Post Contract Adjustments

So I got an email today saying that we needed to make some adjustments to get development approval.

One being that our garage needs to have a 200mm gable - not too sure how much this change is going to cost us but hopefully not too much (heres hoping!) Reading through our guidelines I can't seem to find anywhere that says we must have a minimum height gable - so we will see how we go. (This means we will get another lot of drawings provided to us for outside elevations to sign off one.)

The other thing that was not approved was our choice of entry door. We decided at contract to change our door choice back to our original due to cost reasons. We had chosen this design with clear glass:

I have now asked for pricing on the following doors which are allowed:

Remembering that our door will be stained a dark brown and we will have clear glass - so I'm leaning more towards one that has slim lines of glass so that you can't see too much of whats going on inside :P

We're still also waiting on drawing for our top draw with power to come back as we'll. So once I have pricing back I will let you know which door we go for :)

Final Drawings

Sorry that I haven't had the chance to post our final drawings yet - so here they are!

Firstly lets look at the slab drawing - when I saw it I understood where all our cost came from. Just look at all those piers! Now hopefully that means it will be very solid and we should hopefully have no problem with movement, fingers crossed :)

Now to take a look at the rest of the house :)

Placement on block:

Outside elevations:

Floor plan:

Internal elevations:

Flooring:

Its great finally seeing what our house will turn out like - can't wait to use my kitchen :)

Contract Appointment

So the big day had come for us to sign our contract and find out how big of a whole it was going to burn in our wallets! To say I was slightly worried about it being over our budget was an understatement!

We got to Porter Davis and found out that our Building Coordinator was on annual leave - which didn't phase us as she doesn't take our appointment, she only show us to our meeting room. Simon who took our Tender appointment also took us through the Contract - if you get him you will find his very helpful and friendly :)

So one of the first things that we find out is that we're being charged for upgrades to batts in the exterior walls and ceiling to get a 6 star energy rating - Simon marked it straight away and said he would check on it for us. I also questioned about whether the designs met a 6 star rating before the slab is taken into account and he said that they were - we had made minimal changes to the design and yet they wanted to charge us to get it back up to the 6 stars. When he went back up after our discussion it turns out they decided not to charge us for these cost - makes me wonder how many people don't question it and just pay. The difference in us not paying for those upgrades meant we could keep our security system!

While going through the contract we may have jumped ahead and looked at the overall price.... lets just say it was not within our budget! While going through all the cost it became apparent that a lot of the costing that we're given to us at Hopetoun during the colour appoint were way off the mark and under quoted. As I had previously mentioned we had chosen to upgrade the downstairs doors and for some reason our consultant (remember how I mentioned we had trainee's for our appointments..) had decided to change the doors to something else as they believed they didn't come in the size we needed. This change that we didn't approve added another $600 or so to our final price! Simon tried finding the doors they had chosen but couldn't so went and checked this for us and it turned out that the doors we chose did indeed come in the size we needed so we changed it back to the doors we wanted.

We continued through and removed what we thought we could live without - such as pre-wiring the Sound System and a few other choices from our colour appointment. If you ever do go through the process of building a house make sure you look at everything closely as we found for some reason one shower had been upgraded to something different to all other ones even though we had previously made them the same. Our cabinetry in the laundry which we were paying for was not included in the drawings but we had extra cabinets in the pantry where it was meant to be just shelves. This was picked up when we were counting the number of cabinet handles we were paying for!

I didn't mention a handy idea that we came up with for our island bench for power. Since it has a stone bench top with water fall edges theres no spots to put power - so we wanted to add 2 power points to the top draw. We had mentioned this at our Tender appointment and provisioned the power points at our electrical appointment. It wasn't included in the contract so it was another thing that Simon had to chase up for us. They checked with their cabinetry suppler and they were able to do it and for once at no charge :) here's an idea of what we will have instead of the normal top draw:

So after going through all the pricing and taking out what we could to get it closer to our budget it was time for signing and boy was there lots to sign! Make sure when you're going into your appointment that your hand is ready for a workout! I'm sure by the end of it my signature was way different to my first one!

Once finally done with all the paperwork we were done, YAY! So now they're going to pass our finally contract onto Choice who are handling our loan application and hopefully all will go well with that process - again a little worried as land values where we're building have not been coming back that great but we're hoping it wont be too bad and that it should still all work out fine.

Once I get an electronic version of our contract I will put some of the house design up. Heres to the next 8 months going fast so that we can get into our new home :)

Colour choice appointments

So the next step in our journey to our new home is Colour choice - this involves an appointment for choosing all colours and upgrades, electrical and tiles.

We had another Trainee joining in on our colour appointment who took control of half of the appointment. We had a pretty good idea of what we wanted so the appointment didn't take too long. This is what we chose for our outside colours:

We changed the entry door as we didn't like the one which was optioned for us. We upgraded to getting it stained (the middle block colour in the above picture, which will be the same stain used for our stairs.)

As previously mentioned we had roughly choose the colours for our kitchen and when we discussed these with our consultants they suggested that there were slightly too many different textures fighting for attention and then showed us other options. We were shown options that we didn't realise were standard and found ones that we really liked. We have decided to go with a two tone kitchen and have chosen a dark brown colour for our island and overhead cabinets and are having white for the lower cabinets against the wall. To go with this we have chosen a silver tone for our bench tops which are stone :) To set this all off we have chosen a coloured glass splash back to add a pop of colour.

In the above photo you can also see our choice of floor covering which is a dark 'rustic black' floor board and a grey tone wall colour. We have also chose a dark colour carpet to match the floor boards.

We only made a few upgrades one being to our internal door - the many reason was that when we went on the weekend we were told that they were standard and had really liked them, so we decided to just upgrade the ones downstairs (the great thing about building a double is that we get to only upgrade what guest will see :P). These are the doors:

The other upgrades were to the master ensuite, we upgraded the toilet (it is flush against the wall) and added a rain/dumper shower.

Next up we had electrical - this appointment drained me as I was so worried about our budget! The one downfall about building a double is that it is hard to retro fit anything electrical after handover. So with this is mind we have put mostly LED down lights downstairs and and put in a few noggings so that we can install fans later. Upstairs we kept fairly basic apart from the Master suite - seeing a theme here?! We also optioned pre-wiring for theatre room and a security system. Here are our electrical plans.

The following day we had our tile appointment which again we also had a trainee sitting in on (see the Trainee house!) again this appointment went quick and we decided to do our ensuite all in a dark tile floors & walls all the same colour and left all other tiles as standard ones. We also decided to choose a feature tiles (last photo below) for our shower niche in the ensuite. Below are our colour choices.

We ended up coming out of our tile appointment spending way less than we thought as we had been quoted the wrong price for the tile we liked for our ensuite which was awesome.

As you can see from our colour choices we have chosen dark flooring and a light grey wall colour this means that any colour we choose to add with furniture and accessories will be easy to change at any time as the black/grey/white shades will go with most colours. :)

Next week we have our contract appointment to go through all the final cost of everything we have chosen then hopefully if all goes well we will start building in September this year!

Working towards our escape from the busy city life

I have been meaning to start this blog for awhile now - for at least 3 years in fact! So I will go back and and start from the beginning and catch up to where were at today. 

My Partner Ryan & I (Nicole) fell in love with a new country town golf course development just west of Melbourne called Eynesbury - its the first town to be created in over 50 years in Victoria :) It is set in the heart of a Greybox forest with the idea of it being styled modern 'Country Town'. As i grew up living on a large country block of land being a good 15min drive to our closest town, the idea of feeling like i was living back in the country but still close to my job in the city (just a 30min drive :)) really appealed to me.

We decided to take the plunge and purchased a block of land which backed onto the golf course in a secluded part of the estate which will not get drive through traffic.

The block took a lot longer than we anticipated to settle and between the time of putting the deposit down on the block of land and settlement we ended up purchasing a house in Hoppers Crossing. This meant that we used our deposit for the new house build and we had to wait until we were in a good financial place to build our dream home. But this didn't stop us from getting very excited when the land finally did title and we have been frequent visitors to the Eynesbury Homestead for lunch on the weekend.

We had original liked an UrbanEdge single story design but after living in our Double story house in Hoppers, we decided that we really wanted to make the most of our block size and make sure that we have a decent sized backyard (for any future additions to our family be it fury or not :P).

We then found a lovely small local builder that we wanted to build with but after going through the whole design stage and quotes - the bank just wasn't comfortable loaning us the full amount of what it was going to cost to build the house as they didn't feel that it should cost that much to build. So went back to the drawing board!

Then while browsing the different builders designs found one that ticked all our boxes Porter Davis Sandarah 45T. It gave us a nice sized backyard, plenty of room in the house for us to grow, lots of room to entertain and most importantly a lovely Master suite, which also as a terrace off the master taking in the most of our range view block.

After making the long trek to visit the display home we fell in love with it and didn't second guess ourselves and signed up on the spot. Porter Davis have their own brokers so we decided to go through them as we were sick of dealing with the bank and decided that it was something we were more than happy to palm off for someone else to worry about. Added bonus was that because we decided to go through them we got a 'voucher' to spend at our colour appointment which would help with upgrades and electrically choices. These are the standard inclusions and currently they have "Dream Big" promotion one which we also get which adds lots of great bonuses on meaning we will not have to upgrade much.

While going through the options we decided to add the galley / pantry upgrade with the added bonus that with their current promotion it was fitted out which meant it was slightly cheaper than normal.

The next step was our Tender appointment where we went through all the site cost and everything that is included in our contract. We got delivered great news that we didn't need to spend $7,000 including bushfire upgrades as we're not in the required area but then got told that our slab came back as needing a P class slab which then ate all the saved money from the bushfire preps!

We had discussed whether or not we wanted to include the option of having a shower in the powder room downstairs and decided it was worth the extra cost as it helped future proof the house, if we add a pool people can shower downstairs or if we at some point get injured or can no long get up the stairs we still have access to a bathroom.

During the whole appointment we decided what we could live without and then added the extras that we thought would add to the value of our house as well as treating ourselves. I got a second oven added to the galley as I have also wanted a second oven as I love to cook. The appointment was meant to take only 3hrs but after arriving at 9am we didn't end up leaving until 4pm - a lot of that time was us waiting while they did the paperwork, luckily there is a nice cafe just up from them where we had lunch while they were doing it all.

Next we had our colour appointments - we were advised that it would be good for us to go to Hopetoun (Porter Davis's colour selection provider) and have a look before our appointments so that we could have an idea of what to expect. Let me tell you this - on the weekend when it is open to the public, it is crazy! When we first went we had a trainee (Our house maybe known as the Trainee house, keep reading to find out why!) show us around the showroom and explain what was included and what was an upgrade.

From this we then browsed and had an idea of what we liked and tried to keep upgrades to a minimum, but to be honest the included level of products meant that you can have a high quality house without going crazy on upgrades. We discovered at our appointments that we had been given slightly wrong information about what was included and a few things that we wanted were actually an upgrade or that there were more options for us to choose from. I have a pretty good sense of style when it comes to what goes together well so colour choices were not daunting to be - what was is the number of people that were there and the fact that a lot of people were rather rude and just worried about themselves. So after being there for a while I just wanted to get away and relax! Here is what we thought we liked after our first visit to Hopetoun:

We also checked out the tiles got slightly scared at the extra cost for a tile that we just loved, but decided that the category 1 tiles had a lot to choose from that would also work with the theme we're aiming for.

Now when building with Porter Davis they will keep talking about their "world of style" its a great thing they've put together to help theme determine what sort of them for colour choice will work well for you. When i did this I got Classic & Ryan got Designer, between the two there are many common themes - black, white, dark wood tones and chrome. Yup that is defiently our style! Some of the styles we got were:

Boston - Think Top Gun and Tom Cruise’s leather bomber jacket.  Aged battered leather adorns furniture mixed with weathered timber boards and chrome detail to furniture.  An aeronautical influence of black and white photography, propeller inspired fans, medium-toned vintage look timbers with a strong masculine feel create a cool and contemporary look.

Milan - The fashion capital of the world, this impressive eye catching design features an edgy, contemporary feel. Dark timber tones blended with stone, grey and black fabrics and leathers create the strong base palette for striking vintage fashion inspired artwork. Splashes of yellow mixed with the latest contemporary wallpapers and classic inspired skirting and cornices, sit beautifully against this strong contemporary style. 

Chicago - A stunning city of architecture and history, this is timeless style enhanced with modern elements.  Rich timbers are complimented by a beautiful neutral palette with an art décor influence highlighted by ornate cornice detail, ceiling roses and skirting. You will enjoy this look for many years to come.

Manhattan - This look is class and sophistication all the way with the use of moody tones, dark timber furniture and beautifully crafted fabrics.  Simplicity and elegance make for a timeless style.  If you love the finer things in life and want a house that becomes the talk of dinner parties then this is it. It’s the sort of style used in a hundred TV shows.

I think all these styles suites us to a tee! I have always loved the idea of having a beautiful styled house that when some walks in they go 'wow' and are left with an impressive impact when they leave, but at the same time I want our place to be homely - a place were we feel comfortable and so does all our friends and family, a place to relax and enjoy ourselves. Hopefully we will be able to achieve this and you will just have to keep following me to find out if we do. :)