Sanding the soffit behind the living pod then staining it was one of the many odd jobs completed in the final few days before moving in. Photo / Ben Crawford
Sanding the soffit behind the living pod then staining it was one of the many odd jobs completed in the final few days before moving in. Photo / Ben Crawford
The Block NZ 2012 winner Ben Crawford and his fiancé Kylie are building their dream home. Share their proud moments and pitfalls here every week.
Wow, what a week it has been, ending spectacularly with our first night in the house. Yep, you heard right, we're in. But more on that later.
It has been a whirlwind of odd jobs and touch-ups for everyone over the past 10 days. I've been painting skirting boards, fillinggaps around 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. Until now the access into the house has been via a makeshift ramp on to 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. The concept of the house peeling itself open to welcome visitors really appeals to me from both an aesthetic and symbolic point of view.
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 obstacle for Garrick, who 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 the same Outdure composite timber used on our decks. For the first time we've been able to enter the house and walk through the spaces as 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 the correct levels and took away the excess soil before filling them back up with metal.
Our earthworks contractors preparing the drive and parking area in preparation of the Firth concrete being poured. Photo / Ben Crawford
It is weird how a bit of gravel transformed these areas. For months we've been staring at stagnant pools of water and tracts of goopy mud. Now that has been replaced with hard fill that we can 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 pour the concrete and finish the entrance completely.
Between all these activities, we've been moving our furniture and personal items in, with the generous help of Kylie's family. This has been awesome and something we've been looking forward to for months and months. Since we bought the section, truth be told.
Over this time we've been buying stuff for the house. And I mean lots of stuff.
Builder Garrick from Haven Renovations putting the finishing touches on the entry stairs. Photo / Ben Crawford
We figured if we got into the habit of spending the equivalent of our mortgage each month on furniture while we built, we'd get used to putting aside this amount of money and we'd have everything we needed to furnish the house by the time we moved in. We're so glad we did this before our full mortgage kicked in, as we'd be living on crates and eating from paper plates if we tried to kit the house out now.
We had been progressively taking over the basement in Kylie's parents' house with all our purchases, so I think they were as excited to see the boxes leaving their house as we were to see them being unloaded into ours.
I can't tell you how great it has been setting everything up. We've always had a strong, shared vision for our overall aesthetic and now it's all in place the house looks incredible. We gave a little sigh of a relief, however, when we saw how well everything works together.
There was a small risk the house could've looked like a mismatched collection of objects, given we'd bought them in isolation, but we needn't have worried.
And then we spent our first night in the house. Oh my God. Can this really be ours?
The first of Ben & Kylie's furniture ready to be unloaded into the house. Photo / Ben Crawford
It felt like we'd won a weekend away in a luxury bush retreat. And it still does.
All the hyperbole in the world can't articulate how rewarding, surreal and incredible it feels to be finally living in our dream home. But I'm going to try next week, in my final Design & Build column.
