Rawson Chifley 37 MKII Metro Facade Build

FINALLY! Our land has registered after an 18 month delay. We submitted our DA and it was accepted after 3 attempts. Our DA was approved after we made a few changes. Our land has been cleared of the dozen or so trees and is ready, and we are only days from receiving our commencement letter from our bank!

Time for a build thread!

We're building a Chifley 37 MKII with the Metro facade, similar to the display home at Thornton but LHS Garage.

Overall the Admin period has been long but we're to blame for that mostly with the delay with our land. We've had really good experiences with everyone at Rawson from Sales, Tender Presentation, Selections consultants and our Build Co-ordinators have been simply the best! Our first brilliant co-ordinator took us from our tender acceptance to DA submission but she was promoted and handed us over to another team member and she has been so pivotal in moving our DA and getting all the changes required in lightning speed and even pushing our slow bank to get off their bum and hurry up! Extremely positive pre-build period for us.

PLANS

Facade:


Modifications:

• We added some Louvre windows to the front facade

Ground Floor:


Modifications:

• We widened the garage by 1m and widened the garage door to suit and also increased the height of the garage door to 2.4m
• We added a roller door to the rear of the garage
• We swapped the powder room and the laundry so we could add a shower
• We added the double story niche
• We widened the rear stacker door
• We turned the pantry into a butlers kitchen
• We got rid of the corners in the kitchen and added a Louvre window at the end
• We widened the alfresco slab and extended it to the rear slightly
• We added 3 solar skylights
• We recessed the slab for the wet areas

First Floor:


Modifications:

• We modified the layout of the bathroom to include the toilet and rejigged it and the bath
• We modified the double shower in the ensuite
• We added two roof windows over the void
• We recessed the wet areas

ELECTRICAL

We're hoping to incorporate some smart home features into our new home, our promotional package included a smart home starter kit which we're expanding on with some additional smart lighting. You can read more about it on our electrical selections blog post: Electrical Selections

We're using LED downlight throughout and have included some provisioning for pendants and LED track lighting.

We've also provisioned for some automated blinds on our west facing windows.

Ground Floor:


First Floor:



LANDSCAPING

We worked with a local landscape architect who helped draw up some plans for us. We're after a low maintenance garden which will require very little water with mainly grass and succulent plants.





SELECTIONS

We're going for a Scandi interior, we've written about our selections and colours on our blog here: We completed our Colour Selections!

TILES

Our tiles colour scheme is mainly White, Black and Grey. We had a great time at Tiles direct and you can see all our tile selections on our blog here: Tile Selections

We'll hopefully have our Authority to commence letter tomorrow (fingers crossed) and we'll be added to the construction list straight away! Our neighbours are also building with Rawson and they've had a very positive experience with their build (Almost at lock up), they just got a new SS but they've said they are equally as good as their original SS.

Hopefully we'll have some updates soon when Rawson begin on site!

Congrats guys. Hope the build goes well.

Thanks!

We received our authority to commence construction letter yesterday and were added to the construction list! Now we just wait for our SS to pick up the file and get cracking! Exciting times!

Hi,

I saw on your blog that the piering and formwork started.
The birds eye view from the drone are pretty handy.
Congratulations!

Do you get provided the slab design drawing?

Hey LuxBuild the only slab design drawings we received were in the construction plans. They were the survey plans for location on the site and the slab plumbing.

You don't get a detailed one because all the site costs are fixed, you don't need to go on-site and measure all the piers because unless stated on your tender it is fixed cost for these kind of items. If they go over they eat the costs, if they go under.. well that's always the risk of fixed costs..

We've got our slab now and everything looks top notch!

Love your post. looks great. Good luck with it.

WEEK 3

Piering and slab preperation. We also had our waffle pods and reo delivered.

WEEK 4

The moment we've been waiting 2 and a half years for! The slab was poured and it looks great!

WEEK 5

The frame was delivered and the exterior plumbing was completed. Electricity was run to the slab.

WEEK 6 - Day 1

The ground floor frames are erected! This is going to be a good week!

WEEK 9

Its week 9, the weather is starting to cause a few delays for the trades but they've been smashing work out between the showers. The Hebel on the ground floor is complete and the plumbing rough in is now finished too.

The scaffolding went up in a day and they then craned the Hebel up onto the first floor level. We should have the Hebel up and render started/completed this week and maybe even painting started!

We're meeting with our SS this week, he's been great! Sends us an update every week and responds of emails really quickly!

Quick week 23 update!

Other than some of the details at the front, 3 more skylights and the cladding at the back around the alfreso the exterior is done!

We had our pre-lining walkthrough last week and things are looking great, no surprises to report of!

This week they will start on the insulation and gyprock! Hopefully the skylights will be installed too!

Things are a little slower than we all would have hoped but the facade has been fiddly, we've found for the most part other than rainy days there's been good progress most weeks.

You can see all the weeks progress between week 9 and now on our blog. https://www.chifley37.com

Things are progressing pretty well now, the exterior of the house really took much longer than we all anticipated. We understand why, it was so fiddly and one part really relied on another part to be completed and so on and so forth. I think the scaffolding had to be added, raised, lowered, removed, added raised, blah blah blah so many times to give access to the trades..

Its come up so good though, just a word of caution to anyone building this facade. The aluminium wood look slats should have the wall they're attached to painted black before they're installed! This isn't something the colour consultant tells you about. We saw a metro facade with the area behind the slats still white and it looked horrible.

We've had the cabinetry installed last week, they did an awesome job! They were there for 3 full days installing everything, you can see their attention to detail in the job though the fit and finish is amazing.







In the butlers,we put a second oven and the microwave and on the opposite wall be put floor to ceiling cabinets.



We've got 2 Hafele convoy pull out cupboards in the butlers pantry, they're worth every cent! These will have back lighting installed in the cupboards so when you open it the cupboard with be lit up. The entire house cabinetry is handle-less except for these tall cupboards, we didn't like any of the handles on display at the showroom. Luckily our colour consultant chose these handles for us, they look so good! They're a Hafele matte black handle.






We had the built in wardrobe from the display homes added to our master bedroom. We used Polytec Vinette Black, this stuff is amazing! It feels soft and it is so matte!



We increased with width of the cabinets in the ensuite to 1.5m each, they're huge!



Here are some photos of the interior before the stairs and first coat of paint were completed.











And here are a few photos of the ground floor with the staircase installed.








The exterior is all finished now! Since these photos the downpipes have all been installed and connected too.



We're still waiting on our final window from stegbar.. Maybe 6th time lucky!?

Looking good. I especially like your pantry doors.

Thanks! It is really coming together now, our tiling and painting should be finished this week.

I love your white roof! Is it surfmist? We have a surfmist roof and it’s lovely. Was pristine until a heap of black solar panels went on!

Yup its a Surfmist roof! We're loving how clean everything looks, just need to keep it that way!

We ducked in while the tilers were finishing off for the day, things are looking fantastic! We were a little worried about the black tiles in the ensuite but they look amazing! They'll look even better once they're all cleaned up.

That kitchen sink looks amazing!!

Apologies in advance for the multiple comments on one of your kitchen island pictures, I pressed some keyboard shortcut and all of a sudden there was the reply I meant to put on the post but x 4 and now I can't work out how to remove it

Let me try again -

Looking great & loving how crisp it is! It looks like our builds started within a few weeks of each other as our slab was poured on the 18th Feb 2019, are you hoping / thinking you'll be in before Christmas? We've got our final walkthrough scheduled for this coming Friday 29th November but we already know there are issues with benchtop heights (which should all be 95cm from finished floor but range from 94cm to 98.5cm from finished floor) & the kitchen, butlers panrty & laundry cupboards that might delay things, but they seem to think we should be able to have handover 10 days after our walkthrough as that will give them enough time to fix any issues that come up.

Can I ask what you had on your Unsigned Internal Colour Schedule document for your Kitchen Handles in this section?

The reason I ask is we are in a bit of a battle with Rawson currently because I don't believe they have given us what we had asked for which was finger pull drawers (drawers with the angled edge that you use to pull them open with your fingers), as below -

We were never actually told of any different options for the drawer face profiles other than do you want handles or no handles. Originally we planned to have handles but then found out the widest handle they offered was 30cm so we opted for handle free.

We have drawers in our current kitchen from 3 different kitchen suppliers (added extra bits after the original build) with what we understood "Finger Pull" to be being the angled entry for your fingers, but instead they have told us this is called "Bevel Edge". What we have been given in our Rawson build is this -

As you can see it's just like a channel they have put in behind the drawer face then with a smaller in height regular square edge drawer face (which have edges that are quite sharp to the touch), but because there is no angle to get your fingers in comfortably you end up scraping the tops of your fingers on the bottom edge of the drawer above.

Rawson are saying this is their "Standard Finger Pull", however there is nothing if the documentation they send out before your internal appointment (eg. the "140523 LUX Illustrated Selection Sheet For Clients (Rev F)", "New LUX Illustrated Sheet (Rev C)" or the "polytec-melamine-doors-and-panels" PDF's or at any stage which lists or shows this as an option.

The Polytec brochure they send out with the "Internal colours appointment confirmation" email has 4 options for the drawer face profiles, none of which look like what we have been given and with the only one with the words "Finger Pull" in the name being the "Aluminium Finger Pull" -

It's so ridiculous even the only reference to anything "Finger Pull" on Polytec's own pages is titled "Finger Pull Handle" and is this page -

https://www.polytec.com.au/products/kit ... ll-handle/

This still shows their Aluminium Finger Pull which looks like this from the side -

We don't want the Aluminium Finger Pull, we just want Finger Pull which you would think logically should look basically the same as the Aluminium Finger Pull but without the Aluminium right, otherwise if the words don't describe the same profile look why would they be the same? Same angled finger entry, just no Aluminium.

I thought I must be going mad but a quick search on Google Images for "Finger Pull" drawers in kitchens to see pictures of what they would look like shows almost all examples of what we consider to be standard finger pull much like our own kitchen drawers at our current house which Rawson term as "Bevel Edge". I'm actually struggling to see a single picture of what Rawson considers to be standard finger pull drawers so I'm wondering how Rawson has taken a term which clearly everyone else thinks means one thing -

https://www.google.com.au/search?biw=2259&bih=1216&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNRwbYVh0yOQcXmSV6y61jhS6RJ4RA%3A1574164279819&sa=1&ei=N9fTXe_ZMcCZ4-EPxduDyAs&q=finger+pull+kitchen&oq=finger+pull+kitchen&gs_l=img.3...0.0..55291...0.0..0.0.0.......0......gws-wiz-img.w743IbtE9ZM&ved=0ahUKEwiv0d31mvblAhXAzDgGHcXtALkQ4dUDCAY&uact=5

Almost the only relevant images that show up in a Google Image search for "Bevel Edge Drawers" are images from Polytec.com.au showing their Bevel Edge profile doors, so it looks like the entire rest of the world other than Rawson & Polytec actually calls a Bevel Edge drawer profile Finger Pull -

https://www.google.com.au/search?biw=2259&bih=1216&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNTxJ7D_WdJvutT-82V6uRDLBXicQg%3A1574167060330&sa=1&ei=FOLTXfDkE6mK4-EPxKyg8Aw&q=bevel+edge+drawers&oq=bevel+edge+drawers&gs_l=img.3...10109.11173..11338...0.0..0.186.1094.0j7......0....1..gws-wiz-img.......0j0i8i30.cRHorVl4qq8&ved=0ahUKEwjwvsqjpfblAhUpxTgGHUQWCM4Q4dUDCAY&uact=5

Here's a Google Image search for "Polytec Finger Pull" which again shows nothing like what we have been provided, and only shows the Aluminium Finger Pull option -

https://www.google.com.au/search?biw=2259&bih=1216&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNTpIWQWExyC_zq3cDKH12-EiMu2LQ%3A1574167634504&sa=1&ei=UuTTXeyvHtSf4-EP2dOb-Ao&q=polytec+finger+pull&oq=polytec+finger+pull&gs_l=img.3..0j0i8i30j0i24l2.26994.29123..29281...0.0..0.186.2005.0j13......0....1..gws-wiz-img.......0i67j0i3.FtOaK4SDheY&ved=0ahUKEwjsoK-1p_blAhXUzzgGHdnpBq8Q4dUDCAY&uact=5

Sorry to get a bit side tracked but looking at your kitchen pics it looks like you have managed to get "Bevel Edge", so just wondering if you had to specify this somewhere or if that's just what you got as the "Handle Free" option from Rawson.

What you are after is called a shark nose or bevelled edge.
Recessed finger grips are exactly as it sounds and what you have where the cabinet is recessed to for a finger grip.

Have a look at this homeone post to see the different types.

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