Browse Forums Building A New House Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 285Jul 25, 2013 2:34 pm Mars we have had a couple of "indications" but still waiting on definite costs. Until we get the exact costing's we can't go forward, not sure when we will get the costing's but I wish they would hurry up so we can get on with our life. In regard to Carpet Call, from what I have heard, the 'colour girls' will either give your the man's phone number or he will call you to arrange an appointment, I think it is the Seven Hills store.... Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 286Jul 25, 2013 5:01 pm carak777 Mars we have had a couple of "indications" but still waiting on definite costs. Until we get the exact costing's we can't go forward, not sure when we will get the costing's but I wish they would hurry up so we can get on with our life. In regard to Carpet Call, from what I have heard, the 'colour girls' will either give your the man's phone number or he will call you to arrange an appointment, I think it is the Seven Hills store.... Hi carak, Still check in every now and them so have caught up with your progress. Hopefully kurmond won't add to much to the tender, we have 11ft ceilings to our kitchen, family, rumpus, study and alfresco and they do look amazing. I know it didn't add much to our tender, so hoping it won't be to over budget. I hope it all works out ok, thinking of you and sending hugs Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 287Jul 25, 2013 5:09 pm Hi Gogo thanks for the hugs... Fingers crossed it will be affordable and we can take the next step SOON. Your house is amazing, not quite sure ours will be THAT amazing but hopefully the views will help to add a bit of omph. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 288Jul 28, 2013 8:35 pm Hi all, Did bricks again today. We have changed our minds in regards to brick and wanted to choose one that isn't a slurry brick. I am too worried about chipping and loosing colour. So, this weekend we we t to all three brick centres with kids in tow, oh what weekend. Kids loved it, but Mum & Dad was very over it by the end. We also place restrictions on ourselves as we don't want extra expense for the bricks so we only looked at bronze range for the main house and looked at others for the feature at the front on the porch. We Are thinking of instead of moroka (sp?) finish we will use a different brick. So today we decided on the following Main brick - Boral - Mineral Feature - Austral - Braham Granite if this is too much we will stick with Mineral for the whole house. Gutters/garage/fascia/Downpipes - monument Windows - think it is called charcoal, which ever is closest to monument Roof - Gunmetal So, think we have the colour sorted on the outside, before we have the tender. Our final plan should come tomorrow, once we are happy with that they will finalise the tender. We checked out our block yesterday and the kids had a ball, of course they had to find the dirt and sand pile, and proceeded to be covered from head to toe in sand. My 5 yr old must have felt like home as he took his shoes off to play in the sand and we spent 10mins looking for them. The block needs a lawn mow and it looks like we will need some retaining walls on the left side,bugger, an expense I was hoping not to occur. I have a photo of the brick selection that I will upload later when get a chance to remember how. Hope everyone else had a lovely weekend, talk soon Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 290Jul 29, 2013 9:57 am Upsize, The colour combination looks good. I'm always a bit wary with combining different brick colours, however your mineral / braham granite combo looks perfect. I hope Kurmond won't have an issues using 2 different sources and brick types. Why not just render the porch? Btw, what colour pool are you going with? I think the Blue Grey Starlight would look great with your brick colour. Are you also going with the Travertine tiles? Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 291Jul 29, 2013 10:29 am UpsizeTime your brick colours, plus the other external colours, look great. Not sure what would be more difficult, deciding on 2 bricks or deciding on a moroka colour perhaps bricks might be easier You are very brave people going to the 3 brick centres with your children, I find them very, very boring, congratulations on having such wonderful children. So good to hear that you can go onto your land now, certainly would make you feel 'at home'. Good luck with the final plan, you are certainly on the way. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 292Jul 30, 2013 9:51 pm Mars, yes we took ages trying to pick the bricks, and limiting it to colour through bricks in the bronze range was hard. Our feature bricks is not from bronze and if we use it will depend upon K and the price given and yes if having a different supplier is an issue. I would hope the supplier isn't an issue considering we are given three options. We will be happy if we only use the mineral brick, it is a really nice brick so either way we a good. My DH is against painting the front bricks, he doesn't like the look if it isn't properly rendered, and to do that is very pricey. With the pool we mostly likely are going with Bermuda blue, I can't get away from the tradition blue colour of the pool, and yes we are using travertine tiles around the copping. We might even use it for the surrounds, this depends on price etc. there is so much! Carak, LOL the brick places boring, the kids find them fun. They are going through a star wars phase, so they ran around the paths and pretended to be Jedi fighting and flying from planet to planet. our middle child pretended any terracotta roof tile was earth and loved climbing them. also, Austral is very clever and has a play ground, so we kept that to last. Apparently according to my sauger we are having pink and purple bricks. It was very exciting to walk our dirt! Have a query though, on our block we have a storm water access point, a sewer access, and then we have this grate with a storm water drain. The drain is about 1000 by 500 approximate, I have never seem them on a block before. It wasn't only ours though, the block next door and behind had the same thing? In terms of our build it shouldn't make a big deal as it is the back left and it will be near our pool equipment, I think it is a more gardening issue and maybe safety with the kids (probably over thinking it). I have rung our solicitor to make enquiries for us buried am baffled why it would be there, any ideas? Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 293Jul 31, 2013 8:33 am UpsizeTime I now know that if I have to go to brick places I should wear my hair in rolls over my ears just like Princess Leia - what a great idea . Great to see that your children haven't lost the ability to create characters and play, so many these days (oh no I am starting to sound like my mother) would just prefer to 'play' inside on the xbox etc. In regard to the drain, will it be a problem with your swimming pool being so close? Must admit, I have not idea's when it comes to drains and pipes etc. How are the plans going? Have you received them yet? Looking forward to seeing what you next step is. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 294Aug 01, 2013 11:46 pm Plans & tenders are doing my head in! Feels like we are going in circles, and no where fast. Feels like I am asking the same thing over and over again. I ended up having enough of it today and called P, and he has sorted it in 1 day, we still have questions but meeting him on Sunday to go through. I think knowing exactly what we want and having my long detail list of what we want seems to be too hard. To me it is clearly layed out but things continually are left off or misunderstood. We just don't want to see additional costs later down the track. Electrical or otherwise! I want it all upfront. I am impressed that P has sorted it so quickly and is willing to discuss further with us. Lets hope Sunday all gets sorted. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 295Aug 02, 2013 9:41 am Hey Upsize, I hear you! I'm still trying to sort out the NBN connection. Kurmond need to provide a conduit with a drawstring from the pit in the street to the garage. NBN Co then pull the fibre through at the time of install. They don't seem to understand this. If I didn't pick this up, I'd be digging a trench myself after handover! Good luck on Sunday! We've just received our contract in the mail. EDIT: Oops...Confirmed that NBN will dig the trench. So much misinformation out there. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 296Aug 02, 2013 5:10 pm Interesting Mars as that is one of our additions on my list, has been there since the beginning and being left out, how much did they charge for that? Also, do you know how much an additional TV point is? We need two more but unsure how much, a friend from a different company cost the $75. Curious to what kurmond charge? Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 297Aug 02, 2013 5:24 pm UpsizeTime understand COMPLETELY about going around in circles. So, so tired of asking the same questions and getting no answer. Or asking questions that get a reply, that makes not sense, so you have to ask again and again and again. Just want to get on with building but these questions have to be answered before we can go forward. Very, Very upsetting. Agree completely that we (all of us) need to know cost's up front so we don't get any additional costs later. If the bank has approved your loan for a certain amount, that is what you have to spend, money doesn't just appear out of thin air if all of a sudden there are additional cost. Good luck on Sunday... by the looks of things everyone will have started building before we get anwsers.... Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 298Aug 03, 2013 6:37 pm Hi everyone... thought I would pop in.... My Dear Carak, I am so sorry you're still fighting the good fight... hang in there luv.... I am sure after all this everything will work out... I am praying for you.... Hey Upsize I can't remember how much the additional tv points were, we had heaps in ours (total of 5) as we had one in 3 of the bedrooms plus HT and living. I would check with your Sentinel appointment or speak to them. I think from memory we swapped some things around. I think we had more phone connections than we needed as we have cordless so I think we swapped one over for a tv point. Sentinel were great, they forgot to set up our aerial and the guy had to come in and fix that up, which was lucky in the end as he then gave us a tutorial on the alarm etc as we upgraded ours to perimeter so we can have all doors and windows alarmed at night and still move around the house. While he was here he checked the sensors, as we have 10ft ceilings the sensors were not appropriate. basically in order to activate properly, they would need to sit 1/2 way up the wall as they were too far away to pick up properly - especially the distance of our garage which is 4 garages long. He said we only had the basic sensors installed (which I would not have expected anything else really), and he came back a few days later and changed every sensor to the top of the line which flash red as soon as you appear - no cost!!! So great. He was really nice - Anyway, keep this in mind if you have more than average height ceilings, make sure you also have appropriate alarm sensors to cater for the additional distance your ceilings make. Hey Mars, your feature tile I think is the same as in our main bathroom and your wall tiles look very similar also - very nice taste... Bugger on the bamboo.... they didn't have this as an option when we built I definitely would have done it if it was although DH was against Bamboo, I probably could have swung it had it been part of the build... would have saved a lot of headaches post build as we did our own tiling, although I am loving my porcelain tiles (except I still don't know how to clean them)... ANYWAY, Carak, I haven't posted any photo's yet because to be honest our house is no different to what the photo's showed 4 months ago, although today I had my first lot of shutters installed, our master, ensuite, DS's room and main bath (aka Ds's ensuite as it's 3 way) and the large window in the rumpus (aka DS's play room). So thought I would share as it's the first real change to the house for us (everything is too expensive and is going to take a while). No garden as DH is a horticultralist and says he wont plant or turf until spring as if he does it now our lawn will go brown and our plants will struggle - so come on spring... I want some green... although he did plant trees but they are disidous (pear trees I think).. so still no green.. just big twigs... lucky we have our own nursery, they are like fully grown already, at least that's one good thing... Anyway here are some pics of my new shutters: DS's Bedroom (Still need to put up his art work so walls are looking a bit bland still) Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Our Master Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r590/Lilac500/master2open_zpsdc7283c1.jpg Master Ensuite Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r590/Lilac500/ensuite2_zpse7d4229c.jpg Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r590/Lilac500/ensuite4_zps96d7918d.jpg Main bathroom http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r590/Lilac500/mainbath_zps3916d69f.jpg Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Rumpus shutters Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Back yard from rumpus (BTW the cones are for our Ds's race track for his pee wee... love all the space. We put translucent rollers on the stackers http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r590/Lilac500/backyard_zps2dd6ccca.jpg kitchen/rumpus (Note: I am in the middle of cooking good old bubble and squeak.. so it is a working kitchen, please ignore the mess... also the stools are from our old place and will be replaced with white/stainless bar stools in the near future so no they are not a permanent fixture but will do for now and finally, the open space between the couch and kitchen will host our round dinner table that DH has lost the screws to so can't put back together... Not sure exactly when this might happen, but I am hoping soon as already for the past 4 months we have been eating on our lap.... http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r590/Lilac500/kitchen_zps904d7ffe.jpg Anyway - that's all - I will post again when there is something to see.... probably another 6 months..... Hope everything starts moving forward for you all look forward to seeing your progress. Blog: http://cbcbuild.blogspot.com.au/ Building Thread: https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=62155 Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 299Aug 04, 2013 11:39 am Hi all, We are waiting on the preliminary plans so not much progress. To upsizetime - does your land slope to the street or to the rear? Do you have an easement on your land? The drain may be at the "head" of a drainage line and the line flows off through other properties. If you pm me a copy of your deposited plan and a picture of the drain I will be able to tell. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 300Aug 04, 2013 6:12 pm Love your house Lilac, can't wait to be at that stage. Beanzy, our land slopes ever so gentlly away from the street. I think it is catch all storm water running down the back. Can't do anything about it just was curious. Meet with P from Kurmond, he was good, went through everything, felt for D as he was there also and knows we went above him. Price and other things added to plan as requested, so most stuff is included in tender, bar a handful of electrical items. Also, NBN is left out to as don't think he knows what to quote for it, he suggested better leaving it for R. Plans get finalised tomorrow and then if all ok sign off time and bank time for Money!!! And guess what out bank manager is overseas, I told him we should organise before he went, but he thought we would be ok. Fingers crossed everything is right tomorrow and then contracts. What do I need to look out for there? Oven beeping time for me to go. Have a lovely night all. Ask for references and speak to them. If they are defensive or try to avoid the request, walk. 1 74688 I would never build with Fowler homes. I built with them in 2021 and till date maintenance issues are pending. All their existing trades and businesses don't work with… 14 105490 Hi there! Putting the feelers out there for those who have (or almost) built with Arli homes! Interested in your experiences who've built from their stock home designs… 0 23465 |