Ok, we're coluorblind!

So we've had some issues with colours, the first time we went in we walked out with some views the colours looked to light for us but we weren't sure. We decided to research and found that to be the case, the browns we looked at looked ok but in reality when painted on we might as well said we were after a white and grey house. These colours look ok, but it's not really our tatse and w're after something warmer which compliments the nice green surroundings. My wife and I are after some nice browns. 


We have the below at this stage, what do you think? We're still umming and ahhing. The Taubmans Chocolate bay was suggested by Kurmond as I was after a Bristol Colour from the two example house below. I'm thinking I should just go get some bristol paint made up and then get them to tell me the code in Taubmans. We were orignally after Bristols ringtail Possum which is seen on the two eden brea homes below.


- Bricks - PGH Chocolatto, off white Mortar
- Roof - Ebony in tiled contour
- Window Frame – Custom Black Matt.
- Fascia – Monument 
- Downpipes and Watertank – Monument
- Garage Door: Paperbark (Looking at cost to change to wood)
- Moroka Colour 1 – Taubmans Greenstead (T112-8A)- Moroka Colour 2 (Arch) – Taubmans Chocolate Bay (T118-7)
- Cladding – Taubmans Chocolate Bay (T118-7) hmmmm.....not sure on this.
- Eaves - not sure? 
- Porch Louvers: Silver (not painted)
- Driveway - Charcoal
- Front door - Taubmans Jarah





Here's a pic of the greenstead on another Homeone members house. Our finish will be Moroka though.

As for the Chocalate Bay this is the best I can find.

Moroka Colour 1 is for around the garage and the right side of the house (we upgraded to Moroka).
Moroka Colour 2 is for the doorway.


Should we change that? 


Here's our plan again, thoughts?

Inspiration came from these two Eden Brea Homes, obviously we want black window frames.

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?

View from Space Update

Just went and checked out Nearmaps and it seems the view from space was updated. You can actually see our road now. I've put on the pictures below roughly where our place is going. Exciting stuff.

Been A while but the gears are turning.

Well it's been a while since my last post. Basically nothing has happened seeing we were waiting on our land to be settled and given some direction by the builders. Well early last week we got the call. Our lot is ready to be settled in about 2 weeks. Kurmond homes must have got the memo also as they have been in contact with me a few times in the last two weeks also. Other then that, not to much contact from them, but no real need to up until now.

Seeing we got talking to Kurmond again we decided to review our plan one more time. I jumped online and noticed they updated there Strand 39 not only with our changed, but someone else made a smart change to the upstairs ensuite. So we decided to ask for that change also. Peter at Kurmond homes had no issues with that and made the change. See below a quick pic.

The plan of attack moving forward is pretty simple.

• Wednesday we head into Kurmond homes to choose our outside colours. We'll also pick up a building contract and sustainability check sheet so we can get our grant. I'll be talking to Kurmond about timings now with council etc from this point.
• On the June long weekend or there about's we should be able to settle on the land.

For those following my HAF fund issue a bit of an update. We got nowhere, tried a few banks and just decided to cop it on the chin, but with a bit of a fight. We took our complaint all the way up and almost went to the banking ombudsmen. We only stopped before there as we decided we still haven't got final approval on our construction loan and we didn't want to push our luck. We did write to the Minister for Housing and sadly they went and attacked the people at Delfin, rather then the mortgage insurers. That upset Delfin a bit but my point was that the insurers are deducting any grants from the value of the house which makes the grant useless. Good news for us is that we found out we can settle using the grant (so it doesn't even touch our hands) as long as we had a few documents completed and a building contract. This means we no longer have to try and find a shortfall of $9500 and also lose our construction deposit.

the risk now is the bank comes back and does something stupid with the construction loan, I hope not. Also it means we're going to find it tough paying two mortgages towards the en of construction as we planned to use some of the grant to live off. Oh well, they say building isn't easy.

Either way, I'm getting excited again. I live every day dreaming about moving into a home that we can much better call our own. Our current house was a stepping stone, our next is much more for us.

Beware - Mortgage Insurers fighting government grants!

Hit a huge hurdle yesterday. For those that don't know Jordan Springs falls in an area which receives the Housing Affordability Fund. The fund was set-up by the Australian government to entice people to building brand new homes to stimulate the economy and to stimulate new property being built due to Australia's housing shortage. Jordan Springs rebate came to a total of $22,600. To get this the purchaser needs to submit building plans and a building contract at settlement.


Well last year (December) we had to obviously place our deposit on our land for the 5%, to do that we went to the banks and ensured there were not going to be any issues. We got everything pre-approved basically. The land we got approved but obviously our land was being released in June so we would have to sit on the approval until then. If you have been readin the blog you will know that our first loan attemp was knocked back because mortgage insurers wouldn't cover the grant (Keep in mind that there is only 2 mortgage insurers in Australia that the banks use). See this post for what happened before... OMG! What is wrong with Jordan Springs!! 


Anyway for some reason Westpac had on our loan contract that it expired April 24th and told us that there's no issues in just simply extending the loan, we would have to submit some payslips and savings again. They made us jump through hoops but we did it. A few weeks went by and I told Peta that something was up, this should have come back straight away, what happened next blew me away.


The other mortgage insurers are now saying what the Bankwest insurers were saying, they have valued the land less exactly $22,000. The amount of the grant. We've now been told we have to cover the difference. This is after we've paid a deposit on the land and a 2% payment to draw up our plans. We've basically spent $20,000 already.


The issue for us now is we have to use our construction loan 5% deposit to settle on the land. Obviously we will get the $22,600 back afterwards but all our plans have been stuffed up. We also need to find $9500 to settle with a building contract so we can get the grant, as we'll be $9500 short of the 5% building deposit payment.


So beware, the mortgage insurers are doing a dirty trick, and there out to screw people over. I'll be looking to write to the government in the next day or so and see what I can do it about, in the mean time I'll have to start selling my overweight body to try and find $9500 in two months.

Plans Updated - More to come...

See attached the latest plans. So far Kurmond have been really good with making the changes, they have forgotten a few things each time I've sent them my long list of details but they have turned the changes around very quickly, sometimes within hours.

I'm really impressed with the latest plan and I'm really happy with the design now, here are some changes that have been made in case you didn't notice.

• Changed alfresco single sliding doors to cornerless stacker. This cost us a fair whack to change as we need a metal support beam, but we decided it was something we couldn't fix later.
• Changed the front door to be taller and wider at 1200 wide. Allows us to bring things in easier.
• Change all door heights to 2340 on the bottom floor, bulkheads and window head height to 2400. We did this as we had 9" ceilings.
• Moved the gas points around. The one in the family room moved to the middle so perhaps later we can put one of those fireplace things in. Alfresco moved next to tap (east side), BBQ will probably go this side.
• Changed window heights and lengths.

Still a  few things to get fixed though but we're not far off.

• Need a manhole upstairs.
• AC ducts need to be shown upstairs
• Need clarification on Facade material
• Rainwater tank, missing? Plus slab for tank.
• Gas points not shown on slab plan.

We sent this off yesterday so hopefully should get an update today or tomorrow. Our next plan is to go in and speak with Kurmond about Electrical, carpet and tiles etc and sort out all the extras. This way we can work out whether we will be in trouble or not. I'm sure there's some surprises we don't know about yet.

Set of Plans - Dad What you doing this weekend?

Well funny story, we received our first plans and they put the wrong house on the plan. We quickly shot off some notes to them telling them to fix it and at the same time jotted some key things that were missing from the original plan. We've just got the 2nd set of plans now to take a look at. No electrical plan yet as we get to decide that but only a few changes. I decided to put a cold water point next to the fridge space in case we decide to get one of those fridges with the ice maker.

Take a look and let me know ideas and thoughts. I plan to hit my dad up this weekend and get his feedback too.

All ok - Kurmond Homes It Is

Bank has come back and we're all good to move on with our home. We've decided for the Strand 40 by Kurmond Homes. We will be customising things a bit inside to suit us so it's not exactly the same. The front lounge room will become my much needed Man Cave for example.

As for Facade we're thinking of mixing the traditional and ultra-modern together to make the facade we want. We like the sqaure garage rather then that little roof bit to the side, also the porch roof we like sqaure also to make it feel more modern. Saying that Peta doesn't mind the angled roof of the Kent ultra modern. What do you like?

Floorplan

Traditional Facade

Ultra Modern Facade

Ultra Modern - Kent