Last week we finally moved into our dream home!! It’s been everything we’d hoped it would be and so much more. One of the most surreal feelings was waking up in our bedroom on the first morning surrounded by the same ferns, trees and birds that had inspired our vision for the whole house so many months ago.

As clichéd as it sounds, we’re still waiting for it to sink in that this beautiful home is actually ours. It’s so perfect, shiny and new that it feels like we’re living in a woodland hotel, complete with a tranquil stream washing away the stresses of daily life. It’s magical!

Here are some photos I’ve taken so far. I’ll try to capture all of the rooms soon. We’ve still got a bit of landscaping to do, lawns to be sewn and the driveway needs to be poured, so the exterior isn’t quite finished. Once it is, I’ll pop up some photos too.

 

 

 

 

 

You can also check out our tour through the house in this video.

It’s been a whirlwind of odd jobs and touch ups for everyone over the past ten days. I’ve been painting skirting boards, no-more-gapping round windows, sanding soffits, patching up dents in walls and landscaping.

 Meanwhile Garrick and the boys from Haven Renovations ticked jobs off their to-do lists like men possessed. Two of the most exciting things they finished were our entry stairs and front door. Up until now the access into the house has been via a makeshift ramp up onto the deck behind the living pod.

Since we began building I’ve had this idea of a hidden front door and it’s a feature I’ve been determined to see come to fruition. I thought it would be easy enough to achieve. Just run the vertical cladding on the building down over the door too, but of course it’s far more complicated than that. However once again even this tricky brief was no match for Garrick as he nailed it with his typical excellence. It looks incredible, with only a subtle door handle providing any clues as to where the front door is.

That and the fact we now have stairs leading up to the door, fashioned from Outdure’s composite timber that we’ve used on our decks. So for the first time we’ve been able to enter the house and walk through the spaces exactly the way we designed them, which has been really refreshing.

Carrying on with the outdoor activities, our driveway and additional parking bay was prepped mid-week by our earthworks contractors. They dug the areas back to their correct levels and took away the excess soil before filling them back up with metal.

It weird how much a bit of gravel was able to transform these areas, but for months we’ve been staring at stagnant pools of water and tracts of goopy mud. Now that’s been replaced with hard fill that we can actually walk on and park on. It looks great already, so we can’t imagine how amazing it will be when Firth and the layers come in next week to actually pour the concrete and finish the entrance completely.

We ended this week on another high because our custom made curtains and blinds from Kresta were installed. And they look awesome.

We absolutely love how luxurious and cosy the curtains make the bedrooms feel, especially the generous amount of pooling onto the carpet. While in the living room, I can’t stop playing with the motorised roller blinds. They’re so cool! I’m glad we went with the double-view option because the independent sun-screen and black-out blinds give us full control over the amount of light we let into the pod. Not to mention how stylish they look with the separate grey and white layers.

Wow, so much progress this week. At times it’s been chaotic with more than 20 men on site at once. So once the dust had settled, it was time to have a huge clean up. It’s amazing where rubbish, sawdust and dried plaster can hide. Thanks to Kylie and her mum in particular, it was all systematically hunted down and blitzed from every nook and cranny in the house.

Since our bedroom pod has always been so much more advanced, it’s ready for furniture before the living pod. I couldn’t hold Kylie back as she was so excited to begin setting up the rooms, so we brought in the first boxes and began unpacking.

We set up both bathrooms and the three bedrooms and they look amazing. Finally it feels like our home with our own belongings in there. But you’re going to have to take my word for it, as we’ll save the photos for the grand reveal in two weeks time, when the whole house has been finished and we’ve moved in. Exciting!

After putting our balustrade order in, Warwick said his team would be on site the following week to fit everything off. Once again the Glass Vice team surprised us. The install so fast and efficient and our decks now have their stunning new balustrades.

They look absolutely beautiful and enhance the house’s aesthetic appeal.  They also make the decks usable across every square metre and preserve our views – in fact the finish is so integrated and free from obstruction that it’s easy to forget there is any glass there at all.