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?

Last week we reached another milestone with the gutters, fascias and roof tiles completed which has given the house some much needed protection from this weeks forecasted rain. The staircase and cabinents have also been measured. 

Spoke to both the Site Supervisor and Building Coordinator about the non existent communication and it turns out that we were suppose to be getting weekly updates alternating between the site supervisor and the building coodinator which wasnt the case, anyway thats now been sorted!

So by the end of September we should see these things ticked off

• Plumbing rough - starts this week
• House wrap - 15th Sept
• Electrical rough - 18th Sept 
• Hebel - End of Sept