Digest, From 15 to 24 days in

 Concrete piers, temporary power pole and slab reo delivered.

Within two weeks of the start date there is a temporary electricity pole, concrete piers have been poured and some steel re-enforcing has been delivered to site.

A few people I've spoken to say the soil where we live is "suboptimal" (they use a different S word).  The engineers must agree, and have specified 41 450mm diameter piers of depths more than a meter.

The site supervisor said the slab would be down about 3 weeks after the start date.

Pipes in

 All in order too... no missing wastes for the downstairs shower.

Slab form work started.

A lot of wafflepods.  You'd think they were building my house out of Styrofoam!

A hole heap of sand as well... You would never have thought sand would make a good material to put a concrete slab on.

Slab form work ready to go.

Got a call soon after taking this photo from the supervisor telling me the slab would be poured the next day.

Slab done next day.

I turned up in the morning to see them start pouring...  Didn't take any photos as I was in a hurry for work.  In the afternoon, on the way home, it's done.

It's quite a tall slab.  300mm of waffle pods and 100mm (minimum) of concrete on top of them.  My 650 high retaining wall is only 250mm higher than the floor level.  You probably can't see in these photos, but the left of the block is higher than it was.  Finished ground height on that side will be only slightly lower than the neighbors.  Previously there was a brick retaining wall there.  It's also probably not clear that we dropped the garage by 300mm.  The finished ground height at the garage is slightly higher than the neighbors on the right.  Minimal retaining... yay.

The next day, dirt's been pushed up for better drainage.  Now it doesn't  so it doesn't look so high

Stuff on site

Supervisor says the frames will be up in 9 days.  A whole heap of material has bee dropped off.  There is a lot there.

I can't fit it all in one picture

My guess is that the frames on the concrete are for the ground floor (they look 2700mm wide).  The big pile of frames is for upstairs.  There is also various steel beams, (painted the same colour as the frames?) particle board for floors and other bits and pieces.

T plus 6 days: Site cut, retaining wall done.

I arrived at the site 7:30am on the start date to meet the supervisor. The toilet was already there, and it looked like they had nearly finished the site cut.

Talking to the neighbour it turns out they'd started just after 6:30am.

Once the house pad had been cut, the site was handed to me to erect a retaining wall. It took four days of solid labour from me, and a couple of days from my mate Paul to build.  We had no machinery, and 8 hours of that was spent digging holes with a shovel and another 16 digging and moving dirt. Without Paul's help I probably would never have finished it.

It's only OK for DIY...  A little untidy up close, but it should last a few years.    Total cost in materials was under $1000.

After expending all that effort, it'd be shame to knock the retaining wall down... but that's my plan.  I was going to spend big up-front and get a massive concrete construction straight away, but thought better of it at the last minute.  There is a clause in the builders specification that said if they damaged the retaining its my responsibility to fix it.  More importantly, when the house is finished I'll have a better understanding of how it will fit in to the other landscaping.

Countertops, Carpets and all the other surfaces

There are a lot things to choose.  Roofing, cladding, flooring, paint, taps etc etc etc ... heaps of stuff.  For a large builder like Coral Homes, you get sent through their "Colour Selection" appointment to pick everything, and for Coral Homes' this is only half a day. We got an indication of what the standard inclusions were before we'd even paid the initial deposit, and we spent a bit of time researching and picking just before the appointment. It was still a bit too short if you ask me and we went over time by about 20 minutes.

Here is a photo of some outside stuff...

We only took photos of the outside stuff as they let us take home samples of everything but the bricks and the roof tiles.


An interesting observation I've heard from others is that when you build with a large building company, the house is not yours, as you only get to select from the things they are prepared to put in your house.   Others had said it's just an up-sell session to get more cash out of us.  It's correct that they had a limited range but I was glad we were not burdened with too much choice.  You could spend years selecting exactly the right things, and still not be 100% happy.  I also didn't feel any pressure from the consultant to "go big".


After we'd finished the "Colour Selection" we went straight to an electrical appointment where we chose switches, lights, fans and fittings and the places they would go.  We've gone for down lights in the lounge/family room, but that's it.  Everywhere else is a pendant, batten or a fan light combo.  By the end of it, we were under the amount of money set aside in the contract, but just before we signed, we realized we needed outside electrical connections for air conditioners. These pushed us over quite a bit.