Settlement Tick.....Missing Organs

Well as of 3:15 it's all confirmed, we now officially own our lot at Jordan Springs. While it has cost us an organ we're just happy to say it's ours (the banks). The next job for us is to finish the building contract and take that back to the bank for approval. Should be interesting seeing they pre-approved it with the $30,000 in savings we just spent on settling the land  because of the banks reneged agreement....that we don't have now. Oh well they put us in this mess, now they need to get us out of it. If not I'm sure someone will.

Happy days anyway, now I wonder if we can look at it yet, visited yesterday (I only live around the corner) and the gates were still up, but it looked real close to being open.

Kurmond Homes - Exterior Colour Experience

Well we went in and done our External colours and we left a little confused. We didn't have a camera so we're waiting on them to email us back with the list so we can share our final selections. We're probably going o go back in there anyway to finalise.

Some tips before you go in to meet with them.

• They use Taubmans Paints on the exteriors. But they will only show you the Taubmans brochure as a guide to selecting your colours. This is all they had in the office and looking at the brochure really didn't help us. We started picking colours of the brochure to match our ideas and after we left we realised they actually weren't good enough. You can get the brochure at Bunnings, head in and grab it. Then perhaps jump online first and look at all their range and go in more prepared. I wish we new who they used up front. We since after leaving done this and we're starting again for the two main colours.
• They use Taubmans for the cladding, facia and eves as well. Same range of paints.
• They use colorbond for the garage doors, guttering and windows. You have to do your best to match the house colours. We went with Monument for the gutters. 
• Staining the front door is extra supposedly, I told them I'm not paying for that. If they can't sort that out then I'll do it. It's the same effort to stain the door as painting.
• We upgraded our front door handle to suit the big door. Will cost extra.
• None of the windows are frosted including the bathroom windows, that's extra. I told them I'm ok to pay as long as it covers the cost of the film they use. Otherwise I'll do it after, again they better not charge to much.
• The roof colours were good, the only cost differences came down to shape. We went with a pretty std flat one with a slight groove. I thought it looked better then the pricier version to be honest.
• They use Austral bricks. This was ok, we've gone with the chocalate colour brick below. They have a range of different bricks, the range changes in price and there's fancier colours but we were happy with our colour which was in the std range.

Land settles Next Friday - 17th of June 2011

Well it's official, land settles on the 17th of June at 3pm. I've been out to Jordan Springs a few times and it looks like they're about to open the gates to the second phase. They also started putting together the landscape at the front of the area which I think will get one of those nice Jordan Springs signs. The sales and information office is almost complete too. They were aiming to have the display village open this weekend, but it looks like they're a few weeks behind, probably due to all the wet weather.

This leads me to the next question, should you inspect he actual land before settling? We still haven't see the lot yet.

As far as the grant stuff goes, we're still not sure what's going on. It looks like I have the Minister for housing trying to work something out, we've even been told to hold off to the last minute before getting the cheque to settle as they maybe able to do something about it. Come next Friday I'll be forking out $27,000 (+ $13,000 deposit last year). That means I'll nearly have paid 20% of the land value. Crazy isn't it. But will they factor that in the construction loan?