Browse Forums Owner Builder Forum Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Update 101Apr 26, 2013 11:37 pm Our owner-builder journey - viewtopic.php?f=38&t=45187 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Door progress update 102Jun 19, 2013 4:34 pm Our owner-builder journey - viewtopic.php?f=38&t=45187 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Door progress update 103Jun 19, 2013 11:45 pm My build thread: viewtopic.php?f=31&t=64437 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Door progress update 104Jun 20, 2013 11:44 am Owner Building on 1800sqm Sanity Intact so far Locked up March 2012 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Door progress update 105Jun 20, 2013 12:29 pm Hi Tracy, thanks for posting. Yep, it's heaps of hard work, I'm totally over it and would never owner build again!! I've actually been silently following your thread for a few weeks as you're just in the next suburb to us. I LOVE your floor plan and all your colour choices. We also have the Caesar Stone Ice Snow in our bathrooms and I love it. Your kitchen will look gorgeous. I love my Ilve free standing stove, and I think they look great in black. The only thing that I would say I don't like about it is it's a little bit of a pain to clean the stove top. The cast iron trivets on the top are really heavy so it's a bit of a pain lifting them all off to clean every time, but once they're off the stainless top wipes clean fairly easily. We've got a different model to yours though and your trivets don't look quite as chunky or heavy as ours. We went on a holiday where they had an electric stove with flat glass top and it was soooo easy and quick to wipe clean, but my DH and I still both agreed that we much prefer cooking on a gas top so will put up with the cleaning. We also got the tepinyaki plate in the middle. I love having it, its so great for cooking lots of stuff on and I use it all the time, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to clean. It's black all the time and looks a bit skanky but I've finally given up trying to make it look clean. My DH says it just looks 'seasoned'. Hi Lynny-Jane, that's just because I never show pictures of the stuff we haven't done yet!! Maybe I should go around taking photos of all the unfinished stuff to shame me into getting motivated. We moved in on 30 June last year and at the time I wrote a list of stuff we still had to finish when we moved in. I looked at it the other day and we've only done about 1/3 of the jobs!! The inside is getting there, but the outside still has so much to do. We still haven't even done our bird boards around our eves (the roof carpenter was meant to do them but as he totally stuffed everything up he was kicked off site before they were done. DH didn't want to face doing them because it kept reminding him of the idiot roof carpenter and the stressful time we had). We've got open eves and none of our rafter tails have been painted. Our verandah still isn't lined or painted. Our gables are still raw hardiplank and need painting. Actually I might take a photo of the back of our place where the retaining walls need to be built. That is also where our patio/outdoor entertaining area will eventually go. Our owner-builder journey - viewtopic.php?f=38&t=45187 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Door progress update 106Jun 20, 2013 12:52 pm TamK Hi Tracy, thanks for posting. Yep, it's heaps of hard work, I'm totally over it and would never owner build again!! I've actually been silently following your thread for a few weeks as you're just in the next suburb to us. I LOVE your floor plan and all your colour choices. We also have the Caesar Stone Ice Snow in our bathrooms and I love it. Your kitchen will look gorgeous. I love my Ilve free standing stove, and I think they look great in black. The only thing that I would say I don't like about it is it's a little bit of a pain to clean the stove top. The cast iron trivets on the top are really heavy so it's a bit of a pain lifting them all off to clean every time, but once they're off the stainless top wipes clean fairly easily. We've got a different model to yours though and your trivets don't look quite as chunky or heavy as ours. We went on a holiday where they had an electric stove with flat glass top and it was soooo easy and quick to wipe clean, but my DH and I still both agreed that we much prefer cooking on a gas top so will put up with the cleaning. We also got the tepinyaki plate in the middle. I love having it, its so great for cooking lots of stuff on and I use it all the time, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to clean. It's black all the time and looks a bit skanky but I've finally given up trying to make it look clean. My DH says it just looks 'seasoned'. . I know what you mean about cleaning the stove top. In our rental we have an electric stove top. It's absolutely terrible to cook with but ever so easy to clean! I know our stove top will probably just look dirty all the time but I'm looking forward to cooking with gas again, so much better. We just got the 6 burner model as I couldn't see myself trying to keep that tempiyaki plate clean. I can see how it could come in handy though! We are debating whether to have it on legs or build a plinth for it to stand on. I think a plinth would be great cos no mess underneath but also I like the look of it as freestanding. Did u guys build the plinth yourself? Your block is beautiful! But the whole hills area is beautiful hey! Why doesn't everyone want to live here? We only moved here in August from the northern suburbs and are so happy we did. I'm going to have to go back now and check out your bathroom bench tops to see how the ice snow came out, ha ha! My build thread: viewtopic.php?f=31&t=64437 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Door progress update 107Jun 20, 2013 2:14 pm Here's a close up of the ice snow on our vanity. We were tossing up whether to leave the stove on legs but then we decided we didn't want stuff getting underneath it so we put it on a plinth. The kitchen company who made our kitchen cupboards made it (out of the same materials that the kick boards are made out of) and my DH installed it. We've got white kickboards too so the plinth just blends in and you don't notice it. I love living in the hills too, I love all the mature trees and don't think I could go back to living in a practically tree-less suburb. I also love the fact that it's a bit like living in the country (our next door neighbour even hand rears orphaned lambs) but we're still so close to the city. Its a great lifestyle for kids. My DH grew up on a 5acre property in the hills, but I grew up near the river in Shelley. We used to live on a 300m2 block for 5 years and DH just about went mental. He likes being outside and kept doing bog laps around our tiny block. We moved into this place (into the little old cottage that's now demolished) just over 5 yrs ago. It is mighty hot in summer though and those morning summer easterlies just about blow us away! It'll be nice when we have a pool to cool off. Our owner-builder journey - viewtopic.php?f=38&t=45187 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Door progress update 108Jun 20, 2013 3:40 pm Thanks for that. I'm still pretty happy with the ice snow, even though I have seen it since in Macca's! Yes, I agree, country living but so close to the city! My hubby and I are both from the country so appreciate the small town feel of Kalamunda. My build thread: viewtopic.php?f=31&t=64437 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 110Jan 31, 2014 2:52 pm Well its been 7 months since my last update and Im happy to report we've actually had a lot of progress. We can finally see the dim light at the end of the tunnel and feel confident that by the end of 2014 we might actually have our house finished, 4 years after we started it. Since our last update, we finally finished the skirting boards. Doesn't sound like a big job but it took us about 5 weekends by the time DH cut them, I painted them, we installed them, then gap filling, re-painting, re-cutting in the wall colour. We're please with the end results and it really finishes off the house. After finishing the skirting boards I was then able to go around and patch all the chips in our walls and do a final touch-up of all the wall paint. We also finally put the kick-boards in the kitchen so our kitchen is finally complete. Once we'd done the skirtings we decided that we could convert our gamesroom from a workshop into a proper games room. We started with a room that looked like this: It took many many weekends of cleaning out, selling our excess furniture, patching and painting, but we finally converted it into a games room. It's an L-shaped room and the bigger area we will have as a home theatre/TV area. We still have to buy and entertainment unit and TV which will go against the dark grey feature wall. The smaller L section of the room we have done as an activity area. We have a desk along the end wall with 2 work stations, and cabinetry along the other wall which contains a wall bed so we can use the room as an extra guest room. Of course DH wanted to install the cabinetry/desk/wall bed himself and it came in 1000 pieces. It wasnt flat packed and he had to go to the cabinet makers factory to see on their computer how it was machined so he could fit it back together again. Such a fiddly job which took 2 more weekends. We also built a climbing wall which the kids helped with. Once the games room was finished we were able to move the furniture into it that we had stored in our guest room and then finish off our proper guest room. We also finished off our entry (bought a blanket box to use as a shoe storage bench seat) and bought a hall table off gum tree. Oh and we finally finished off our fireplace. We re-painted it a darker shade and DH laid some marble tiles in front for the hearth instead of having cardboard. So the only job we have left to do inside is DH is going to build me a big window seat under our bay window in the meals area. 2014 is going to be the year of the outside. I'll write another post about all our progress on the outside over the last 2 months. Our owner-builder journey - viewtopic.php?f=38&t=45187 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 111Jan 31, 2014 3:20 pm In June we accepted a quote for getting retaining walls built at the rear of our house and signed up for a pool. We then had to wait until November for the ground to dry out so they could build the walls. Just after the pool was installed we had overseas family staying with us for 6 weeks so we were too busy to be able to get much done. DH installed the pool fence and that was a really fiddly job because of the curved wall. I think it took him 7 days all up because he could only do a little bit at a time due to being so busy. He's just started the paving last weekend. He's hoping to finish it over the next 2 weekends which will be awesome. We're getting a bit sick of the beach experience with all the sand. There's so much sand in the pool it will be nice to finally vacuum it all out and not get more in. Now that we've had the walls built we are going to build a patio/bbq area out from the bay window. We can't wait to get an outdoor living area. In April/May we will also plant lots of bushes in our terraced retaining wall area. The idea is to plant mainly native bushes that grow to the height of the walls. That way they will camouflage the walls and soften them without blocking our view of the creek when we're sitting up the top. We've got LOTS of gardening to do! Our owner-builder journey - viewtopic.php?f=38&t=45187 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 112Jan 31, 2014 7:23 pm Amazing, it's come together beautifully Custom Farmhouse Build in the Great Southern | https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=67188 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 113Jan 31, 2014 8:09 pm Oh WOW!! You certainly have been busy!! I love your skirting boards, they match perfectly with your cornice. And the floor boards are gorgeous!! What an impressive yard you have…all those lovely curved retaining walls and grand steps going down. You must be so pleased! I love the games room that seems to have so many uses….great planning! My husband and I ask ourselves the question "What on earth are we going to do with our time once we have completely finished building?" It has consumed us for three years and the lifestyle we had pre-build is a distant memory lol!! Though he has been talking recently about buying a block of land in Nth QLD to build a shed that we can holiday in….he's a keen fisherman and loves the Barrier Reef. I on the other hand am not so keen to jump into another project - especially one that's almost 3000km away arrrgggggghhh!!! LOL Thanks for the update - well done!! Owner Building on 1800sqm Sanity Intact so far Locked up March 2012 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 114Jan 31, 2014 9:29 pm Love it all especially the climbing wall - I'm going to make sure DS doesn't see a photo of that <!-- l --><a class="postlink-local" href="https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=62083">viewtopic.php?t=62083</a><!-- l --> Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 115Jan 31, 2014 10:28 pm That is one awesome retaining wall. Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 116Feb 01, 2014 2:11 pm Thanks Sammi_O. Its getting there VERY slowly. I checked out your thread- I can't believe how quick your build is!!! I had to have a bit of a chuckle that you said your brickies were slow and steady when they took 2 or 3 weeks. It took my DH 6 months to lay the bricks for our house. Mind you it is double brick with brick internals and he was mainly doing it on weekends. Still think I had the slowest brickie ever! I love your raked ceiling in the meals/living area with the highlight windows. What a feature. I wish we had done that. Thanks AKB. The climbing wall is a huge hit with all the cousins too but I didn't realise how filthy and chipped the wall would get. Now DH wants to get more hand holds and extend it around the corner onto the other wall. Perth_Euro - yep, the walls are very much in your face aren't they. We're really hoping that once the terraces are planted up and the garden established it will camouflage the walls a bit and it won't look so wall-y. I love having the stairs though. Much safer than sliding on your bum down the embankment to get to the grass and creek down below. Thanks Lynny-Jane. I think I would shoot my hubby if he suggested a project like that 3000km away! We've got so many projects planned for the outside of our place around the block that i don't think we will ever run out of jobs to do on the weekends. I'm keen to go on more holidays now that the pressure is off and we will have a bit more free time. Oh, and DH still has to build his new shed so that will probably be his big project for 2015. Patio and garden this year, shed and driveway next year. Our owner-builder journey - viewtopic.php?f=38&t=45187 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 117Feb 01, 2014 7:33 pm I'm definitely too impatient for an OB build then!!! It's all about perspective huh Custom Farmhouse Build in the Great Southern | https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=67188 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 118Feb 02, 2014 12:05 pm You guys continue to amaze me! The skirting boards are lovely. I spent 20 hours just prepping and painting the skirting boards in our bedrooms alone. Havent worked up the energy to start on the living areas yet! Now that is some serious retaining walls. Will look fab once they are filled with plants! And beautiful pool. Must have been lovely spending time in there over this summer. Well done, it all looks great. Time for a well deserved holiday i think! My build thread: viewtopic.php?f=31&t=64437 Re: Another OB in Perth Foothills...Finishing the inside & G 119Feb 07, 2014 11:22 am wow - I didn't login for a while and look what you've done - it looks beautiful - impressed Preliminary agreement 23/11 Contract 22/03 Prestart 06/04 - finalised on 30/04 Unconditional approval 10/05 Demolition 05/07 Slab 26/08 Brickwork 13/09-06/10 Roof frame started 07/10 viewtopic.php?f=31&t=32292 Building Standards; Getting It Right! Don't think they are designed for double brick. WA has a particular way of building and unfortunately that's the way a large amount of sills are finished. 3 7014 Hi, Apologies - I know there is plenty out there on this but struggling to put together the puzzle. We're planning our garage/external laundry to master bedroom and… 0 11123 I am not sure whether Perth has its own way of doing things in regards to this. Most of Perth has class A (sandy soil), except for some areas near rivers or hills. 2 13107 |