And another plan for our builder: Highmark Homes NZ. Here is the lighting plan.

This is our first working diagram of our outlet plan and the wiring to the junction box.  I’m supplying it so our builder Highmark Homes NZ and I can talk about it and see if we need to modify anything.

Thanks to Matt Theule for catching my mistake in the Garage, I need an outlet for the washer and dryer, and the garage door opener! 

OK, so I’ve been amending and playing with this outlet plan quite a lot over the past few days (sorry for making you keep looking at) but I think this is it for now.  I’m sure we will make some more modifications after I talk it over with my builder Highmark Homes NZ and our electrician (for now slated to be New Life Electrical Ltd.).  I’m sure I’m missing something, or we’ll have to adjust.

You are probably asking about that electrical detail in the upper left (if not, too bad, I’m going to tell you anyways)

If you look back where we will be living you and zoom out on the google map, you will see that we live out in the wap-waps (boonies to you yanks).  If there is another hurricane Hawkes Bay or the inevitable big earthquake, or other extreme event that could bring down power / power lines, since we are so far out, and have such a low population, if it is a BIG outage, we can count on being low on the list of getting repairs.

So it makes sense to prepare for the worst, a week or more of no power.  What I have planned is the ability to plug in a Generator in the outside Circuit 1 Power Point, flip a switch on the power board, and Isolate the “necessary” Circuit lines from the main bus.  I’ve given myself the fridge / freezer, Oven, HeatPumps, bedroom lights and Main Computer support.

Again, for our house builder’s reference (Highmark Homes NZ) and maybe our electrician’s (New Life Electrical Ltd.), our lighting plan

I’m obviously going to need to expand this out per room and per wire plan.  Mighty complicated.  It was hard keeping it straight in my mind.

By popular demand, some more information about the Kitchen, and the Appliances there-in:

First up, a simple table listing them out (in fact the one I provided to our builder, Highmark Homes NZ, to use to order the items).

So I’ve already told you about the Refrigerator, In This Blog Entry. But let me be a bit more specific:

Here is a picture of the exact unit I will be using, and it’s measurements in the cabinet

9.6 CU. FT GROSS CAPACITY (261 Nett Litre) INTEGRATED LARDER FRIDGE, you can find out all about it from the  German manufacturer Liebherr here

And now the freezer

Net volume 108 litres, Read more here.

And here is the cabinet they will be integrated into in the kitchen:

The Frig will take up the entire left side of the cabinet (the “two” cabinet drawers is actually one door, just made to LOOK like two ).

The Freezer will be on the bottom right hand side, and the top right hand side shall be a pantry (with pull out shelves / organizer from another German Company Hafele

OK, so what’s next?  Why the Stove top and hood, which I already talked about in this blog entry.

Unfortunately I can’t find anything on the internet in English, so these pictures will have to suffice. The FRANKE company is a Swiss based company, and all I could find was in German.

They will go on this cabinet in the corner

The wall oven will be a BOSCH

You can read all about here.  The big thing with this is it was the only high quality Pyrolytic (self-cleaning) Oven I could find in New Zealand.  Apparently self-cleaning ovens are considered “not green”, and the average Kiwi isn’t willing to pay the premium price for a self cleaning oven they can “clean it up myself”.  Self-Cleaning ovens don’t sell well, and admittedly they do use a massive amount of electricity to self-clean, but having had both, I wasn’t willing to go back to oven cleaner fumes!.

It’s a big oven as well, 63 litres (2.22 cubic feet)

Joining the oven in it’s cabinet will be the Microwave.  Now this is the one item I’m still not completely sure about, I have penciled in a combination Microwave / Conventional Oven.  This oven is very cutting edge (read about it here)

It is both a regular oven AND a microwave oven.  The wall oven is actually a VERY BIG oven, and I realized that most of the oven usage I do involves small re-heat items.  Having a smaller second oven that doesn’t take as long to heat up (or in summer cool down) seems like a good idea, and if I can combine it with a microwave, all the better.

The downside (of course there is one) is all those fancy prepared microwave settings buttons and shortcuts are missing from this oven.  You have to program all microwave heating completely manually.  And it is also much more expensive then a top of the line Microwave.

I go back and forth on this one, ALOT.

The possible pure microwave replacement I’m considering in its place is this one

A standard Microwave with all the bells and whistles.  Stay tuned, I’m interested to see which one I buy as well (if you have any recommendations, PLEASE leave a comment below and let me know what you think)!

Both of these ovens will go in this cabinet

Now the sink; I was searching for what would be the perfect sink for quite some time.  Almost all the sinks I found just didn’t “fit” in with the look I was going for in the kitchen, also due to where I was putting the sink I had some design constraints.  After much research and looking around, I’ve settled on a Butler’s sink

The choice was hard, because of course double sinks are the “right” ones as everyone knows now a days, and I’ve used double sinks all my life, but to be honest with you, I had decide long ago that most double sinks had bowls that were too small.  And I watched how Matthew and I used a double sink, and since we will have dishwashers [coming up in the next section] I just didn’t see why we HAD to have a double sink.  We never really used it in a way that made the second bowl really worth while, a single BIG bowl made more sense.

Once I started down that path, a Bing search on single bowl sinks, to see what was available, led me to this sink and in fact this photo.  As soon as I saw it, I know I had found IT!  It will even go with the “look” I’m trying to achieve in the kitchen.

The sink will go in the island, now please be aware that when I first designed the island I was still thinking standard bowl, so the representation isn’t quite right, I hope to redo the visualization of the island soon to show the effect with the butler’s sink in it.

Finallly the Dishwashers.  We are going to get TWO Fisher & Paykel DS603I Single DishDrawer units

You can read about them here.

So why two single dish drawers (it is a bit more expensive then buying one double DishDrawer unit)? 

Well that is because of experience.  We owned a single integrated double dishdrawer unit from Fisher & Paykel in Santa Barbara, and the integrated double drawer unit has a fatal flaw! In order to support the ability to make it integrated, they weren’t able to sound proof the bottom dish drawer, and when you use the top drawer the sound goes right thru the bottom drawer and out into the kitchen; and don’t even ask how loud the bottom drawer is when you run it.

I’ve heard quieter freight trains.

where as with the single integrated dishdrawer, you get FULL sound proofing!  So two it is, they will go in the Island. Looking down from above, the square boxes you see in the line drawing represent the drawers, they are placed near the bottom of the island so they are underneath the sink

So, that’s a walk thru our kitchen appliances, Putting it all together, you have…

Well folks, you may have noticed that for the past couple of weeks, my blog entries have been on the light side, and I’ve left it to Matthew to make the site historical entries.  We have done a lot of work on the site over the past 3 years getting to this point, and we’ll get you all caught up before the real fun begins (look out for the series about bringing electricity to the site, that’s my favorite preparation).

Anyways, I’ve been busy making an extension to the engine that runs this blog ( BlogEngine.Net ) that will allow us better track work and information about the Vendors we are using in this project.  This isn’t a technical blog so I won’t bore you with the details, if you are interested in the technical stuff, you can read about it on my technical blog here.

The important thing for you all to know is that all of our regular Vendors can now be easily tracked, and articles relating to them pulled up, like this: Highmark Homes NZ.  When ever we use a Vendor that we want to track, we will add a link to that vendor in the blog entry.  From there you can click on the vendor’s name and that will take you to our Vendor Contact Listing page.  From there you can click on a vendor’s name and see all of the entries made for them.

For our extra special vendors we have even made Categories where they are listed under “Vendor - “ (you can see them listed to the right) – >

So now that I’m done doing the geeky stuff, on to some more blog entries on the plans for the house (while Matthew will continue with our historical study).

First up, and our next blog entry is, By Popular Request, “The Kitchen Appliances”.

So being the anal detail oriented person that I am, before I even start to talk to builder, I’ve already designed my house, based on the starting point of one of my builder’s stock homes. I used Punch! Home Design -- Architectural Series 5000 to build up a virutal model of my home, and not just the home, but the home on the site.

Our house on Virtual Building Pad

Over the next few blog posts, I’ll be sure to let you see some more of my house design from the software.  Right now I’m working on the Landscaping plan. But I am most proud of my Kitchen.  It took a lot to plan my kitchen so it would fit in the foot print AND give me my much desired Island.  I wanted to put the stovetop on the island, and the sink in the corner, but Matthew was concerned about grease spreading out into the house (when I wok, it’s not a pretty site).

Our kitchen will be built by

So we have the sink on the island and the stove top in the corner.  And yes that is a stove top and hood specifically made to go in a corner; I saw it at a design center and knew that was for me!

I think that is TOO COOL and I actually got to test it out at a show center and it is a REALLY smart layout, you can actually use all 4 burners at the same time when cooking, it’s really easy!

Our Builder will be