Variations - anyone want to buy a Lung

I tried to prepare myself for this, I knew it was coming. Like walking into a dark bear cave knowing a bear was in there but you're being pushed in with your hands tied behind your back, being served as lunch.

Early in this process I researched variations, it seemed to me the average was about $20,000. You needed that much no matter who you were if you were looking to upgrade the "must do" items. Things that are so hard to do later that you almost have no choice. For example putting a porcelain tile in now might cost $5,000. Replacing your tiles later in the whole first floor might cost $20k-$30k. We saved hard for years and had $20k.

For those following my blog know though that all came crashing down when the bank reneged on our loan after it expired. Valued at the full price in December when we paid our deposit, re-evaluated June 16th this year, 10 days after it expired at 20k less. We kept saving from December though, and stillare to this day as we knew this was coming.

Problem is.......we don't have 20k.

Guess what, the variations so far (bare minimum) is at 18k. Anyone want to buy a lung?

So now we're not to sure how to handle it, we're doing our best to make sure we get everything and to be honest I think we'll get there somehow, you always do somehow. If your're building be prepared for this, it will make things much easier. Knuckle down and keep saving too.

As for a general update our house is council approved and we're just waiting on our construction certificate. The variations are all being finalised and we should be able to start building in the coming weeks if Kurmond Homes are ready.

Kurmond have still been fantastic for us and are doing their best, they still feel a bit under resourced at times though. Some of their suppliers are their weak point. Tile contractors are frustrating, not happy with the variation price at all. Probably more so because my old man does Kitchens and Bathrooms so I know I'm being ripped off.

Electrical was about what I thought but there seems to be a huge lack of knowledge with the Fibre to the home (FTTH) at Jordan Springs and with all the builders. For those who didn't know, Jordan springs is a FTTH estate and if you buy in Jordan Springs you must install it for your services. You're not allowed to have a TV Antenna on your roof at all, you must run your TV through the FTTH cable.

Speaking with a few people yesterday it appears Delfin and the government are having issues. Some people have moved in to Jordan Springs and have no TV, no phone and no internet. The sub contractors for the builders seem to have no real idea either. Trying to explain what I wanted was liking speaking chinese. I knew more about it then the contractor and to be honest that worried me. The deal in the past was that no matter who you were building with at Jordan Springs you had to use Open Networks to install everything who had experience doing this. They're now out of the picture and it seems like the builders can arrange it all now. That's ok but I'm not sure I'm getting the right thing which is a bit scary.

Oh well, if you have any questions let me know. I'll do my best to answer them. Once my variations are done I'll post them all up to.

Been a while so time for an update.

It's been a while since I posted an update, my wife and I went through a real busy patch with work and it's nice to be on holidays at the moment just spending the next two weeks at home cleaning up and getting our current house a bit closer to ready for renting it out.

As for an update with the house the plans are now in with council, they were submitted on the 7th of October. The Preliminary assessment has been completed on the 26th so I'm hoping it's now only days away from being determined, as long as they haven't found any issues.

The Penrith e-planning website is great. I keep an eye on what the rest of the street is doing and look at all the other cool houses going up nearby. It's nice to know what's going next door as well. If you know your DA number just type that in or do what I do and type an address in and search, then hit the property button so see all the DA's. The link is http://www.penrithcity.nsw.gov.au/ePlanning/Pages/XC.Track/SearchApplication.aspx

As for Jordan springs, it's coming along real nice. If anyone is interested in building and buying land over there let me know. If I refer people I can get $1000 for me and for the buyer. Always good to help each other out. Jordan Springs actually is selling blocks in the next section called the Northbridge 2 release today. There's 45 new blocks of land for sale. It looks like a nice spot too, it's the part where it will be heading up to the park on top of the hill. I went and had a look yesterday and I can imagine enjoying a nice stroll up that hill to the park, looking out west to the mountains. The picture in my head looks amazing.


We have yet to do our internal colours and electrical, Kurmond say they wait for the council plans to be approved before doing those to ensure there aren't any changes. Hopefully if all goes well we will start building before Christmas.

Once things start happening I'll be updating things more regularly.

Signing everything this week.

Well the bank stuff is sorted. Basically now everything is approved and we're good to go. Westpac came through at the end of the day after I basically said they were about to lose me and my wife as a customer and all our bank accounts.

Tomorrow night we head in to the bank to sign our paperwork, Tuesday we go into Kurmond to pay our first big payment (second) and sign our contracts. (After I get them to fix a few things)

We should be building by Christmas some time which is good. People who bought in Jordan Springs have 26 weeks from settlement to start building otherwise they maybe required to pay Stamp Duty they signed the stat declaration for. Ours ends Dec 16th so we're leaving it a bit late because of all our hurdles, don't worry though, if the builder knows they can arrange a letter to have the time extended but you need to let your builder know upfront.

We've done our tiles and we need to go back and do more (electrical etc), but it doesn't matter now as the plans will be off as of Tuesday so I'm happy.

On another note I've contacted open networks about what we need to do to connect he FTTH connection. Their website makes no sense to me.

Valuation for Construction Back

Another kick in the guts.......

Westpac have come back with an evaluation on our Kurmond Homes house being $30,000 less. This is another kick in the guts and strange seeing that to build similar homes from the likes of Eden Brea, Zac Homes or Metricon we would be paying 100k for the same style and size home.

With all the maths worked out this means we need to find another $16k to $20k now to build our home, before our grant runs out in 4-5 months. If you've read all my blog you would know the debacle with the land we had to use some of our own money for the construction deposit to get the land, roughly $25k. So if the bank/mortgage insurer evaluators didn't screw us in the first place we would be fine. But thanks again to the evaluators where now going to jump through some magic hoops again to get our home built. Taking the house down by 30k wont help either as the value from the bank will come down. We would have to drop $100k to have no issues which means going for a much smaller home, not something where willing to do for a difference of $16k. Keeping in mind we can afford the repayments easily and the bank was happy to lend the full amount until the evaluation came back.

After all this keep in mind we've already paid so much out of our savings. For the house and land so far we have paid out $60,000 of our savings, and we have about $30,000 left for our construction. So by the end of it if we find this $16,000 we would have paid out $106,000 of our own money up front.It's so crazy I should have not paid LMI at all once it's all done.


The bank manager (Aloka) is arguing our case because of everything we've been through and is escalating and trying to get us a better deal. We're expecting to hear something over the next few days. Oh well, off to figure out how we find 16k to 20k now in case this doesn't work. Next stop first though will be to another bank.

Variations and an Update

We've been a bit quiet lately, more so because of work and basketball commitments taking a priority. It's getting exciting over at Jordan Springs, the display village is now open with 16 homes, and 2 more to open in two weeks time. There are so many houses going up also it's really starting to come together. Here's a shot from the car park yetserday, we also got a free sausage sizzle in our park which was great, we all got to wear our lot numbers but sadly I didn't see any neighbours. I did get to meet 2 couples who read this blog funnily enough, nice to meet James, Deon and Ursula. Looks like we're going to have a nice community of people.

We got our construction loan approved on Friday and we're just waiting on an evaluation to come back on the land (Crazy huh - we've had about 4 of those done in the last month). What this means is we should be able to sign the contract next week and our plans will head into Delfin and Jordan Springs.

We still need to go back into Kurmond Homes and finish of our selections but we delayed that so we could make sure we got the banking stuff out of the way. I assume we'll be back in there next week or the week after to pick internals. We had some external variations which I think were priced pretty good. Some things cheaper then others.

Upgrade to Garage door to Ceder - $395
Maroka Upgrade to front Facade (We had some but we made more Moroka) - $620
Upgrade to Translucent windows to Bathroom, Ensuite and W/C - $172
Upgrade to Translucent on Front Door - $45
Upgrade to Taubmans Jarrah on Front Door - $43

To be honest I'm really happy with this.

Colours and Contracts

We've finished and signed off on our external colours basically. I've attached our colour board for those interested but they're pretty much the colours we stated before.

Our Colour Board

As for contracts I went in to see Peter at Kurmond Homes last weeks and had my contracts and other paperwork fixed up due to a mistake with someone there sending me old documents. This was all fixed up in 5 minutes so I was glad to go in and just get it sorted. If you're having troubles, just head in there and get it fixed, he didn't mind at all.

I've now sent the fixed contracts off to our solicitor for comment and review. We're using Joe Grassi and Associates in Penrith as this guy is very well known for being an expert in property and building law. While I've noticed a few issues since reading the contracts he will be sure to pick up even more. Here are some notes I asked about.

•  Excess Sand, gravel or Soil removal
• Any insurances or bonds (like what happens if they crack a footpath??) And the length of those insurances if the build takes longer. As in I don’t want to keep paying for anything like that over time. Are these included in this terminology?
•  Refund of any insurance bonds that aren't used.
• Ensure all warranties, instruction manuals, serial numbers for all products installed in the house are provided by the builder.
•  I’m concerned about rain days, I think if there’s a roof on and they’re working inside the house rain days should be looked at? I live around the corner so I’ll know. I think it should state only can be claimed before roof is put on.
• Should the contract state the warranty for the actual house?
• The contract of sale states no gas connection but the tender does.

We also have an appointment with the bank on Wednesday to start the ball rolling with the construction loan, as some of you know we lost a huge chunk of our building deposit due to our land being re valued at settlement. We now we have to see how the bank plays with that one.

Waiting, so here's a Jordan Springs Penrith Update

I'm a big fan of keeping track of things and seeing how my new suburb is going to evolve. I've been watching closely the DA's at Penrith Council on the plans being submitted to council from Delfin. I must admit, it's looking like I've made a good purchase. Take a look at some of the screens below from DA applications. You'll get a feel for the future of Jordan springs and why it's going to be such a lovely place to live. Interesting that stage 2, that's the next part to be developed will be down a nice long road through the corridor of trees. Some good buys I think. I feel lucky, I'm nice and close to everything, I guess that's the benefit of buying in stage 1.

Colours 2

I got some sample pots thanks to the advice from De Novo Concepts and as you can see in the photo below they look a little grey, light in the photo, surprisingly though in real life they look a lot better, I think that's been half my problem. Looking at colours on a computer screen really doesn't help. The two colours below are exactly the same as found on the below photo.In real,life they look a lot nicer. I ended up getting the Bristol ringtail Possum in a taubmans paint from Bunnings. They told me to give the builder the code, not sure what I give them as it says.

Formula: Ringtail Possum- B133

Library: Taubmans_W.LIB

Range: Bristol 2024

Base/Can: Accent / .25 Litre

B             0Y           2N                          C                             0Y           19N        0.25

I               0Y           3N          0.75        

I've played around with my photoshop file to try and match it a bit better. Does this look any better? Do you think I have the colours in the right spot? I also made the metal above the door the same as the garage wall.

Playing with Colours

Thought I'd play around on Photoshop this morning, what do you think of the below. Considering I'm doing my best to make it look like the colours we selected. I plan to send this to the girl at Kurmond.

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.