Colour Selection

A sample of the colors chosen for the house, I could not get samples for everything so have included a list at the bottom of this post.
BathroomsVanities : Laminex Natural Milkwood with kickboards in Laminex Flint charcoal.
Floor tiles and wall tiles in showers : Agra Charcoal with silver white mortar.
The showers will have a Pebble Tan 10 cm vertical feature running down one wall.

External

The bricks are Boral Jarrah with an offwhite mortar that has an ironed finish.
Windows are white.
Gutters, downpipes and garage door are colourbond Ironstone.
The front rendering on portico and projection will be colorbond Surf Mist.
The roof tiles are Boral Gunmetal.

Landry
Agra Charcoal tiles to the floor. Minima Avor (light beige) tiles for the splashback.
Sink and benchtop are Formica Silver Strata, again with charcoal kickers.

Kitchen

Floor is Truloc Spotted Gum which will also feature in the entrance, living/dining and the rumpus room. The glass splashback will be Dulux Sapphire Stone. The kick boards are Laminex Natural Zinc Works (looks like stainless steel).

One of our major upgrades was to put Vinyl Wrap for the kitchen cupboards including the wrap around the front. This enabled us to have a gloss finish. We decided to go with a new colour to the Laminex range called Pearl Frost which has subtle silver sparkles through it. This should match the stainless steel oven, rangehood and dishwasher(and the fridge one day when we can afford to upgrade it). The benchtop will be Quantum Quartz New Diamond White. This has the least amount of fleck.


A closeup of the Pearl Frost Vinyl Wrap. Photo still doesn't do it justice, but trust me it looks really nice :)

Others not listed

Carpet - Godfrey Hirst Forget me not (Dark Grey)
Internal Paint - Wattle Flokati (Off white) - Used throughout the house as it is neutral and we can paint feature walls once we are finished. PD charge way to much to change a color of a room or for a feature wall.
Timber front door and sidelights - Wattyl Dark Oak Stain
Laundry door - Wattyl Dark Oak Stain with clear glass
French doors to Lounge/Courtyard - Wattyl Dark Oak Stain
Bi-Fold door to Rumpus/Alfresco - Wattyl Dark Oak Stain

Fear of the unknown

Good news is that we now have our Tender and Contract appointments booked on the 3rd Nov and 26th Nov respectively. Bad news is they wont tell us the site costs over the phone and we have to wait for the tender appointment to find out so they can "explain the breakdown of what the site costs are made out of." I can understand why they do this as the sites costs can be a large part of the overall build and can vary a lot. This is where the fear c0mes in, if the site costs blow out to 15 or 20k we will seriously need to cut back on some of our modifications (I will post these soon) maybe even losing the alfresco which to me was the main reason of getting the house (along with the rumpus room that opens onto the alfresco) .

The worst thing I did after seeing that there was some clay that came up from the holes that were drilled by the Porter Davis soil engineers was look up building on clay soil. Yep the information I found was all doom and gloom. Clay is one of the worst soils to build on because it expands and contracts with the weather, obviously not good for the foundations of the house.

I have included a link to a quick video that gives some basic information about building on different soil types. (It is American but i guess they have dirt as well :) )
Soil Video Click Here - /www.hgtvpro.com

Anyway figures crossed, no need to loose any sleep over it, just may have to think of some options before we go the tender appointment for if the site costs do blow out.

The Hole

Some action from the block... we found three holes just like this one which hopefully means the builders have been able to get onto the block and do the soil survey.

We have been waiting for 8 weeks for the developer to let Porter onto the block which we were told would only be when the land is ready to title. Now with any luck we will get the figure for the site costs that wont blow us away. We were unable to get Porter to fix the site costs as the block did not meet their criteria which of course they wouldn't tell what the criteria is.

With an estimate from the Porter Davis Sales Rep we budgeted 10k for sites costs as the block has less than 700mm of fall(fingers crossed).