Tapped out.

Visited the house today, and the most noticeable thing is that the plumbers have been back to do the fit off. Toilets, taps and showers have been installed.

Mixer tap with veggie sprayer was part of the promotion we received

Simple spout in the laundry

Bathroom is coming together.
Need to check whether the spout comes out of the wall far enough!

Shower in the main bathroom

Dunny. (As if you didn't know)

We left a note for plumber to put the rail up a bit higher,
due to the height of one of the owners....

Looks much better than the last time we saw this!

A couple of people have asked about the shed we are building in the back yard. The slab is down, however We've asked the shed people to hold of the construction as we needed to check the fence situation. The concreters put the slab too damn close to the fence line, so we want to check whether the fence needs to go up first.

It turns out that the fencers can put up the fence anyway with some mucking around, so the shed will go up soon.

Need to get started on the retaining wall soon....

Lights are on, but no-one is home!

Quite a few photos for you all today, as we haven't had a chance to do an update for a few days.

The new shed out the back is progressing - slab should be down soon. Not sure what we will do with all the extra dirt which has been excavated, but some of it will be used to level the yard.

Tiler has been busy, power is on at the house (the lights and power points work), and the sewer and storm water have been connected.

We have some small problems, but should be able to get them sorted out in conjunction with the Site Supervisor. Hope you like the photos!

Crushed rock in preparation for the shed slab

Footings for the shed

Storm water pit - in the background you can see the storm water connection against the column

Love the tiles in the downstairs power room!

Lights are on, but no one is home. There's a small problem with these lights...

Laundry tiles

Door furniture has been delivered

Ensuite - with the waterproof membrane applied in the shower space.
M&M have yellow, we have grey. Fair enough - no such thing as a grey M&M.

The main bathroom

Toilet floor. Yes, taking photos of a dunny floor. Seeking help very soon.

This is the back of the garage, through the stair windows. See the damaged tiles? They will be replaced.

Stairs and Benchtops

Today the plumbers were on site installing downpipes and flashing on the garage roof on the outside, and putting in the waste connections for the bath and vanities inside.

We took the opportunity to get some stair photos, and realised that the Quantum Quartz benchtops have also been installed. Very nice. Colour? Coral Reef (because I knew that you would ask!) Oh, and the stairs are "Woodcare New Maple".

The benches are covered - I moved this piece for the photo

We decided to also cover the sink after this picture was taken

Stairs (oh, really?)

Stairs - and footprints. The painter told us that the clear coat on the stairs sets very hard.

Downpipes installed...

...and again. Plumbers left the top window open.

What the hell are these wires?

Yesterday was a big day on the site. After the Easter break it was time for everyone to get back into the most important job in Geelong - building our home.

Yesterday was also a little different for us, as we spent the day working on the site to install some wiring. More info on that later.

The scaffolding in now up, in readiness for the the brickies to start their assault on the upper level. The plumbers were also on site yesterday doing all the internal work. Now that the scaffolding is up, getting into the place becomes more of a challenge!




Home wiring for sound, data and video

One of the things that we decided to do was to try and "future-proof" the home as much as possible. When building a new home, you would like to have all sort of things available in the house to cater for the future - for example, the ability to be able to watch TV in any room, the ability to be able to watch Foxtel in every room, a home computer network, phones where you need them and so on.

With one of us being a "nerd" (that's Bernadette's technical term for someone who works in the IT industry), it was decided by said "nerd" that we needed to have some cool wiring.

The idea was simple - we wanted to have the ability to have everything in every room!

Normally to achieve what we want, you would run a coax for TV to every room, some Category 5 data cable to every room, and a phone line to every room. This can be done with a solution such as the Clipsal Starserve or the Hills Home Hub, and these were investigated - in fact we nearly went with the Hills solution.

A friend of ours (Adrian) is in the antenna business, and also does some home wiring work as part of his service - usually because people want to see TV in every room. Adrian mentioned that he recently installed a different system, and suggested that I check it out.

Our Home Network

The selected home network is a little different - only one type of cable is run to any point which is capable of being used for either phone, data, video or audio. The down side is that the cable you need to run is more expensive than the standard cable.

It works like this - say you have a bedroom with a couple of outlets. Using the system you can plug a tv into one outlet and a phone into the other. If your needs change, you can unplug the tv, and use the same outlet for a data port to get access to the internet. This is done by using adapter cables and changing a couple of jumper cables in the control box.

The diagram below gives you a basic idea.



So, yesterday we wired the house with the network cable, and also put some speaker wire into various places in the home. The required cable comes on a 300 metre drum, and is pretty darn expensive - however the 300 metres did all the outlets I needed, plus a few more that I put in to use up the cable. The cable is rated for data speeds in excess of what is currently available on normal data cable - it's 4 pair shielded and is essentially about the best you can get.

I will draw up a diagram of all the outlets and put it up here if anyone is interested.

The speaker cable was run for the home theatre, al fresco area, and family room - some of it may not be used initially, but if it's in the walls it's easy to hook it up later.

Time for pictures:


The above picture shows all the cables from rooms in the house coming back into a central point where the box will be housed. Also visible is the TV antenna cable, and the phone cable which will feed into the box. Foxtel and other devices with AV outputs can be modulated (turned into TV channels) and sent anywhere in the house - along with infra-red remote control!



The picture above shows some speaker wire in the roof of the al fresco area - the idea here is that we may run some outdoor speakers to this area, so having the cable in the roof makes it a whole lot easier later.

Sorry for the long post - we thought it may be of interest, and I'm happy to answer questions about the home networking product.

Thanks

Special thanks to Adrian at Austech Antennas for his help with the wiring and for installing our brand new antenna.

Special thanks also to Ed for making the trip from Melbourne to help out with the wiring, and coming up with a couple of brilliant ideas. Much appreciated.

Frame / Plumbing / Gutters.

Well, after being away for a few days, we thought we had better go around and see how things were progressing.

We fully expected to see the roof trusses on, but were surprised by some of the other things which have been happening. Check the photos!

Street View

Scaffolding Up - waiting on tiles.


Rear View - Building site has been cleaned up.

Upstairs Access

Plumbing is in - ensuite here

Main bathroom plumbing

Alfresco is now obvious

Gutters and Fascias. Did we choose those colours? Seems like a long time ago.

Windows delivered.

It seems that all the plumbing has been put in, an if you enlarge the photos you can see the green coloured pipes to the dunnies (huh, what's that? Ok darling) ummm "Toilets", which come from the tank.

The gas pipes are in, including the oversized pipe to the alfresco (that's for 'ron).

Everything is all set for the roofers, and I'd say we are now waiting on roofing tiles to be delivered.

Plumbers crack!

Today the Plumbers did a cracking good job, and put in the wastes and storm water for the house. At this rate, I'll have to update the blog twice a day (kidding - I wouldn't do that to you!).

Another landscape picture:





Thanks for the kind comments everyone (or almost everyone....)