Building the Charlton by Porter Davis

The practical completion phase is the final stage of the build. It involves all the paint work, electricals, bench tops, sinks, tapware, flooring, tiling, wardrobe, pantry and galley fit outs and pretty much all other internal and exterior work required to get the home to completion.

This week's progress includes:

• Waterproofing of wet areas
• Tiles and grout have been delivered
• Bench tops installed
• Roof tiles for the alfresco delivered 
• Garage roof still in progress
• Interior paining continued 
• Decorative mouldings installed onto facade 
• Rendering continues after a very long break in between coats. 

With only about 4 + weeks to Christmas my gut just tells me we won't make it in time given the amount of work left to do and the stairs issue to be sorted out. Whilst it would be nice to see handover on this side of Christmas I certainly wouldn't want a rushed job at the risk of compromising on quality. So if we don't make this year then my bet will be end of Jan. Spoke to our BC who will be pushing for an approximate date from our site supervisor as we really need to start booking in our trades for post handover....flooring, blinds, driveway, side gate, fence, argh..it's giving me a headache already :(

To add to my headache, I have put an formal email to our site supervisor expressing my views on the issues regarding the patch job under the stairs and inconsistencies with the stair width between the two flights of stairs. (I'll have another post on this later.) I have yet to received a response as I suspect he is still on leave so might need to follow up with the temporary site supervisor and get his thoughts on the matter.

Anyway so here is this weeks update with plenty of pictures. Enjoy!

The Sinclair Facade

With work on the facade progressing its nice to see the house start to show some personality. I have to admit we love everything about the Charlton but felt the facade options were limited. Ideally we were hoping for a more hamptons facade which looks to be all the rage in the building industry right now. We really love the New England facade that's currently available on the Hoffman and Rochford so it was such a pity that its not available on the Charlton. We even waited about 3 or 4 months in the hope they would offer it on the Advantage range of houses but they didn't so we ended up choosing the Sinclair facade for its classic look. We plan to tone the down the 'sophistication' by putting in plantation shutters on windows. I think it will work ;)

Renderers have finally progressed again and have last week rendered the top half of the house. I'm quite pleased with how the colour has turned out. The mouldings have gone on but it looks like they will still need to comeback and put them on the garage and then be painted. We chose colour Doe by Dulux which is a shade lighter than the main render colour. We're hoping to achieve something similar to this picture but instead of wooden framed windows we've gone white aluminium and have matched the roof and garage door with a dark grey colour.

Sinclair Facade

Sinclair Facade in progress

Render Colour Dulux Champignon

Decorative mouldings to give it that classic look.

Waterproofing

Not a lot to say here but waterproofing has been applied to all our bathrooms. I'm guessing tiles will go on next.  

Upstairs main bathroom

Footprints everywhere

Master Ensuite

Our tiles have been delivered. Yippee, yes I'm excited about a tile delivery. haha. I took a sneak peak through the paperwork sitting on the pile of grout to check the order because we put through a last minute building variation to have our tiles changed.   Can anyone tell me what that pole thingy is for?

With the house build in its last phase we have finally settled on our flooring supplier. Our reasons for not using PD was mainly because we felt the choices in flooring (particularly the timber) were limited and we also felt we could get better value by sourcing it ourselves. It has been a hassle choosing to do it post handover as we have already given up many weekends just trying to source the right product and supplier but hopefully it will save us some extra $$ in the end. 

So the plan is to lay floating floorboards downstairs and carpets upstairs. The only exception to that is the cinema room which will be carpeted and bathroom and laundry which must be tiled by Porter Davis. 

For our floorboards we have chosen to go with engineered oak in a black wash. The boards are 190mm wide, 15mm thick. We found that you can spend between $75 - $120 per sqm for engineered oak so we just budgeted for a product somewhere in between. The boards we chose cost approx $90-95 per sqm. $25 per sqm for installation and $7 per sqm for a 3mm acoustic underlay. Our timber is from Smarter Timber Flooring in Cheltenham who have been great to deal with. Details here.

There are still a couple of unknown costs associated with the installation as they can't quote us until they assess the site. They are:

1) cost to remove and reinstall the skirting boards (personally don't really like the look of the quads) 

2) amount of floor leveling required. 

Here are some photos of the boards we chose. 

Here it is again. I was still drawn to it even after seeing it laid out.

Carpets

When it comes to carpets we weren't too fussed. Just give me something low maintenance, mid range pricing and looks decent. (haha) Throughout this process I certainly have learnt a few things about carpets so I'd thought I'd share.

• If you have pets avoid choosing a loop pile.
• Go for the best underlay you can afford. Besides the extra insulation it also gives you that extra cushioning effect that you don't get when choosing a cheaper carpet. hehe. That's what we did. "give me a not so expensive carpet but I want the best underlay you got!"
• Darker colour carpets don't necessarily mean it will hide all the dust, lint and hair plus it can make the room or space look smaller than it is compared to a lighter carpet.
• Keep in mind that when selecting your colour from a small swatch that it will appear darker once laid on a larger surface area for this reason I chose a shade lighter than the one I actually liked. 
• If you're not too fussy with carpets like me then my advice would be to consider using a carpet warehouse such as Fowles or Western Distributors - I found them to be much cheaper than your major retailers. 

Ashton Twist - Pambula Beach. theres my foot again. Whoops.

Play Law and Order SVU scene change sound effect

Ok I might be over dramatising the whole thing but we have come across our first issue. It appears the staircase may not have been built correctly. (Well that is my assessment anyway). Take a look at the picture below and you can see the the cornice does not extend to the same length of the plaster wall. The reason for this is because the supporting staircase beams protrude out into the wall thus not allowing the cornices to fit so what they have done instead is cover it up with plasterboard instead  ....No thank you. Surely they cannot expect this to be the end result. 

...whats next?