Return to Sender....

Modern technology makes it easier for us to stay connected with friends and family... These days, It's much quicker and easier for us to pick up our IPhones and send a text or write an email instead of sending a card or a letter in the post.... I'm guilty of doing all of that myself! But how lovely is it to receive anything in your mail box that is not. a. bill!!!! I am guilty of not really sending much in the post these days, besides my Christmas card every year and birthday cards to family interstate.... Perhaps I should change that...

When David and I were first married, I ordered us a return address stamp for all our correspondence. It came in handy when we sent out our "Thank You" cards after our wedding, and for Christmas cards, and all sorts of things.

Since we sold our home and moved, we have celebrated many occasions and so we have sent all kinds of things in the post - Christmas cards, Birthday invitations, Birth announcements, Christening invitations and Thank yous... Lots and lots of envelopes that required our return address on the back... But we were living in a short term rental and so there was just no point in having a new stamp made.

It became frustrating having to hand write each one (though, I do realise that I could have printed labels or something else but I didn't!!!!) and so knowing that we will soon have a new permanent address, I have been on the look out for a new return address stamp.

Our original one was purchased at Officeworks, and then sent away to be personalised, but I don't believe that they are available any longer - at least I couldn't find any when I looked there a while back. So, anyway, I thought I would have a look on Etsy! Well, I was SO excited to find so many pretty options! And they are all much, much nicer than the one we originally had!


Here are some that have caught my eye.....

 

 

Image and stamp from My Stamp

 

 

 

Image and stamp from savethedate

 

Image and stamp from NoteTrunk

 

 

 

Image and stamp from savethedate

 

 

 

Image and stamp from savethedate

 

 

 

 

 

Image and stamp from BearRubberStamps

 

 

 

Now just to make a decision on which one to order! Tough one!

 

 

Curious to know... How do you mark your envelopes with your return address? Do you have a return address stamp?

 

 

 

Teresa

 

A bit of a tour....

So I've been thinking... Here I am blogging about this build, and showing you a million pictures and you have NO idea what type of house we are building here!

So, I thought that now that the slab has been poured, It would be a good chance to show you what's going where downstairs... That will, at least give you some idea of what we are doing here...

As you have already seen in photos, the block is sloping up from the road, and has views. We wanted to take advantage of those views, and we also wanted to use the slope of the land to build our house, rather than carting away tonnes upon tonnes of dirt. After all, as I have always said, "It's our dirt. We paid for it, and why should we pay someone to dump it somewhere else if we don't have to!!!" So (I am rambling... sorry, I know) the front of the house is two stories and the back is single story. This has meant that even though we have had to remove some soil, we have not had to remove as much and as such our retaining costs have also been reduced. This project has taken us so long to properly start as the builders we had initially approached had wanted to dig far more than we had wanted, insisted that it would be ok... and then changed their minds when they put it on paper, and realised that over 2 metre retaining walls around the house would be required.... Time wasted! And end of my rant, ha!

Anyway, back to the layout. I've labelled a pic of the slab to show you what goes where! Downstairs is very basic... The entry, A spare bedroom with ensuite (just a toilet and hand basin), Double garage and stairs. The bonus of building this way has meant that we have a nice little storage area under the house. It's like a cellar I suppose. The floor is concreted as part of the slab and it will be accessed via a roller door, so we will be able to get big things in and out of there if we need.

Upstairs there is a balcony to take advantage of the views, four bedrooms with ensuite to main, a seperate lounge that we will use as a home theatre, open plan kitchen dining and family room, the laundry as well as a family bathroom of course! We have also taken advantage of the fact that we are building and so we have incorporated an under the main roof entertaining space out the back.

 

 

 

Well, I hope that has given you some insight in to our project....

 

Today the brick layers started on the back retaining wall. It's nice to see things constantly progressing!

 

 

Teresa

The Foundation

There are so many photos in this post... It took some time to get it together and finally..... it's complete!

This house feels like it is coming along in leaps and bounds....

It took so much time and effort in the planning stages, and I know that the actual build will be over before we know it....

On Thursday morning David got up bright and early and met the builder on site for the slab pour. He kindly took lots of photos for me to share with you, and was sending me progress shots on my phone so that I didn't miss much! I was at home, curled up in bed waiting for the kids to wake.

There was a hive of activity. The team putting in the rio had not completed the job, and so they were busy working on the back half of the block while the pour started at the front.

The foundations for the house were poured as well as the footings for the retaining wall which encircles the back of the house. There was a LOT of concrete. Bless all our new neighbours for putting up with all the trucks coming back and forth, and all the tradies' cars in the street...

Early morning... Guys getting the rio in at the back

 

The rio for the retaining wall

 

The first truck arrives

 

The concrete starts flowing

 

So much going on!

 

 

 

 

Slab for downstairs complete and pouing starts at the top.

 

Job done!

 

Now that the slab is poured - that main section at the bottom needs to sit for about 4 weeks before work can continue. There will still be work going on though! The blockwork for the retaining wall can begin, and so over the weekend some supplies were delivered and as far as I am aware, the bricks were being delivered this morning as well....

 

I think in my next blog post, I'll show you what I can of downstairs so that you can get a bit of a picture of what the house is going to look like... A bit of a house tour of sorts, I think!

 

Teresa

And so the work begins....

I don't think I've shown you a before picture of the block, so here it is!

 

This was the Real Estate photo from when we bought the block. I can't believe how green and lush it looked. It was nothing like this when we started excavating!

 

 

 

Excavating the block was a big job. It took several days to complete and I was quite worried while it was happening.

The block is sloping, and the soil reports we had completed prior to purchasing the block mention rock. Shale rock - which is apparently easy to break up, but there is still always the unknown. You hear horror stories about additional costs during builds, and this was one surprise that neither of us wanted to face.

Thankfully, the rock that they had to dig up was easy to break up and so there were no issues at all!

Here are some photos of the progress... I have narrowed it down to a few, because I know that these types of photos are boring, but necessary!

 Initial excavations complete!

 

 

Trenching for foundations begins

 

Plumbing for our downstairs toilet

 

All the trenching competed

 

 

This is what the block looks like at the moment. The guys did this work on a scorching mid 40 degree day last week.... The job isn't complete, so there will be a hive of activity tomorrow!

 

Preparations for the slab - Orange plasic and rio!

 

 

This week the slab will be poured! Such an exciting time for us.... Stay tuned for more piccies!!

 

 

 

 Teresa x

 

A Celebration!

 

The day before the build started we had a little ceremony!

 

We were excited about the excavations beginning and on my sister's recommendation we had a 'Turning The Soil' ceremony!

 

It had just poured rain for about 20 minutes before we got up there, so the kids stayed in the car and watched on...

 

 

Madeleine chose a special ribbon to decorate the spade.

 

 

The children watched on from the car

 

David dug up some dirt and we made a toast for good luck!

 

After all the bad luck we'd had, we needed to do this! It was lovely to go back up to the block just one more time to see it as it was - an untouched piece of land. Our piece of land. The place we just can't wait to call home.... We have some big plans for a vegie garden and chickens (we couldn't have either at our old home, as there just wasn't enough room) and the kids can't wait to have their cubby house back again.

 

 



Hi there!

Its been such a looooong time since I have blogged!

I decided to start blogging again because our build has finally started and I want to record the progress of our build, and I feel that this is the best place to do it... I will still blog some of the recipes that I am making as well, after all this blog was supposed to mainly be about food!

Today though, I'll give you a bit of a run down about what has happened with our build since I last posted -

Towards the end of 2011, when we thought we were almost ready to go to council with our second builder, we made a big decision not to continue with them... It wasn't an easy decision to make, but they weren't listening to what we wanted and we weren't willing to spend the amount of money that they were charging to not end up with what we were wanting...

And so, we told them where to go and hubby started talking to a builder friend about having him build our home for us.

He gave us the contact details for the architect he uses and we set about redesigning a home that would meet the needs of our little family. It took a lot more time than we had imagined, but we finally got there... council approved the build and just before Christmas our builder started cutting the block ready for our foundations! Exciting times!

Even the kids were excited

 

For the first few days I had to keep pinching myself... Was this really happening? You see, it had been 2 years 8 months and 15 days since we had purchased our land... We had moved house three times since (twice when I was pregnant) and had a new baby in that time....  That's a long time to wait, especially when we had started planning this build before we had sold our own home, thinking that it would mean only renting for a short period of time... maybe 8 mths? Our block is sloping, so we knew that this was not going to be an easy build, but never imagined that it would take such a long time to get anywhere.... In any case, we have learned a lot of lessons along the way, and we are just so happy to finally have started.

 

I hope that you'll follow our progress as we build our new home.

 

 

Teresa x