Carpet Installed/Furniture Delivered

What a whirlwind the last few days have been/

We started our move on Thursday night and it feels like we havent stopped since then. Most of Thursday night/Friday was spent assembling our flatpack furniture from IKEA, including the realisation at 12.30am that we hadn't picked up the mid-beam for our Malm bed resulting in us sleeping on the floor of the home theatre.

Carpet was completed on Thursday and is looking & feeling amazing.

 Carpet colour next to our Malm bedside table

Not a great pic, but these two Malm drawers took friggen ages to assemble and weighed a tonne!

Our lounges arrived from Freedom :D This is one of them - the Signature lounge in Napa Cement. Yes I'm aware there are a zillion pillows but I am trying to decide which pillows should go on which lounge

Starting to look more like a home. Only one bar stool as Freedom had to order the others in. A word of warning if you get a light colour - we have had some colour transfer already from dark pants/jeans :(

Now scoping out a dining table setting as our current setup involves either 1) standing around the kitchen island or 2) fold up chairs and a camp table perched on the flattened cardboard box that our mattress came in. The budget is getting stretched pretty thin though and I know landscaping should really be our next priority.

Very happy with the house so far but realising what an absolute nightmare it is to keep clean without any grass or driveway. We've got sheets up on the windows until our plantation shutters arrive, which will be 6-8 weeks. Props to Mick & Ritchie @ Shade Elegance who have been incredibly reasonable and flexible so far!

Still waiting for MJH to replace our glass stacker door along with a final brick clean which were both raised at PCI. Noticed that someone has swiped our nice stainless steel plug for the bathtub also (yes I have looked in every cupboard in the house and it is nowhere to be seen! At PCI it was next to the bathtub, booo).
 

Appliances Installed

We were lucky enough to sign our MJH contract when there were a few offers on - one of them was the free upgrade to Smeg appliances. Had our rangehood, oven, stovetop and dishwasher installed today. We also got a microwave however will be selling this off as we purchased a convection microwave from Good Guys.

I haven't been in love with our splashback but the colours seem to blend much nicer now that appliances are in.

The appliances look lovely as well, particularly the wide oven. The dishwasher is a bit plasticky though - I had expected it to be all stainless steel.

Despite covering the floor I noticed some light scratches in our bamboo this afternoon following appliance installation :( Disappointing but unavoidable I guess. It's not very noticeable but annoying as we've had our floor for two whole days.

I also spent this morning painting the skirting around the fridge recess only as Good Guys will be installing this tomorrow. It was about 5 pieces of timber that I needed to paint and it took me hours, and now I'm covered in paint. I now have much more respect for our painter - getting paint even is HARD!

My achievement for the day. I think I spent a solid hour just marking out the skirting with masking tape, and the paint STILL leaked through. I then had to tidy it all up with turps, ughhh. Not looking forward to doing the rest of the house! 

My painting was really crummy as well - patches everywhere

Bamboo Installed

Our bamboo floor was installed today through Harvey Norman - the colour is Red Strand. Our layer Spiro did a fantastic job and I would highly recommend him if you're in the Sydney area.

Apologies for the mess as the floor needs a good clean - I don't happen to own a mop or broom yet!

We need to install the skirting ourselves which I am absolutely dreading, ughh :(

Really pleased with how the floor has turned out and it's amazing how much of a difference it makes to the feel of the house. Feels much more like a home rather than a construction site

Keys

On Thursday 24th April 2014 we officially got our keys

Bamboo is being laid tomorrow and then carpet on Thursday. Appliances from MJH are arriving Tuesday and installed Wednesday. Whitegoods from Good Guys will be arriving Thursday.

Cannot wait to assemble all our IKEA furniture (i LOVE flat pack stuff) and have my fingers crossed that our Freedom lounges will arrive in the next couple of weeks.

Shade Elegance are coming in sometime this week to measure up our plantation shutters.

Can't believe our house journey is pretty much over. We have had a truly amazing experience with MJH and are very pleased with the house they have delivered.

PCI

PCI was today and it went really smoothly!

Met up with our new SS Shane who was absolutely lovely. He ran through the paperwork first (warranties, care guides etc.) and then we went for a look through the house.

Fortunately only the following will be required:
- Door handles to wardrobes
- Repair of water meter to front of house (neighbour's builders have runover the entire thing, flattened it into the ground and now it has been leaking water everywhere, wahhh)
- Repair of sewer pipe at rear of house (neighbour's builder have also managed to run over this)
- Replacement of glass stacker door in great room (glass panes were replaced after it fell down however the metal has scuff marks all over it)

We are due to get keys on Thursday (24/04/2014) which fits in perfectly with our floor installation (scheduled for Monday 28/04/2014).

Shane also gave us our McDonald Jones gift which contains towels, soap, soap dispenser and a toilet brush ...all in white :)

Also got this to fill in........no idea what we're going to do!

Small Update

Not much happening these days as we draw closer to handover. PCI was initially planned for tomorrow (15 April) however we still haven't heard anything from our new SS. Really hoping it happens this week so we can still look at getting keys this month. I'm wary of handover dates given all the public holidays in April. Flooring is tentatively booked for 28th April but I think we may need to push this back

Painter was back today doing touch ups and finally got to go inside the house. I've been peeking through the windows and noticed blue tape everywhere, however today all the tape was gone so I think the gyprocker etc. had been in also

Something odd that I noticed - none of our wardrobe doors have handles? Every other handle in the house has been installed but nothing for our wardrobes.

Towel racks and toilet roll holders are in at least :D

Towel racks, yay

Last few weekends have been spent researching appliances - I think we may have two big purchases sorted!

Security Fence Removed

No exact dates yet for handover as yet. There have been whispers of April 15 for PCI but nothing set in concrete.

House Cleaned

Cleaners were in today and have removed the plastic film from all windows and stacker doors, mopped the bathrooms and tidied up our kitchen

Managed to get a proper look at our splashback and it looks good, although I'll admit it wasn't quite what I was expecting. We had intended on getting something grey to match in with our cabinets, however in some lights the colour looks almost olive (and i suspect this is due to the natural tint in the glass itself).

That said, I think it'll come together better once appliances and flooring are installed

Mmmm clean stacker doors

Splashback - happy with it although it is much more green/brown than our cabinets :(

Our lovely island benchtop without the covers - Caesarstone Ice Snow

Colours dont match, boooo

This picture probably reflects the splashback colour the best - looks greyish on it's own but then looks olive next to our cabinets

Love our big sink

AC return in hallway

Clean windows, ahhh

Splashback Installed

The big day finally arrived and I am aware that the photo below is quite possibly the worst I've ever taken. We are well and truly locked out so I had to resort to a blurry pic through our stacker doors. I'm excited to see our splashback in different lighting as the entire kitchen was orange today in the afternoon sun.

I will update this post later with better pics of the splashback once I can get inside :)
 

Splashback in 'Heirloom'- cupboards look a bit funny here as the black covers that were over our Caesarstone benchtops have been flipped over during the splashback installation. 
I think this will look very different with appliances and no black covers over our Ice Snow benchtops

Air Conditioning Installed

I've been MIA lately as we had no progress with our house last week at all. Our glass splashback, which is one of the items I have been most excited to see, was due to be installed on Wednesday however several days later it is still not there.

Fortunately we had some site work today in the form of our air conditioning being installed.

Now I have been quite wary of our air conditioning after we opted to stick with the standard Derby unit rather than upgrading to the Actron (or even getting something like a Daiken after handover). The reviews I had read online said the Derby unit was noisy, unreliable and I was not exactly thrilled by the day/night cooling system - lets be honest, I like to laze around in bed all day so being able to only heat/cool the bedrooms OR the living areas was going to be difficult for me & my partner (who is likely to be in the home theatre).

To my surprise, I arrived at the house today to a Braemar unit (the BC183A to be precise). It appears that MJH have been using these lately due to lack of stock with the Derby units and frankly I am pleased that we got this one instead. Reviews for the Braemar unit seem more complimentary and no more day/night system yaaaaay (i think!)

An electrician will be back tomorrow to connect the AC together and fingers crossed our splashback finally gets installed.

Shower Screens Installed

Another surprise today - shower screens installed on a Saturday! Good one Stegbar & MJH

Ensuite glass panel. There are little foam squares all over the glass from either packaging or installation

Main bathroom

May have also gone completely crazy at IKEA today. Had some Xmas vouchers to spend so ended up with a bed, bedside tables, 2 sets of drawers (all in white) as well as some cushions. There are going to be some long nights ahead of us with an alan key.

Plumbing Fit Out + Mirrors

Plumbing fit out was completed today which means all taps, shower heads, toilets and a bath tub were installed.

 Oh hey, bathtub (I JUST WANT TO CLEAN THOSE TILES)

Shiny taps

Shower - main bathroom

Toilet - appears to have already been christened

Ensuite

Tap glamour shot - Dorf 'Enix'

 Taps installed for kitchen sink

The above photos were taken by my parents at around 2.30pm, and when I dropped by tonight I found a couple more surprises (excuse the shoddy iPhone photos)...

Huge mirror in the main bathroom - needs some Windex!

And another big mirror in the ensuite - LOVE IT

Electricians have also covered up the wires on either side of our garage

 Nice and tidy

Electrical Fit Out Complete

All lights, powerpoints, tv points etc. were installed today.

We're doing downlights ourselves after handover so we've only got a few lights scattered around the house at this stage.

Got excited and went to play with all the switches when it occurred to me... we don't have lightbulbs haha

I think plumbers will be in tomorrow to install the goods sitting in our garage. Our SS Mark advised shower screens/mirrors will go in next week and we're looking at PCI on 15th April (which is exactly a month ahead of schedule) with handover a couple of days after.

Can't believe the journey is almost over.

Entry - smoke alarm and light fitting (with no bulb!)

Downlights in the overhead cupboards in the kitchen - the only downlights we paid for with MJH

Heat/light/fan combo in the ensuite. These I could play with given they have bulbs built in, woohoo. That said, the 'light' is absolutely useless but the heat lamp and fan seemed to work well

Ensuite colours under the heat lamp