I've been reading posts on this site for the last 12 months and have found it a fanatsic source of info - so I've finally decided to post something myself as it looks like we might actually be reaching the start line at last with our own house build. I should say we (hubby & I) moved over to Oz about 2 years ago from the Uk so all this house buidling is totally new to us....
It all started about this time last year we decided to buy our first house here in melbourne and I started looking. I had been completely brainwashed in the UK into believing you could buy a mansion with ocean views for the price of a small london terrace . All ****** of course. But not wanting to give up on either the dream of the perfect house or living near the sea we decided to go down the 2 property line and we bought ourselves a plot of land on the Moonah links golf course (We are both keen golfers and have fallen in love with the Mornington peninsula but it is too far to commute to the city for work) and bought a small second property for our weekday commuting lifestyle. Now we had to find our home design unfortunately we probably should have done our homework before we bought the land coz
a. Moonah has a strict design code (no pitched roofs and natural colours/material only)
b. Our plot is in a dip which means we can build 2 storeys (our neighbours can only build single storey) but to get the views we needed an upside down house with living upstairs and a balcony to the rear.
c. Mornington peninslua is considered "the sticks" by some of the smaller boutique home builders and they don't want to know.
To cut to the chase after one option fell through - they REALLY didn't want to build in MP and stuck a huge travelling cost into the quote to force us to back out! And another with the perfect option told us upfront that didn't do the Peninsula when we enquired - we found our current builder/home design by chance. While visiitng a Hotondo display home in Mt Martha we noticed a New Dimension Homes place next door. The house itself didn't suit our needs but the sales guy was really helpful and told us they had already designed one home for our site and showed us some home plans of an upside down house they already had an file - it was custom build rather than one of their standard floor plans but they said they could redesign it anyay we wanted......So we moved the bacony to the rear of the property and increased it in size slightly and got what i think is the perfet floor plan for us. When work out how you upload the file I'll upload a copy.
Anyway we have had our colour consultation (choice wassn't as good as I hoped but I think it will work) and now we are waiting for the contract and final price. I think that's when we need to go to bank but I get confused with the process so any help there would be good? Once the ML design coomiittee has signed it off (not sure how long that takes) we can hopefully get a start date on site. When we started this we naively though after buying the land in Nov 09 we woul be building by March 2010...