We've been lurking on this forum for a few months now, and it's been invaluable with helping us to ask the right questions and select options so far in our house building experience. We sold our first house back in June, bought a run-down place in Melbourne eastern suburbs a couple of weeks later, and have left our initial deposit with M at the end of June. We're living in the dump only until we can knock it down and start with our new house! Initially I wanted my uncle to build for us as he's a custom builder, unfortunately he only has real experience with $2-5m custom builds and says from what he knows, m3tricon will be fine for our needs (and cheaper than his costs would be)
So far, quite a positive experience with ******. Sales consultant in lyndhurst was helpful and communicated within 3-4 days by email, and our CSC calls when she says she will ,and replies to email within 24 hours. Hope this continues.
Anyway, here's some pictures for your enjoyment! Just click on the thumbnail if you want to see a huge size version.
The old place we bought on about 600m of pretty flat land.
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The proposed house: ******* nolan 41, chateau facade. We found it quite hard to visual facades from the tiny catalog pictures, so I spent a whole heap of time in Sketchup to replicate the layout so we could play with colours etc!
This one with a very dark grey brick; I think the upgrade costs for dark bricks are pretty huge (I've been told of about $26000 for a cat 7 Austral!) I love the Austral Zinc, but it's cat 8 and the cost for the full house would be massive! We're thinking about maybe just Zinc to the front, and a lower category brick to the rest of the house (it was done on the Lindrum at keysborough and looked OK), and also working on a shortlist of acceptable bricks.
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This one with a more usual dark brown brick, around cat 3-4 upgrade depending on manufacturer.
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We'll need help on colour later on (mainly in brick, cladding & render selection, and maybe with wet areas) but we don't have the colour appointment until mid September, so we'll work on that later!
A 3D view of the internal elevations, based mostly on the original floorplan. Only thing is that I didn't bother constructing the stairs as that would take ages, so I just used a standard clipart stair for now.
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Now here's where we could use some homeone feedback! We have our first prelim contract meeting (aka initial tender appointment) next week, and we'd like to submit pretty much all the structural changes we have in mind at this appointment in order to not hold up the process too much. The main changes we've made here include
1) The original laundry layout had an entrance door off the kitchen next to the fridge. We've redesigned it so it has a seperate entrance near the powder room/bottom of stairs.
2) The powder room had a toilet in a little cubicle and the sink outside; we've put them all together in the one room so it's hidden from view.
3) A few extra doors to close off the study, front/rear passage, rumpus (home theatre) and ensuite. I work a lot from home and was going to close off the sitting room to make my home office, but ultimately I can use one of the upstairs bedrooms and/or the study for my work.
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Major structural options we've already chosen include higher ground & 1st floor ceiling, brick infills instead of FC. There's a bunch of other little options we've got but not particularly relevant to structure.
At this meeting, we also may make these (structural) changes;
- Delete colorbond (standard tiles are cheaper, we prefer the look of tiles too)
Delete full extended eaves (standard design has 600mm eaves to north, 450mm to rest. I think this should be sufficient, 600mm eaves all around is another $3300 too.)
Add plumbing to use future water tank to WCs
I'd also love a 10 car garage, but because of size limits only a 2 car garage will fit Anyway we love this forum, and would welcome constructive feedback that would help us lock in the structural options at the prelim contract appointment. We also post a fair bit on our blog, which would probably be useful to others building/have built a 2 storey ******* house so welcome to have a look there too (link in my signature)
Thanks everyone!
T&T