Knockdown and building Fairhaven's Barwon 352

After looking very closely at Burbank's Barrington, Henley's Lexington and Talise, we finally decided on Fairhaven's Barwon 352.

We have a blog going and will post updates here too as we watch some others Fairhaven's homes come to life in this forum.

Chatz

Hey chatz, welcome! I'm so happy to see another knockdown ~ + another Fairhaven too! Really exciting.

I've had a look at your blog ~ love Mt Waverley ~ have family over there, and in our "early days" (pre-kids) DH + I rented not far from Mt Waverley station. Lovely lovely area.

I'm not sure exactly where you are up with the process ~ would love to see some pics. Do you have many mature trees to contend with on the block? Do you have council restrictions on your tree removal ~ just asking! After what we've gone through with our council (not Monash btw) I would so recommend you start the council approvals process asap if not sooner.

It is a bit more a long road to do the knockdown thing than just building on an empty block... But I'm sure it will be very worth it in the long run. Our long complicated story is all in our thread (if you can be bothered going through it all!! )

You must be so excited!! Can't wait to see more. Keep us posted!

~ cheers, J

Our colour selection is tomorrow and we feel completely under prepared.

What fittings we could select from the display homes we have, so taps, basins etc are under control. However I think we are suffering a little bit from using a smaller builder as information is not as forthcoming upfront, we have had to keep asking what brands do you use for various things. Fairhaven had a good checklist for taps, basins, toilets etc, but we received incomplete lists of what bricks fall into what categories and only today did we get the upgrade costs for each category.

Our preference for the roof is Colorbond Ironstone but this suits darker bricks with hints of blue in them which puts us in the category 5 range (PGH Mowbray Blue is our favourite). Oouch.

We still have not decided on the flooring. I would love wooden floorboards, especially after seeing some of the other Fairhaven picks on H1, but its a huge jump up in cost so we are more likely to get tiles. Maybe something like this or this and keep the walls light. Not that we have decided on a colour yet.

We did manage to get to a Beaumont tile display and have a fair idea about what we will have in the bathrooms.

I have marked up the electrical plan and have been researching CFC and LED globes. They cost more upfront, but use much less power, don't need transformers and are not fire risks like normal downlights. So we are not provisioning any 12 volt light fittings. I still managed to add 35 light battons to the standard plan.

Chatz

The other half of the story is organising the demolition. We contacted several in the area and only one bothered to reply so guess who got our business: Demolition Depot.

We have organised for the gas and power to be disconnected and meters removed, and for the power to be moved to a pit. Not that I've received confirmation to my emails with the forms attached, so I will have to make some more calls to follow up.

Demolition Depot have highlighted an issue with the power and phone lines to our neighbour's house as they hang very low across our property. They have asked us to arrange for them to be moved. The power and phone companies don't seem to understand or have a practical solution, so we have raised jobs with them to investigate. Once again I'm sure we will have to phone them to follow up.

I posted a topic to see if anyone else had encountered this problem but no replies yet.

Chatz

Hi chatz,
Great to see you have a thread now. Good luck in your colour selection tomorrow! I hear there is a lot more choice, and a much better display centre from when we did ours.
A close friend of mine is doing hers next week, so I'll be really interested to see what your experience is like. Enjoy the process
Barbs.

Somehow we survived the colour selections and are still married. To be honest it went really well. We had a few iterations of which tiles we like, but then we didn't find a carpet that complimented those tiles, so pick the carpet and then choose the tiles. Wendy kept presenting ideas and helping us to move forward. All up we were there for just over 3 hours.

The selection centre used to be the selection centre for another builder, its quite large and open with plenty of space to spread out and mix and match things. The display kitchens are still from the previous builder, but all the tiles, carpets, roofing and bricks are in Fairhaven's range. There is a reasonable amount of natural light but it could do with some more internal lighting. It was good being the only ones there, I could imaging a larger builders selection centre would have several groups crawling over tiles at the same time while we could switch between tiles, carpets, benchtops etc when we needed to.

On our way to the selection centre we dropped into the PGH bricks display at Springvale again. I had conceeded that the bricks I liked were too expensive so we went with Cassica.



PGH were very helpful and supported our choice of Ironstone for the roof, gutters and downpipes, and Paperbark for the facia, windows and garage door.

PGH also suggested a stained wood door rather than colouring it Ironstone, so we selected the Windsor 52G:



We selected the Hampton style for the garage door, but without the windows that are in this picutre:



We are still discussing flooring options, Wendy was unable to give us pricing, so we specified 3-Strip ReadyFlor Spotted Gum but may select a laminate floor instead depending on the cost.

So here are most of the selections:

Roof: Ironstone
Gutters: Ironstone
Facia: Paperbark
Downpipes: Ironstone
Bricks: Cassica
Windows: Paperbark (Called Merino but the same colour)
Garage Door: Paperbark
Front Door: Corinthian Doors Windsor 52G
Carpet: Godfrey Hirst Colorado, colour 185 Antler
All Benchtops: Quantum Quartz Luna White
Splashback: Glass, Nile Clay
Kitchen Cabinets: Classic White Sheen
Ensuite Cabinets: Classic White Sheen
Ensuite Tiles: Sequenza Grey Gloss Edora Insert, Gloss Silt Grey, Gloss White
Bathroom Cabinets: Marina Grey Sheen
Bathoom Wall Tiles: Linea Grey
Floor Tiles: Technico Charcoal
Ceiling and Walls: Haymes Barely There

Chatz

Things are moving along for us this week.

We have had the gas meter and electricity disconnected and we have signed up the Demolition Depot to knock down the original house.

The only issue we have with the block so far is the power and phone lines to our neighbour. We have been nagging the power companies since the line does not meet current standards. We will continue nagging since the demo company said they cannot proceed and Fairhaven have added a provision for $6000 if everything has to be carried onto site.

We had our tender meeting today which went really well, all over in 3 hours. Only a couple of mistakes on the plan, we made one or two very minor changes, went across the road for some lunch and came back to sign the final tender with the updated pricing. Andrew was very patient and carefully explained everything. If we can get the power line fixed and the $6000 cost removed, then we will have kept to our budget, just!

They liked my electrical plan so much they are using it rather than redrawing it themselves, so it was worth spending some time working it out.

Once we get the final drawings I'll post them here. It is very close to the standard plan, the main changes are to the kitchen bench (added another meter to be 3.6m long, not sure that is long enough), some sliding doors and we moved the study door into the dinning area.

So far its going well with Fairhaven.

Hi chatz, pleased to see things moving smoothly for you ~ hooray!

Maybe you'll need to put something in writing to the power company ~ they are obligated to respond if your query/request is in writing (doesn't necessarily make them faster though!!). It's very dangerous to have a sagging power line (sure I don't have to tell you that)!

I'm glad the colour selections went so well for you ~ it is really hard to do! I think you've done really well.

We are currently doing some flooring research (in the background) ~ as we are doing our flooring separately ~ and the choosing colours thing is starting all over again!!

Good work chatz!

~ cheers, J

Our bench is roughly 3.8mtrs long and it fits in perfectly!

Hi Chatz, we also did a knock down/re build. We also had low power and phone lines to contend with. Our builder's OH&S manager reviewed the issue with power and telcos. Fortunately it was resolved by removing one low hanging (obsolete) telco line. The power company decided that we had just sufficient clearance to avoid having to move the lines.

The important thing is your issue is not uncommon. The telcos and power company know exactly what needs to be done to correct the problem. They should be able to take action in a short period of time.

Best wishes.

Here is a long overdue update.

• Settlement on our old house is done and we are now living in a cosy studio apartment known affectionately as The Shed.
• We have had the power lines raised to the minimum height. This allowed the demolition company to get their heavy equipment on site.
• The house has been demolished.

Chatz

Hey chatz ~ congratulations on your progress so far! Well done on getting through all those milestones.

Gee, that demo machine looks v e r y familiar to me!

That "shed" of yours looks supercute (ok, small too! ) and how lucky you are to be so close to family while you're going through the build.

Will you be able to have your tender meeting before Christmas ~ how does your timing go from here? Keep us posted...

Hi Vanilla tree,

We have been following your saga, our dramas with power lines pale in comparison. If they are going to dig 8m down you ask them to put in a basement! Sounds like Fairhaven are trying to do the right thing, lets hope the rest of your build goes smoothly.

We should find out this week if we will get to contract before Christmas, everything hinges around that second soil test.

Chatz

Disappointing news yesterday with confirmation that work onsite is unlikely to start until February.

So after excessive nagging to get the power line issue resolved, paying an electrician ($2K) to do it a month before the power company would (for free) etc, hassling the demo company etc, we still end up too close to the xmas break and nothing material is likely to happen for 2 months. Between now and then we get to sign contracts but it doesn't feel like progress until they are doing work on the house.

In hindsight we should have had the power line moved underground for our neighbour to avoid the builder's spotters fee since at 4.6m its still too low for some of their equipment. The extra delay in doing this would have made little or no difference to the overall build.

Chatz

This week Fairhaven have got back to us with the engineering report.

Disappointing news on several fronts:

- the survey that was provided to the engineers had two mistakes; the big tree was still on the plan (but has been removed) and they located the pool only 1.5m from the house when it will be more than 3. Both were know to Fairhaven.
- the engineers finished their report on Dec 10 but Fairhaven were not able to get their pricing to us until this week
- the report requires a p class slab (which we insisted on provisioning for) but half of it needs to suspended (which we made no provisions for)
- the report requires tree root barriers around nearly 90% of the slab even though we removed all plants from the block

As it stands this pushes us way over budget to the point that we have started looking again at smaller house plans to try to get the costs under control. We have invested many months in Fairhaven which we would have to repeat elsewhere but we may not have a choice.

At Fairhaven's suggestion we are engaging an arborist (at our cost) to do a survey the relatively small neighboring trees to get remove the need for hopefully most of the root barriers. Effectively making up for what appears to have been a poor survey and paranoid engineers. Fairhaven seemed confident that this would save money overall. We just wish they had told us before Christmas, we could have organized this last week.

We are rapidly approaching having to make a really tough decision.

We hired an arborist who found that no tree roots would affect the slab; a far cry from putting root barriers around nearly the whole house. We are still waiting for the updated engineers report, and then new costings, more than 2 months after the original engineers report was made.

With our budget well and truly blown with the upgraded slab and root barriers, we went back to Henley to have another look at the Talise Q2 as a fall back.

Right now Henley are advertising heavily that they have cut their base price. In reality the price had increased $10,000 to get a similar set of upgrades that used to be standard. So that was frustrating since we had claimed back the $1000 deposit. If we had left that there, the original price would have been valid for 6 months.

The reason we didn't select the Talise in the first place was it is not on display anywhere, and that is still the case.

Regardless we have decided to get to Tender with Henley and see how the two stack up. After selections it seems we don't have to skimp on the flooring or a fireplace and we will still come in well under the Barwon before the slab upgrades.

Henley have not been real quick either, it seems things suddenly happen immediately after I call. That said I had a very constructive talk to them today about putting in a pool just prior to the slab, so that was encouraging.

The next few weeks will be interesting as we try to decide which house to go with. The Barwon has a better kitchen and laundry, the Talise better zones and fittings, the Barwon has....

Hey Chatz,

Just been following whats been happening and it sounds like such a rollercoaster. Thought I would add my 2 cents since DH and I are building the Talise Q2 we signed the contract yesterday and construction should start in 5 weeks (apparently).

If I were you, I wouldnt be too worried about having to make a choice on Talise.... you may think I am biased BUT I too had the same issues with not seeing a display, but after looking at hundreds of displays I realised I could imagine the flow of the home in my head without walking through it.

I found that the Talise really had everything I was looking for - excellent open plan living, LARGE kitchen with separate butlers pantry, MASSIVE wardrobe, theatre room (which was converted from the living room in original plan), large study/home office and great alfresco too.

Anyway, if you wanted to ask any q's about the talise, I'd be more than happy to help. We shopped around with so many builders before signing and found that we got so much more bang for our buck with henley so decided to go with them.

Good luck!
Trudy

Hi Trudy,

Congratulations on getting your contract signed. I look forward to following your thread if you have one.

I agree that after so many display homes we should be able to picture every room and detail.

We have our tender meeting Friday. At last we will know what it's going to cost and can compare the two options. We are still torn but we need to make a decision if we are going to have a new house by Christmas.

Chatz

Hey Chatz,

How did you tender appointment go? We are still waiting for site start as there have been a hold up with he bank ... surprise surprise.

We are really hoping that we will be in by Christmas.... did they give you any type of timeline at your tender appointment?

Can't wait till the build starts.... everything has been dragging along!

Trudy

Trudy,

I'll have to start a new thread!
We signed the contract with Henley yesterday, submitted everything to the bank etc.
Henley are now applying for permits.

Chatz