Carpets and concrete

I had this really well thought out, perfectly spaced timeline of how we were going to get all our finishing trades through the house before Christmas so that we could move in and have our first Christmas in our new house. They really were the best laid plans.

My plan somewhat went out of the window when handover didn't occur on Nov 1st but managed to keep on schedule with the wood flooring able to access the house via the builders key. Next step was the aggregate. We are using HCM concrete and the boys were out on Friday the 8th and Saturday the 9th forming up the area around the back and sides of house and around the pool. The plan was to have the pour on Tuesday 12th of November with a colour called "Mont Blanc" from Geostone (Holcim).

Unfortunately on Monday the 11th, HCM got informed that Holcim were having issues with the quarry crusher and couldn't supply anything until after the Christmas break. This was a massive spanner in my plans and basically i cancelled the moving truck service, due in a few weeks time, upon receiving this news. This news basically lost us the house for Christmas, as we wanted to wait for the colour we wanted rather than swap to one we didn't.

But I still had other dominos in the chain waiting to fall, so we pushed ahead with carpet install, which was due to occur Monday 18th, but slipped to Tuesday 19th. Carpet was laid to both kids bedrooms, the guest bedroom, games room and study.

Tuesday afternoon we got a very unexpected call from our aggregate guy. He was able to get a delivery from an alternative vendor, Limecrete, for a colour that is very, very similar to Mont Blanc called Kajaani White and that he could pour it this coming Thursday. We jumped at the opportunity given how similar the colours were and I'm happy to report that as of 9am this morning, we now have aggregate around the back, sides and pool. Can't wait to see it honed.

Keys!!

We finally managed to get our PCI inspection done on Wednesday the 30th of October.  At the time of the inspection, our air conditioning hadn't been finished, nor did we have any glass balustrading on. This unfortunately meant that we weren't going to achieve key handover by November 1st as planned.

However, Stannard appreciated that we were in a tough position with our own finishing trades and kindly allowed us to access the house via our own builder's key so our trades could start. So on Monday 4th of November, the Art of Timber, our engineered wood floor contractor started work on site. We are getting wood up our stairs, across the first floor landing and into our master bed and robe.

After a week of work, the timber floors were nearly finished. It was then the turn of the balustrading people to install our glass balustrading, which went in on Monday 11th as planned. Three days later on November 14th, we went into Stannard's offices and officially completed handover and got the keys to our new house!