Electricals! Upgrades! More costs! Yay!

It's nearing a month now since we happily signed our lives over to Plantation and even still all the little choices left to make are still a major hassle. We had our electrical appointment two weeks later and wow..... I wish I had become an electrician.

All the upgrades we chose came to almost $12k! Mind you this is for like 80 light fittings (not even the downlights just yet! We're fitting those afterwards), heaps of dimmers, 2-ways, extra circuits, outdoor lighting etc. One thing that I cant wait to see is the upgraded faceplates we chose for some of the main light switches! They are the Clipsal Saturns with LED rings. They pretty much have a ring of light when they aren't on so you can see them which turns off when the light is on. You can set this to turn on when the light is on as well and are really futuristic type upgrade :)



After we finalised our electricals we finally received our Post Contract Variation. This was astonishing. Depsite all of our "little" changes it only came in at $2700! We were expecting close to $10k so we finally had the first bit of good news - financially - so far! In light of this sudden stroke of luck with Plantation we have decided to upgrade the Kitchen Bench to 40mm with waterfall edges on boths sides hehe. How can we resist now! So unless this costs $7k or less we will be happy :)

Still waiting for council approval in the meantime - Plantation use a private certifier which SHOULD make things quicker but it doesn't. Plus its impossible to get updates from the certifier in the meantime. Recently we were also given a timeline as to what happens after get approval and it can still be a few months before we even have a start date!! Needless to say that didn't go down to well, but hopefully it wont come to that.

Final Plans and Elevations

Well this is what our mini mansion (for two people it is!) is apparently going to look like :) In the meantime we're still waiting for the plans to go from the the private assessor to council :( *sigh*

Contracts are signed! Council Approval here we come!

What a grueling day today was! We had appointments booked with the Builder from 9AM - 5PM and I certainly was wondering it could go for so long. Well we certainly found out why! They did cover practically everything today, the first half was going over the final plans and contracts and ensuring there was no mistakes which there were plenty of but luckily they could be fixed on the spot with little drama.

The second half of the day was the Colour Appointment. Plantation have a great showroom and as they use alot of local suppliers we had previously already visited alot of their showrooms as well to find out what we wanted - AND learn just how expensive things are going through Plantation :( Some things were literally an 80% markup on their retail price. Whoever says builders make only 5% on a house is wrong!!!

Anyhow as we had a pretty good idea of the colours and upgrades we wanted (yes - anything decent or modern is an upgrade lol - especially any decent tiles) it only took a few hours. The Colour Consultant was very patient and was a big help in deciding between the last few selections we wanted. All in all a great experience, just glad it's over!

Apparently now we have our electrical appointment within the next two weeks or so, and being in IT I have a LOT of things I want to add. I think this is the part I'm most looking forward to as we get to make our house "cool" now hehe.

The realisation is starting to set in that we are nearing the final stages before we simply wait for construction to start - the next big things are organising all the retaining walls and electricals, oh and of course getting the OK from Council :)