Chris Hooker

It seems that Online Media is a great way of sharing your experiences, and it’s interesting to see who is following the progress of our home.

Surprisingly my new neighbour (who is yet to have their house completed) dropped in last night after reading my website, and recent entry regarding site debris.

They were kind enough to supply me the now-current site supervisor for their Porter Davis Lifestyle home, so we can now pursue the right man to get the job done.

It’s disheartening to hear their Porter Davis experience, like mine and several others I know who have built with Porter Davis, has been less than smooth. Hopefully with some persistence they’ll have all their issues addresses before hand-over.

I’ve just noticed our neighbour’s house is being finalised this week, which is great to see Highlands in Craigieburn starting to populate so rapidly, and it will be great to have another neighbour.

Unfortunately it’s also an indicator I’m going to need to chase down next door’s site supervisor again, because he failed to deliver on his promise to clean the mortar from my house which was a result of the brickies constructing the double-story.

This is yet again another Porter Davis tale, as the house next door is also being build by Porter Davis in the lifestyle range.

I have mortar stuck to my glass, and at least one ruined fly screen from this, not to mention the door which will need another re-paint. It’s disappointing that I’ve had to chase this site supervisor on three occasions in the past five months only to end up with the same result.

I will place hopefully my final call to the site supervisor tomorrow to have this addressed.

I’m still waiting to hear on the matter of the retaining wall, but I’m not holding my breath.

Almost 5 months after Porter Davis handed my house over to me, I’m still yet to receive installation of a retaining wall that was paid for and included in the contract and engineer’s designs.

I’ve had to actively pursue Porter Davis for the past three months, and finally received a call back stating that it’s no longer needed, and may receive a refund of $1,500.00, pending management assessment.

I’m sure that would result in an argument with “Australia’s most professional builder”, so I’m not holding my breath.

I had a maintenance / repair guy out last week from Porter Davis for the “3 month maintainance” work, which is intended to repair cracks and minor niggles with the house as it settles on the land.

Unfortunately the primary job for this maintainance guy was to fix defects that existed before the house was handed over.

The maintenence guy was friendly, and did a good job, so thankfully, most of my areas of concern were fixed:

• Poor joinery in a window frame
• Bad paint work from handover that would make an amateur shake their head
• Flaws in plaster
• Paint stain on carpet
• Damaged Toilet Roll holder (pathetic in a new house in my opinion)

Unfortunately, there are a few items Porter Davis have still failed to deliver, and because I was working from home, I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have, leaving some defects to to wait until the 12 month inspection.

I love my house, but it was painful getting here, and every so often I’m reminded of the poor quality of work demonstrated by Porter Davis, and have to chase them for things I shouldn’t, which is highly disappointing given the premium price paid over and above the standard house price.

I recently setup a new ADS2+ service at home (courtesy of work), and have been using the Netcomm NB6+4W wireless, which means the new modem has a built-in wireless router, and I could do away with the two separate units I was using previously.

Whilst the setup is easy, and Windows joined the wireless network easily, I was having problems with my Mac authenticating to the WEP 128 network (highest level of wireless encryption without setting up secondary authentication).

I initally thought there was a problem with the profile in OSX, but after chatting with a colleague at work, it was suggested I might need to enter a dollar symbol ($) before the WEP key, as is necessary in other Mac Wireless devices (such as iphone, ipod touch, apple TV, etc), where the dollar symbol acts as an escape character.

I tried this solution (you can get more info here from Apple’s support article), but that didn’t work at all.

Eventually I used the setup assistance (the easy way of setting things up) and BAM - it worked first go. I suspect the profile was magically wiped and replaced using the setup assistant.

So, despite all my best efforts of re-naming the wireless SSID in the router, factory reseting the modem, deleting my profile and items in my key-chain, it was the lazy way that proved successful.

The house has come a long way in the 3-4 months since we moved in.

Here are some of the latest pictures:

Front-View of house, Driveway & Garden

Front-Right Side View of house

House Left Hand Side View

A view of the back-yard and outdoor dining/Al-Fresco from the Living room via our big-open French Doors.

Back-yard view, left-hand side

Lawn (Roll-down turf, type: Couch)

(Ignore the dying plant in the middle )

Rear-View of Al-Fresco

Left-hand side back-yard & Al-Fresco, with Outdoor BBQ

Gardens by John, Justine’s dad. I might have carted a few barrel loads of stones around though

For those who are interested, the house is a Kensington 24 built by Porter Davis.

I’ve been tweaking some of my websites lately, and noticed this website finally got it’s page rank back. Admittedly it’s only PR1, but that’s OK.

I’ve found a flaw this website inherited from the previous CMS (Nucleus CMS) which I believe has been affecting this website’s search engine ranking, and had a detrimental affect on other sites I’ve been linking to.

Nucleus CMS was an offshoot from Wordpress, but the branch in the development tree didn’t go far, and therefore I eventually switched over to a clean install of Wordpress.

Unfortunately my outdated and un-patched version of Nucleus CMS had a an exploit allowing spammers to inject spam message posts, and these were subsequently indexed in the Search Engines.

Even though the clean install of Wordpress has no such exploit, and those posts are removed, the “Hammy” URLs still exist in the SERPs because Wordpress basically allows you to throw it any URL.

The Hammy URLs look like domain.com/?STRING=blarg. I’ve removed the string name due to it’s hammy nature, but let’s just say it’s related to Pharmaceuticals, and is therefore objectionable.

I’ve seen this case before where a popular and well ranking website gradually loses it’s rankings because they have an un-moderated or outdated and exploitable forum, and all of a sudden bad content is injected, and the ranking gradually declines.

As the URLs vary, but have a common string being, I needed to create a filter or block on this URL using a wild-card.

I wracked my brains trying to come up with a .htaccess solution to this problem, and I’m sure such a solution is available, but ultimately, I think robots.txt is the way to go.

The Robots.txt entry I’m now using is:

User-agent: *
disallow: /*string*

I’ll be monitoring the SERPS over the next few weeks to see if these entries are removed, and see what sort of impact it has on my previously high ranking sites that this site is linking to.

We had our Outdoor Barbeque bricked in over the weekend.

Outdoor Natural Gas BBQ

We found a brick layer in the Local Leader Newspaper, and he had the job done in around 7 hours.

We used left over bricks from the house, and the bricky matched the cement colour to that of our house.

The structure was finished off by creating benches from bluestone on the top of the structure, and have left a cavity underneath to build a cupboard.

We’ll clean the bricks up, and seal the bluestone, add the doors and finish assembling the burners, hotplate etc and then have the natural gas connected, which has already been run to the Al Fresco and capped off.

Total cost for this lovely outdoor kitchen was $900 (not including the BBQ, Gas Burners or plumbing).

Now that I’m living in Craigieburn, I’m coming to grips with the fact that I am not in close-proximity to the CBD. Elwood was 7KMs, North Melbourne was 3KMs, and Craigieburn is between 30-40Kms, depending on how you travel.

Thankfully there is convenient freeway access, and there are some very excellent things about living in the area that I’m coming to realise, and these will be featured in two new websites that I’m setting up:

Craigieburn.me - it’s all about me (or you!) - featuring all the cool things Craigieburn and surrounding areas have to offer.

Craigieburn.Biz - local businesses in the area.

Given I’m seeing the place through a fresh set of eyes, and I have a need to locate local businesses and trades to assist me in the little projects I have around the home, I’m doing a lot of research, and will be featuring businesses and trades on this website.

Keep an eye out for the sites which will be launching in the coming weeks.

Chris Hooker

Ok, an update on the progress of the house:

• Moved in Early September
• Aggregated Pebble Driveway went down just before we moved in, took 6 weeks for the sealant to be finished.
• Justine has assembled a heap of furniture and for the most part is fully furnished (needs a second plasma for the lounge, a third for the bedroom ).
• Justine’s Dad and I have been doing a lot of work in the back yard (well, John has done the majority of it)
• Fence finally went in a few weeks ago
• Phone line was installed today, internet coming this week

Short-term To Do List:

• Back yard garden & landscaping
• Front Yard Landscaping
• Front Yard Garden lights
• Minor furnishings
• Organise a brickie & plumber to do the outdoor BBQ
• Throw a house warming

Anticipated short-term expenses in the order of $5,000-$7,000

More pictures will be posted when the house is looking a little closer to a finished product.