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.

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.