Our Rocky Forever Home - couple of pics

SUMMARY: I'll try to update this from time to time.

My hubby and I are looking to build our "forever home" (well, 20 year home anyway) for ourselves and our two boys 4 year old and 1 year old.

Our plans:

Plan by Em_Brisbane, on Flickr

Our rocky, sloping, lovely piece of land:

2013-12-03 08.43.43 by Em_Brisbane, on Flickr

Our selections for the bathroom:

2013-11-05 10.09.54 by Em_Brisbane, on Flickr

Our main floor tile (a lappato 600x600):

2013-10-19 12.58.59 by Em_Brisbane, on Flickr

Kitchen inspiration (apart from the chandelier, the splashback and the stools haha):

Copyright Eliot Cohen - Zeitgeist Photographyemail: eliot@zeitgeist.com.au by Em_Brisbane, on Flickr

Our pool (hopefully it turns out looking this nice!):

image027 by Em_Brisbane, on Flickr

Timeline so far:

Feb 2013 - first enquired at land and Plantation Homes
March 2013 - contract on land with extra long settlement to give us time to sell our house
June 2013 - sold old house with a week to spare, settled on land and moved into rental (nightmare stressful couple of months!!)
Oct 2013 - signed contract with Plantation Homes (after 4 months languishing in admin land, sorting out our siting & retaining, floorplan tweaks, kitchen specifics etc. I guess that's what happens when you're picky!!)
Jan 2014 - commenced first retaining wall
Feb 13th - site cut done and no hideous rock encountered!!
June 17th - HANDOVER!!

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Have you considered using a smaller builder who will do a custom design to suit the block (as opposed to spending a heap of $$$ on earthworks and retaining walls)?

If you do stay with this plan:
- Make sure you get the drainage well and truly sorted, especially on the high side with the retaining walls.
- Have a think about where your natural lights coming from and what time of day e.g. you won’t get much natural light into the proposed 5th bedroom at the front as it’ll be a narrow window facing west.

Good luck with it.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply PAB!

We have considered a custom build, and we will probably get a drafted plan done to see what they could offer us, but the problem is we really don't like split levels, so whatever house we'd be looking at would be flat slab anyway.... also we had a look at @denbrook's split home option and they add 20-40k to do this anyway so I figure why not spend that on retaining walls and get the house we want...

Yes the point about the dark 5th bedroom is very valid and we've thought about that. We're also concerned that it will make the entry quite narrow. We're not actually sure how many kids we're going to have at this point (have 2 currently and will be going for either 1 or 2 more!) so we're not sure whether to do the 5th bedroom conversion or do something else with it. An alternative I've been thinking about is to close it off and open it up the other side (but leave the entryway quite wide, so it would only be a small space). This would make the kid's activity room bigger and use it as a study/homework nook. If a 4th child happened along we could maybe consider closing it off then.... Or if a 4th child happened we could also consider changing the study we're putting between the bathrooms into the 5th bedroom at that point, and use the small front room as our study (sad though to lose our big study!).

Whatever happens we dislike open studies at the doorway (I'm so messy I can't even see my desk right now!) so we'll have to do something different with that space.

P.S. Yes our current house has a terrible drainage problem near the cut retaining wall so we were hoping to be very careful this time, but I'm not sure how exactly. Is drainage more important the higher the retaining wall? Why is this? My brain not working currently. Will just have to rely on the landscapers/engineers suggestions and hope it's enough I guess!

Love the plan

We are currently in council stages with plantation homes as well. We are building a q2 retreat at augustine heights

Good luck with everything

Hi,looks like there are a couple of plantation builds on here.We too are building a plantation Retreat Voque Q1...Your house plan looks the same.We are closing off study and opening up other side to make another usable area for teenager.Just starting,plans are not even in council yet,just ironing out last minute council issues....cant wait to get started...

It's not 'more important' it's just more costly to get right and worse, to fix if it's not done right the first time.



Go to a couple of firms (independent of Plantation) for advice on the drainage and push for best options - don't skimp!

Forget split level, just get a single level house built on piers.



Total agree with closing off messy studies.

The area to the side of the front TV room, maybe extend the pantry into the area by another 600-900mm, build in a study nook and give yourself some more cupboard space. That’s one thing Plant (and others) are notorious for at the moment – lack of storage space!
The area around the WIP including the fridge can be worked on to streamline the entry a bit more and maybe make the entry a bit narrower as it is a bit of a space waster....anyway, something like this...



Other thing to think about is if you’re putting the laundry behind the garage, I’d suggest pushing the wall of the garage out to the boundary (zero lot permit required) and taking the small back wall of the garage that opens to the back yard, as far back as possible. This will give a ‘nook’ in the garage for bikes, etc. that 2, 3, 4...5…..kids seem to accumulate!

good luck with your build!

Hi there neighbour!

How have you found Plantation? Any tips or advice in dealing with them? Have you made many changes to your plans? I think there is hardly any difference between the q2 and the nouvea...



Hi Bouquet - whereabouts are you located? I think the major difference between the Vogue and the Nouvea (I don't even know if I'm spelling this right hahaha) is the location of the first hallway - yours is through the kitchen and ours is before it. I'd be really interested to see how all you plans have come up as that's exactly what we're thinking to do with that study. Are your plans up anywhere to have a squiz at (or could you possibly post them (de-identified of course) here? Is your "study nook" area totally open or do you have small walls coming in the sides to frame it? Is there a window in the study area out to the portico or have you left the hallway really wide?



Thanks Tina!

Ah yes, piers. It is a sensible possible solution but I just really want my alfresco leading out to the backyard, and the pool outside the living room window. We'll see just how prohibitive the costs of excavation and retention are and go from there I think.



Great mockup but I think you've got the vogue plans there rather than the nouvea - due to the location of the hallway through the kitchen rather than before. Doesn't matter, it gets your point across!

The issue with the laundry is - because we want to add a powder room and mudroom around there we are probably going to extend the laundry to be in line with the far garage wall and extend the laundry depth by a metre or so (not sure if this is possible yet, need to chat to Plantation). The garage sadly cannot be extended outwards width-wise due the width of our block and setback rules (not allowed to be on boundary). There would be no access to the backyard from the garage but we're planning to have a decent shed so hopefully that won't be a problem.

Kitchen - if you look at the plan I posted you can see the nouvea has a double door entry to the pantry which I think is a total waste of space so I'm going to move the fridge to where one of the doors are, make the pantry single door and a bit smaller, and then add more counter space where the fridge used to be. That's the plan anyway.

I totally agree about storage but when we add the "rumpus" option (the room between the two bathrooms), I am hoping to shave a decent chunk off this rather large room to make the main bathroom substantially bigger (you can't swing a cat in there let alone bath 3 kids!) and also hopefully get a walk-in-linen. We could sacrifice the bath in the ensuite for a WIL also if necessary.

So there's a bit of rejigging to go yet with the plan. At the moment we're just nervous about our meeting tomorrow to see if our land people are happy with the siting/setbacks and the excavation/retaining walls. I would be very happy to hear any thoughts about the above proposed changes.

Em I like your layout, just wanted to comment that last house we had our laundry was near the kitchen and it worked really well. Doing laundry close by the kitchen when dinner was cooking etc was great. Didn't happen this build but it's a good idea...also in the master bedroom WIR behind the bed area - love. Have seen a few pictures on pinterest they look great....something abit different

Where abouts are you buiulding?

So far plantation has been ok, we did have a few issues with the sales rep at brentwood orginally but after that the team at head office in springwood were very helpful.

My advise would be just to visit the colour selections centre early and get a idea on what upgrades are available as it will be tempting to add on.

Also make sure you upderstand everything in the tender.

Love your plan! We considered this one but ended up with a smaller/cheaper one. We've had a great experience with Plantat!on though! Best of luck!

Hi Tina.We are leaving study nook open for now,huby is a carpenter so we will make changes later if we want to..There will be a window in there for light.We are also making main bathroom into one room,so there will be no sep toilet,just leaving nib wall in..having larger vanity in there instead.We like the idea of having another room in between both lounge and theatre room,kind of seperates rooms,thus is why laundry will be staying where it is.Building at Mount cotton,If we ever get through council !!!We havent built before so all new.

Thankyou GC, yes I'm excited about the laundry on the other side from the bedrooms so I can run cycles overnight and not bother anybody (sad things excite me hahaha) and also the garage door hopefully not waking anyone up! We'll probably have the garage open through the laundry and try to build a little "mud room" area for dumping of shoes/bags. The entrance from the garage in our current house is always a mess so that's one of my target areas!

And I love the WIR also - with the window in it it's such a lovely open feeling little room! I'll hide in there when the kids get too much I think hahaha.



We're near Springfield. We originally went to Brentwood but the guy couldn't have been less interested in selling us a house, so we went to Rochedale instead and have found someone better to help us! We've also been speaking to the drafting bods from Springwood and they've been lovely.

Yes, you're right, we probably should do the "Cosham Information Session" thingy soon.



Thanks MV - I'm pretty sure I've stalked your thread quite thoroughly hahaha. I'll have another snoop now.



That's a good idea to make the main bathroom bigger like that. I'm very interested in how your study nook plans look.... did you find it made the entry too narrow?? .... I don't suppose you could PM or email me just that part of your plans?? No worries if you'd rather not.

Just a quick update. We had a 3.5 hour appointment with Plantation (normally it's an hour long appointment apparently!) where we went over the most significant changes we want to the plans. They are going to come back to us with the first version of our plans. I'm so excited!!

We are struggling mostly with what to do with the front "study". We originally wanted to close it off and have it as a spare/guest bedroom but there is a real problem with this plan we can't figure out how to get around - it makes the entrance relatively quite narrow, only 1.5m wide. This seems to be unavoidable because as you can see on the plans the "study" only has one very narrow and tall window in it, so if we make the room smaller in order to make the entrance wider, it won't have a window!! Another option we are now considering is actually keeping the entrance quite wide and lovely and having this room as a "storeroom" without a window. It would definitely be very handy but I worry we'll regret losing a whole room.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

What if you split the theatre room into a study and 5th bedroom and made the 'study' a play room?

You could just use it to make the 'tv area' large enough to incorporate toy storage and a play area and then you have the 5th bedroom and study without having to make the house bigger which is endless $$. Also putting a study between two bathrooms will make the plumbing cost more.
edit: You could then just make the whole house longer and add space to all of the rooms you wanted bigger.