Kitchen, Garage door and start of fixing

A few decent cosmetic changes have happened in the past week, with the garage door, kitchen cabinetry and the majority of the internal doors and fixing completed.

 

Garage all complete, all that's left is the up and down lights.

Kitchen coming along nicely with all cabinetry installed. Looking forward to the caesarstone benchtops and appliances to going in!

 Taken from the kitchen looking toward the living, happy with this too. This was taken at about 7.30pm at night, so it looks like the addition of the extra triple stacker and glass window splashback is letting a lot of natural light in!

All things are motoring along smoothly at this stage, with the only area of concern being that it appears our doors have been jimmied open.

This image is of the front door, while the garage entry looked to have the same markings on it. Not exactly too comforting as we have knowledge of a few break-ins in the estate during the build process. It won't hurt our pocket it anything happens, but just serve as an annoyance and cause delays! Fingers crossed this doesn't happen when the real front door is installed.

The build in general is absolutely flying along. We went for a look to see how the fixing was coming along this week, expecting to see most of the skirting done and that sort of thing and ended up looking at a garage door and a kitchen! We are due for our render to the frontage next week with internal painting, caesarstone and tiling next on the cards.

It seems Boutique will be well ahead of their advised handover date of May at this rate, which we expected, but to be at this point after the slab went down on the 5th of December is a great effort (taking in to account the Christmas break!).

Plastering complete, Bricks cleaned and facade ready for render

The plasterers, like the other trades we have had through, have flown through their work; The entire house was completed  in two days (including all the stopping)!

It's starting to feel a lot like a house now, you can really get a grasp on the size of the rooms and start to visualise how it will all look upon completion.The only issue we have had was that Boutique did NOT square set the cornices in our Home Theatre room (which is stated in the contract that this room is to be square set), so we have raised it with our Site Supervisor and we have been advised by Boutique that this will be rectified.

Another exciting step in the past few weeks has been the brick clean. They have come up an absolute treat and we couldn't be happier that we spent the bit extra and upgraded to the category 3 bricks.

 

Our front facade has also been blueboarded and looks ready for the render to go on.

 

Can't wait to see how this, and the front door will look when they are complete.

Bricks, Roof, Rough-ins and Plaster!

We are back in to the swing of things post Christmas and New Year break. After Boutique put their tools down on the 19th of December we had our bricks delivered and the roof on, which is impressive in itself given that we were told to expect maybe the slab to be down before the end of the year!
Come the 5th of January and there were tradies all over the place and things were back in to full swing.

Our brickwork is now almost complete and we couldn't be happier with the way they look! We upgraded our bricks to Homestead Tan, a category 3 brick. It's difficult to capture how they look in a single photo (in my opinion they look much nicer when you are looking at them in person and the house as a whole) but this photo probably shows the they look against the roof the best:

I must take my hat off to the brick layers. The past few weeks have either been 45 degree days or they have been days that were literally non-stop rain (some summer huh?). So to complete their work in the time in between is a great effort!

On to the inside it looks like we're getting closer and closer to being ready for the plaster to go up. All the rough-ins and wiring looks to be complete and all the plaster sheets are delivered and sitting nicely inside our living area:

From what we've heard from builders and a few friends it seems that we're looking at about 2-2 and a half months until completion once the plaster is up. If true, we would be in well ahead of the May completion date we were told at the beginning (though I'm sure this is one of those 'under promise, over deliver' type of dates).

Exciting times ahead and hopefully some steady progress without needing to rely on this bipolar-like Victoria weather in order to achieve anything! Lastly, a few more photos of the brickwork:

 From the backyard looking to the outdoor area (top mortar still not dry/bricks not clean)

Other side of facade (can't wait until this is completed... if only to get rid of the hideous red bricks!)