A few more photos

The view from the road.
Darren's beloved Weeping Cherry. It has a specially grafted trunk and we transplanted it from our old house.

Our magnificent Purple Beech.

Our weatherboards. They are James Hardie Linea boards, made of cement stuff but look like timber boards once painted.

This is our al-fresco area. It will lead onto a big deck that goes out amongst the tree ferns. We got sliding doors, I can't remember what the reason was but I don't think we could get bi-folds. These will do but I hate the black handles. We will change that! To the right is the rumpus room.

Darren is grumpy

Poor Darren is very grumpy. The roofers finally came back and finished after starting about 5 weeks ago. It was only about 6 days work! The roof looks great but there are a few little mistakes. One line of screws has popped out, they mustn't have been screwed into the timber properly. Also, different parts of the roof have corners cut off in different ways. I would never have noticed but Darren looks at every little detail and things like that annoy him greatly. So we'll have to call the supervisor and get it fixed up. Darren really didn't like the roof guys much. They were arrogant. He was hoping they could help him cut in the skylights and offered them a slab but they just said no. He is glad they have gone and hopes someone else will come to fix things up. We have windows now!

Here's a pic of our lovely roof. I can hear the music from the Colourbond Ad in the background!

This is from inside the lounge room with the dormer window.

A gorgeous Spring day for windows.

The lower roof is now on. It's a bit hard to see the colour in this shot, it's a dark grey. You can see what beautiful weather we are having at the moment. It is my favourite time of year, full of anticipation of Summer, Christmas season and holidays.
Our windows were delivered today. Yay!!! Here is Darren checking if the colour matches the fascia OK (which it does). Our windows are aluminium but have wider sash pieces so they look more attractive like timber windows. They are all double glazed too. Most of them are casement windows, some awnings and some sliding doors.
The house with almost all it's roof on.
More windows.
Jake was so happy I was taking his photo!

Some of my kitchen ideas

I thought I'd share some of my ideas for my dream kitchen. This dishwasher is 90cm wide with a 34cm deep door. You can have it just under the bench or even mounted in a wall so you don't have to bend as far down to reach in. It has two baskets that sit side by side, 10 wash programs, a special filter system that means no more food scraps to clean out and it is very energy and water efficient. I wonder how much it costs? It's a Smeg. I like it better than dish drawers as it's way bigger and uses less water.
I want a 90cm ceramic cooktop purely for ease of cleaning. This is a downdraft exhaust extractor. It works like a rangehood but you install it in the wall behind the cooktop. I am having a cooktop on a bench with no wall behind it, only a small "backstand" where this will go.

This is the Titan sink. It is one bowl, deep and humongous. I want to get a mixer tap that swivels 180 degrees and has a pull out hose for rinsing like in a commercial kitchen. I want a big sink so I can wash big pots etc. without getting water all over the bench.

The roof goes on!

The top level of the roof is now on, yippee!!
The dormer windows with the colourbond on.
This is our gutter guard to stop leaves from building up in the gutters. The roof is just too high in a lot of spots to clean out gutters.

This week has been stressful. Everything just takes soooooo long. We are always waiting for someone to come and do something. This is the down side of owner building / not hiring a team of tradesmen. To cut costs Darren is doing as much of the labour as he can. He is also organising other trades as he needs them. The problem is that most of the other trades have other jobs on too (they don't just work for Darren as they would for a big building company). They have to juggle jobs and we are not always top priority as they figure we are just a one off job. It just makes everything slow. I know even big builders have these issues but it is worse for us I think. The weather doesn't help either. I know we need rain but I wish God could somehow just make it not rain on our block sometimes. That wouldn't work though because everyone just looks at the general forecast and will stay away anyway on those days!! At least once the roof is completely on, rain will not be a big deal anymore.

My main stress is that every day is costing us money. Rent money, living money, food money, school money, etc. Every day Darren is not out earning money on other jobs our mortgage goes up. It has been OK up till now but we are starting to see our loan at the end of it all being much higher than we wanted. When I look at it though, out initial estimates were very naive. We just didn't factor in a realistic amount of living expenses. We haven't really tightened up enough either, just kept on living normally, still going to the footy, movies, eating takeaway, going on holidays etc. Add to that the building has taken way longer than we anticipated, mainly because Darren is working predominatly on his own and spends a lot of time waiting for things.

Anyway, that is my whinge for the day. At least we are learning a lot and I know the house will be worth way more than we will owe on it so that is something. I really hope we can move into at least part of the house soon. We are thinking of getting the guest room part finished first (where the dormer windows are). If we can get the bathroom there going and have it lined, we could live there and in the caravan and garage underneath and be quite happy. I don't know if you are allowed to do it that's all. We have to be careful with insurance issues mainly. I am looking into that at present. I think it would be fun to live the simple life for a while and we would save a lot of money that way.

What I must do is to look at the bright side. Look at how blessed we are in so many ways. It is a blessing just to be able to build this house and experience the process. We've always wanted to build our own home. Our kids are happy and healthy and we will always afford a roof over our head. I shouldn't complain! Compared to many in the world we are very rich indeed!!