Kitchen Drawings and Developer Approval

Kitchen Drawings

We received our kitchen drawings from Timpelle Kitchens this week - they are great, no changes needed to be made.

One thing that was surprising was we thought that the kitchen bench with the waterfall was 40mm caesarstone, and the rest 20mm. However, they clarified for us that we will be getting 40mm caesarstone benchtops for the whole kitchen, and 20mm for the laundry and bathrooms. Love it!!

Here's a birds eye view of our kitchen :)

Birds Eye View - Kitchen

Developer Approval

Our Wisdom rep has informed us that our submission was approved by Macquarie Links, however she is still awaiting receipt of the paperwork before they can start on our DA pack, which will take 10 days to prepare. Hopefully she gets it today so we can get things moving and submit to council.

Slow progress..!

Cx

File Lodged To Developer

Just a quick one to say...

Wisdom have lodged our file with the Developer today!!!!!!!!!

10 day turnaround - then if all good, next up Council

YAHOO!

Cx

Progress!

It has been quite an eventful past couple of days for us! Everyone has got their variation estimates back to us for signing already, even when they estimated it would take a week. Love it, love it, love it!

Wisdom Internal/External Colours
Draft Colour Selection Sheet has been updated to include the variations we signed off last Friday

Carpet/Tiles/Flooring
Quote has come back for us to sign off on - we are going to visit one more time this weekend because I'm having second thoughts about the external tiles we have chosen (much to Pauly's dismay poor thing!)

Kitchen
This has come back already, our appointment was only last Friday!
We have now signed off on kitchen, and decided to leave the cupboards on one side of the oven, and to upgrade to flat stone drainage for the sink.
Now that we've signed off, they will start the kitchen drawings.

Electrical and Air Conditioning
Already signed off last week

Home Theatre
We contacted the Home Theatre rep that does Wisdom's installs, he was really nice and we've sent him a big email with our requirements and what we want estimated.
He said he would do a quote on supply & install, but also a quote on just install, which is great!


Today I had a call from our Wisdom rep who let me know that our plans have come back, and they should receive our BASIX assessment today and tomorrow she will be submitting to our Developer for approval!

EXCITED! What a huge moment!

Cx

Landscaping Appointment

Straight after our colour selection appointment, we met with Wisdom Landscapes to put together a landscaping plan to submit to the Developer.

To be completely honest - we had no idea what to expect, and no idea what we wanted. We were the exact opposite of the colour appointment where we already knew everything we wanted, and going into landscaping just had no idea!

Regardless, we weren't expecting things to be so bad - it turns out we need a retaining wall that is almost the entire length of house. 

You can see in the picture above that because they had to cut so much to comply with the driveway gradient regulations for council, we need a retaining wall to fill it. The Wisdom rep said that it would be around 0.8m high. I'm still a little confused about it at the moment, actually.

He also suggested (and we went with it) that we could fill where the laundry steps are, so that we could eliminate the steps and just walk out onto flat ground, which seems like a good idea, although it still seems expensive to do.

I also reshaped the driveway - there were a lot of corners and edges in the original design, so we kept tweaking it until we got smoother edges around. 

For our driveway we went with

Colour: Bluestone

Fill: Plain (no pattern)

Border: Large Tile

In the plan we also asked for gardens beds across the front, pebbles and pavers on the laundry side (blindside) of the house, letter box (per Macquarie Links specs) and a fold away clothesline.

We are worried about how much this is all going to come to - I found another fellow blogger who went with Wisdom Landscapes, and their plan looks a LOT less complex than ours, and they had come back with a $36,000 price which is not at all within the budget we had allocated to landscaping :(

Anyway, we should receive a copy of the plan next week, and apparently we'll get the estimates and costing in around 3 weeks time. It would have been nice to get it all done in the one hit, but it looks like it may not be possible and we'll just have to do the basics: driveway, retaining wall, letterbox and clothesline.

Cx

The Next Chapter

I'm pretty excited about the state of progress at the moment. We got a call from our new Customer Service Officer yesterday and we've confirmed Colour and Landscaping appointments for this Thursday. This is required for Developer Approval before it goes to council.

We are hoping to book in our Carpet/Tiling, Kitchen and Electrical appointments as well.

We've been advised that the timeline from here is something like the following:

• Developer Requirements
1. Landscaping Appointment -> Sign off on plans -> 5 working days to complete
2. Colour Appointment -> External Colour Palette Sign off
3. Then lodged to Developer for approval -> up to 10 working days for approval
• Council Requirements
1. Colour & Landscaping Appointments -> Sign off
2. DA Pack ordered -> 10 working days to complete
3. DA Lodgement to Council -> 4-8 weeks for approval (if no amendments required)
4. Waterboard Approval requested
5. Engineering drawings requested
6. Kitchen, Electrical, Tile/Carpet Appointments completed (in parallel to council lodgement)
7. DA Approval received -> Construction Certificate Lodged -> 2 weeks to receive
8. Pre-Tender Requested -> 5 working days to complete
9. Construction Plans Drawn -> 5 working days to complete
10. Construction Certificate received, Bank Documents received
11. File signed off to construction

That's a lot of steps now that I type all that up! Our CSO said that she would be in contact with us at least once a week to update us on the progress of our file, in particular she said that when our application is with Council she will call to check up on it weekly and then let us know how it's going, whether by a call or email. It will be nice to know we won't have to do any chasing around because they will keep us in the loop and not make us wait around during periods of inactivity.

So looking at those steps, we are looking at a time line no less than 2 months. It would be great to see a slab in November, I think that's my target. I'm not actually sure if that's achievable, but I will try to remain optimistic. As long as we don't delay the appointments and we choose everything we need to and sign off as soon as we can, then it's out of our hands and we just have to wait!

I'll try to get back on here next week and tell you how the colours went and what we've chosen!

Can you wish us luck again?!

Cx