Catch-up Blog 14: Decisions, Decisions... (Sept/Oct 2018)

While the plans were in with council, in September and into October we invested time in seemingly endless research, showroom visits, reviewing quotes, negotiating prices and making decisions… so many decisions to make at this point; garage door, bench-tops, vanities, toilets, bath, showers, taps, mixers, sinks.. cabinets and cupboards, kitchen and laundry appliances, handles...  the list goes on and on..  the whole process was both exciting and time consuming.

When Alessandra arrived in October we drove around together looking at the options and comparing pricing…  We have locked down as much as we can with deposits in place to hold pricing, and left the goods with the suppliers so we don’t have to find temporary storage for them. 

Making these key decisions up front, under less pressure and stress was fun, and deciding early helped us be 100% clear on layout for the plumbing in the slab, loads for electrical design etc...  

Another axiom for building (for projects, and for life…) is that pretty much everything is interdependent, so making the decisions we could up front gave us confidence for making many downstream decisions as we started the build that otherwise would have been - I don’t know, resulting in potential complications, costs, lost time and stress based decisions down the track. 

We have also sourced ex-demolition kitchen and pantry cabinet carcasses to fit, constructed from native timber instead of melamine, that we will up-cycle with the addition of some elbow grease and updated hardware like runners and hinges. 

At the same time we have been very lucky to source, through local friends and family, enough good quality recycled native timber for our benchtops, vanity tops and some other interior joinery like window seats, shelves, coffee tables etc... 

Alessandra, John and Andrew have a sizeable interior joinery project ahead of them that runs in parallel with the house build, to fit out the kitchens, pantry, bathrooms and laundry with handcrafted rather than mass produced joinery... 

John has the skills and the equipment to help us, we will contract out some tasks like benchtop lamination to joiners... and we will also enlist the help of Pat our builder/carpenter with ply shelving and facings - we have seen his work at the red bridge café, it looks great!