MUST Haves for the HOUSE

Hi All,

As we are in the process of deciding a builder for our house, and the cost of building, i tht it would be good to ask you all out of ur experience the MUST HAVE features for the house. So as to get a guideline of the cost and decide the builders accordingly.

we are building a single storey house in Tarneit Gardens.... and are looking at finalizing a builder soon, the MUST Have List over and above the basic house structure so far is

Ceiling ht 2550
Fly Screens
Cesarstone benchtop & glass splashback for kitchen
Alfresco/pergola

It will be nice to know ur thts
thnx

https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=12621

Great list there...

A DISHWASHER !!

Find a really good dishwasher, then build your house around it.

A big enough space for a modern fridge with plumbing...

enough tv and phone Points, as well as where you would like lights and power points.

I would recommend sitting down and doing a list of every thing in a house you want. and then visualize on your plan of where your going to have things for example electrical TV's, stereos,computers, etc as well as in the kitchen, i dont think you can ever have too many PPs. we have 55 pps in our new house and there is around 14 alone in the kitchen. OH and we have also put a 2x pp in a robe for our mobiles an stuff.

A shed.

meh... instead of phone points get network points instead.. even if you don't have / want a HT a networked home the capablity for a networked home is much better then having to pay 3-4 times later on

even having the "basic" installed when buillding but allowing for future improvements by getting holes predrilled and pull wires done saves alot of money when wanting to network/ smarthome your house later on

I would consider some sort of cooling - obviously can be put in afterward, and often cheaper, but if you need to package everything up now, I totally recommend it. Our rental had no cooling last year and summer was horrible, we negotiated it with a renewal of lease this year and we are so thankful!

I'd also look at upgrading insulation - it makes a big difference and doesn't add too much to cost!

Good luck!

Spend your money on stuff you can't do later - higher ceilings, thousands more powerpoints and lighting, upgrade insulation, upgrade facade, vacpan, and the list goes on. Things like colors, doors, et cetera should have less priority because you can upgrade on these later.

Hi,

I would reccommend getting the high ceilings. I think they are worth every penny. It m,akes your house look and feel so much bigger.

Our builder charged us about 5000 to lift them from the standard height to 9 and a half foot.

But why have net work points when everything is going wireless these days?
we put in cat E5 able right through the last house we built and never ever used it.. even had a place for a patch panel and never got around to finishing it!

Consider if you want a larger sized garage for storage or if you have big cars/4wd. And a rear roller door if there is no side access.

Ample storage! (check ouy me "let's talk about storage" thread )

Plenty of power points and sufficient lighting points....

Insulation - roof, exterior and interior walls

A decent sized pergola/alfresco area

And more storage in side. are the built ins big enough

My "must have" is someone that can build the bloody thing.
Yes I'm scarred....

window locks, remote control to garage door and plenty of storage!

on my must have list are lots of power points - tv points and phone points although I will be looking at smartwiring the house for networking purposes. We have tried to include most of the other things mentioned in this thread so we hope we have it all covered! I bet I forget something though.

Thanks all, very helpful,

do you have approx prices for phone & power pts

I think our PPs were around $50 extra

My reasons are because you can use Cat 5e cable to route your telephone. (How to has been covered in another thread.)

Because wired network is more stable than wireless. I've had drivers for the wireless network cause the operating system to become unstable - reverting back to a wired network fixed the problem.

Because if all your sons and you are trying to stream video at the one time even a 105 mb/s wireless will not cope as all the traffic has to fit in this bandwidth. Using gigabit per second switches will future proof you for lots of children!

Because children will have LAN parties and bring their friends over complete with multiple computers to play multiplayer games. Trust me, they're not going to be happy chappies unless they can have the lower latency of a wired network.

Because you can supply power along a Cat 5E network, thus providing power for your security cameras. If you use wireless for these, you will still have to find a way to provide them with power. It's just easier to send power down the Cat 5E cable.


Because I run two printers and three scanners. It would cost me too much to provide each with a wireless server.

And these are just what I can think of as I'm typing.