The house is scheduled to start being demolished next week so we dropped around today to take some last photos. Took the advice of someone on the Home One Forum and took some reference photos so we eventually do a timelapse series of the changes.
Front of the house
The new house will start much closer to the front of block, about 6m from the front fence.
Taken from the north-west back corner of the block
The end of the house will end up being near where the end of the shed is. Though only one side of the house is that long with the northside much shorter.
The previous owners must have really liked palm trees
My new office will be approximately where the shed is. It’ll be a bit wider, though not as long.
Need I say more? =))))
Images are copyright to Longridge Homes, and courtesy of Marco Bastelli (who truly ROCKS)
Last week we decided to pay a visit to our future next door neighbours. We wanted to introduce ourselves, apologize in advance for demolition and building noise, and use the awesome cuteness of our nine month old daughter to gain advance forgiveness for any and all sins performed by contractors in the coming months. Seriously, you just need to look at that face and you’d give her anything. Maybe I’m biased…
We only made it as far as one of our neighbours. She lives on the northern side of our block, and we would like to build a tall, rendered wall along the boundary at some stage to form the cat yard. I’m not sure if the using of the cute child trick worked, or if she’s just exceptionally nice, but we stayed there for AGES, met a large portion of the family and went away feeling really positive about everything. They all loved our house plans, and were very happy that we are not subdividing and building three town houses.
We will probably go and see the neighbours on the South side next weekend.
Today we got the telephone connected. Not to the house we’re living in, but to the house we’re about to build. Yes – the same one that has yet to be demolished before building can commence…
Why?
A large part of the design of this house is based around us working from home. For this, we need interwebs! Fast interwebs. We bought our house where it is due to proximity to the telephone exchange for that precise reason, so it would SUCK somewhat supremely if we were to build a beautiful, shiny house with two home offices, move in and find out that there are no current slots available for ADSL2 on our local exchange… After some research, we have discovered that there is quite a waiting period for ADSL on our exchange, thus we need a telephone line to apply for ADSL and jump on the waiting list.
Our phone line will be connected in the next couple of days, after which we will be firmly implanted in that queue…
We have been given a start date of the 1st June for demolition. This *may* be changed if council approval is not received in time, but they seem pretty confident that everything will be good to go!
Will take a few pics of the old place to upload for before and after shots =)
We have just faxed off the quote acceptance to have the house demolished by Magill Demolition. w00t!!!
We have chosen to go with this company because they were incredibly fast in getting the quote back to us (still waiting for three a month after requesting!!!), always very polite and helpful to speak to, and they can organise the council approvals and disconnection of services on our behalf at no extra cost (other than the fees that it would have cost us anyways). Too easy. And they can do everything by email (including the acceptance if I were able to spend 5 minutes fixing the scanner without a nine month old screaming for attention, but since this didn’t happen I had to fax it).
They claim that they are able to start within 4-5 weeks of quote acceptance, and the demolition takes about 3-5 days (although allow for 10 just in case problems arise, which is highly unlikely).
Will update when we get more information from them (ie, disconnections done, approvals granted, start date issued, etc).
YAY!
Recieved a call from the builder today saying that they’ve been told by the council that our house plans are going to be approved. Yay! We may need to get council approval for a small retaining wall (less than 0.2m-0.5m high) but other than that we just need to get approval to demolish the current house. Hopefully in a month we’ll have an empty block!