGEOUS home – very spacious and livable.  If we didn’t work from home, we could quite happily have built this design, slightly modified to allow for our block which is not wide enough to fit it.  Since we DO work from home, we decided that we need to make it a bit more spacious.  The list of changes is as follows (starting from the front and heading to the back):

The width of the house has been reduced in a straight line through the entry and lounge.  Imagine the original design and fold it down the length of the house to remove a bit over 1.5m or so across this section.

We have traded the standard front entry door to a 1.2m wide Hume Illusion XIL23 – sexiest front door EVER!  More on this in another post  =)

Lengthen the garage to allow for a workshop area at the back.

Close in the lounge area so that it has only one entry rather than three.  This will become Kelly’s office.

Swap the location of the laundry and study, create a long laundry room with under bench washing machine, inset sink and lots of room under for kitty litter.  3.8m of linen cupboard on opposite wall.

Continuing down this side of the house, we have rearranged the ensuite to take up the rest of the space from where the study was, and created something much more luxurious.  Walk around the vanity area to a large two person shower on one side, and a very roomy loo on the other.  The door to the ensuite it incorrect on our plan, this will be via the walk through robe from the bedroom (so that the doorway isn’t so in your face from the bedroom).  The robes in the bedroom have been slightly modified to allow for entry from both sides of the bed, and also have been increased in width to allow for storage space on both sides of the passage.

Over to the other side of the house, the main bathroom has now been changed to remove the vanity and toilet, and instead insert a linen cupboard.  It is now a three way bathroom with the vanity and toilet forming separate areas outside of the main bathroom.  The setup isn’t ideal, but it was really the only way that we could fit in this new arrangement without making MAJOR changes to this area of the house (the changes that we have already made were pretty huge).

The study is now completely open to the hallway, and this will form the playroom for Alyssa and any future possible sibling/s.  It has been placed in this location for easy visibility from the lounge/office across the hallway.

The walk-in pantry has now been made up to 3.5m in length with cabinetry along one side for appliances, and shelving along the long wall at the back.  There is room for a chest or upright freezer in the corner on the outside wall.

The kitchen is now in a large L-shape.  The wall along the pantry has a doorway through to the pantry, and also a hole in the wall going to the pantry so that appliances can be easily slid between the benchtop in the kitchen and the benchtop in the pantry.  This will be finished with a little roller-door type thing.  The island bench is close to 3.5m in length with the sink down one end to allow for maximum preparation space, two single dish drawers (one at each end), and a VERY large breakfast bar area.  Once built, we are hoping to have the cabinet face under the breakfast bar covered with a magnetic whiteboard material so that Alyssa has somewhere to pin up her artwork and draw directly onto it.  The long wall in the kitchen will contain a 900mm wall oven with microwave above, 900mm cooktop and also a commercial wok burner, then the space for the refrigerator.

We have then lengthened this area to create a very roomy dining and lounge area, and also to fit an office on the end for Chris.  He needs a very large space to allow for any visiting colleagues who wish to come and work with us from time to time.

We plan to run a very high fence from the end of the office to the opposite boundary wall, then another from the bedroom down along the boundary wall to meet with the first.  This is to create a large, enclosed courtyard area which will be designed to be escape-proof for cats and kids alike.

We have made SO MANY changes to the original design, I’m still amazed that they have agreed to everything that we have asked for.  I think this is a testament to just how good our experience with Longridge has been to date – nothing has been too hard!!  I’m just hoping that it continues to be so easy…

More on colour selections, appliances and the likes at a later date!  =)

We own a block of land in Hectorville.  It is 866m2 in size with a 16.5(ish)m frontage.  East facing.  It has a house on it that is currently tenanted (for another three days!), and we will have it demolished sometime within the next couple of months.

We are planning to build something “green”.  We had done a bunch of research into solar passive design and come up with our own plans that fit in with our needs and what we thought would be best suited for a good environmentally friendly, eco-house design given the location and orientation of the block.  About a year and a half ago we started working with a wonderful architecture firm, EnvironArc.  They put our design onto paper, scaled it correctly and turned it into a home.  They gave it all the elevations and made it into something truly modern, funky and extremely sexy (as far as houses go).  Unfortunately, we got this one priced at more than double what we had said we’d like to spend on the build.

After this we decided to take a look at some local project home builders to see if we could find something that comes close to meeting our needs.  These needs being a comfortable home for our family with two home offices (we both work from home), a play room for the kids with easy viewing access from one of the offices, three or four bedrooms, walk in pantry and enough storage space to deal with Chris’s requirement to keep every box for every single item that he has ever purchased.  We also need something that lends itself to adding a large,  enclosed, escape proof yard area to keep our cats safe.

We found a house that was probably 70% of what we wanted, and went to take a look at the display homes.  The build quality was ok – quite basic – with prices to match.  We thought that this would give us the room to move within our budget to get it to very close to what we want, and definitely meet our needs.  Our initial dealings with this company were very positive.  We took one of their plans and removed some width to fit on our block, then stretched the house and changed the sizes of some rooms to better match what we need from a house.  The company (that shall remain un-named, but starts with “H” and rhymes with “knickinbotham”) were very welcoming to the suggested changes, and went so far as to send us out selection booklets for appliances, colours, green options, etc.  The green options included a bunch of things including mention of CBus home automation, water recycling, water storage.  We spent a lot of time dealing with this and started getting quite excited, expecting to sign up to build this property many months ago.  THEN the problems started – thankfully before we got to contract stage!

In all of our dealings they had always contacted Chris.  The very first time that they called me (hoping for the weaker and more submissive person in the family, undoubtedly, and not planning on dealing with a heavily pregnant and not-in-the-mood-to-put-up-with-crap woman), they came up with “We’ve been going over your plans and we don’t think we can help you.”.  Upon further questioning, I was told that they can’t do water tanks.  Me: “but it’s in your brochure”.  Him: “yes, that is a fair point, but we only do it for housing estates where it is a requirement”. Me: “So you will do it where the housing estate has it as a pre-requisite for all building contracts, but not where my bank balance requests it”.  Him: “um, well, ok, leave me with it.  I’m sure I can get this through.  But we definitely don’t do water recycling”.  Repeat the previous response thread.  THEN he goes on to tell me that they don’t do CBus.  Meanwhile I am staring at this nice, glossy brochure with their company logo all over it claiming that they DO offer CBus.  And water storage.  And water recycling.  He told me that most of their clients sign up to build a house and look for ways to save money by removing things such as insulation (WTF!?!?), and that we were at the other end of the scale.  I asked him if the brochure was produced just for green cred and kudos based on the hope that nobody would actually request any of the items.  Then I told him we needed time to re-evaluate our desire to build with them, and would be in contact at a later date.  When I called to tell him that we were no longer interested in dealing with their company as we had COMPLETELY lost faith in them, he guaranteed me that they could, in fact, do all of the things that we had requested.  Too little, too late.  Sorry guys – we’d rather give our money to someone else.

So we looked at a few different companies.  I feel here that I need to highlight Dechellis Homes.  Virginia from Dechellis was AMAZING.  Very accomodating and friendly, absolute can-do attitude.  They had some very nice plans, too.  The website could do with a bit of a usability fix, but everything else about them was so easy.

We decided to go with Longridge Homes.  Marco from Longridge was equally friendly, equally can-do, houses were of a similar quality (Longridge are more sleek and modern, Dechellis rather more glamourous and regal), and in the end it came down to the fact that their plan for the Madison 255 just suited our needs much better.  We have made countless changes to the base design, and nothing has been too much trouble for them.

The plans that we currently have are marked as copyright.  I am waiting on approval from Marco to be able to post a copy and discuss the changes that we have made from the initial design.  More soon!

We’re building a house in Adelaide. Our builder is Longridge Homes and the design is based on their Madison 255 but modified to include extra space for a couple of home offices and a larger living area.

The plans were submitted by the builder to council a couple of weeks ago and we’re hoping that we’ll receive approval within a month or two.