Hi all,
After asking tens of questions in this great forum, and after reading lots of reviews and feedback from the great people in this forum, we made our mind and decided to build our first home.
We bought a land in Craigieburn and started hunting for builders. I wasn't very impressed with Sim0nds and M3tricon reputation as they received an average of not so good feedback. So we narrowed down our search to H3nely and Porter Davis.
They both seem to offer the same inclusions and have good reputation. At the start, we never even thought about PD so we were about to go for the 'Cooper' or the 'Barclay 388' by H3nley.
Having seen that the majority of people chose PD made us think of the urge to give PD a visit. So we did, and guess what !! We fell in love with their Bardot29 floorplan.
I wasn't so impressed with the 'Rumpus' and 'Bed 4' locations so we asked the SC if they could switch them, and the reply was a 'Yes'.
After 2 visits to PD, we deided to pay the initial $1000 deposit and the get things rolling.
Next week we have a meeting with the SC to put all the variations and facade decision on paper.
I'm so concerned about the whole mortgage nightmare and the chances of not being able to pay it off if things go wrong
People might think that house building is a good investment. Personally, I don't know, I don't think that after about to pay $400K, any profit can be made when selling it after few years. I don't know if I'm making my point clear, but I'd love people to persuade me that it's a good investment
I will keep updating this thread once I have anything to add. I will also attach as many shots/images as I could once the building process starts.
I made a little spreadsheet (Excel) documents that show any potential PD buyer all the expected expenses that you might come through during the process of the build. I uploaded it into Google Documents and can be viewed in this link. Anyone who wants the Excel version of it (or even the Mac Application version of it 'Numbers') can PM me and I will email it to them.
The document, http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key= ... JktdSUf2GQ
Here's the floor plan as shown in PD website,
Here's the floorplan which includes the alfreso (we're going for it as long as the total amount of the house doesn't exceeds a value we have in mind
Here's the modifications I made to the floorplan using my simple Photoshop skills Luckily that PD agreed to change it with no extra charge.