Caz's Atherton- deck and yard starting soon!- pg 40

Its about time I started my own thread for the building of our house!!

I'm Caz, husband Phil and I and our 3 kids (6, 4 and 3months) are building our second home. The first home we bought together as a couple almost 8yrs ago has long since bust at the seams as we filled it up with kids, cats and chaos (hence the title).

We purchased a block of land in our home town which is 723sq - almost twice what we currently live on!! We have searched around for last few months to find the right house to fit on the block, use it the most efficiently and give us the most for our money (slightly limited as I am currently on Maternity Leave). We would like to be able to live in this house for at least 10yrs, so have left some room to add on a rumpus room later as the kids get bigger. As the plans currently stand, this house is twice as big as our current home, so we wont know what to do with ourselves!!

Our land is in an established street that was extended through into a court and another 8 blocks opened up. There is Plantation reserves directly behind our house, plus a laneway to the left of it to get to the reserve, so we only actually share one fence with a neighbour!!

Here is our block, Lot 7, notice the funny shape means our house will be built down the straight fence we share with our neighbours, and the leftover triangle will be our backyard:

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We are now building the ATHERTON 2300 as the Millbank would not fit by .5m inside our easements

Here it is:
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We've made a few changes:
*added single roller door to rear of garage
*enclosed study to make into Bed 4, added a robe
*moved Bed 2's robe to the shared wall with Bed 4
*kitchen pantry enlarged to now include robe that was previously Bed 2's
*added double doors to doorway between meals and lounge areas


Have had a fairly good run with Simonds so far (fingers crossed - agonised over staying with them from reading all the bad stories on this forum, but we haven't had any probs so far....) We have a site start date for November, with estimated finish date at the moment of April 2010 - will get official dates etc at tender appointment.

Going to do the tour of the Simonds showroom next week with my DH so I know ahead of time which are standards, which are upgrades, and how much room I have to move in our budget. Have gone over the sample HIA contract so I completely understand it and have a list of things I want to double check (thanks to HomeOne!)

I've started a blog to keep everything in one place, here it is: http://cazoraz.blogspot.com/

Thanks to everyone for all their help and advice so far, we have a long way to go so I'm sure I will be asking a million more questions!!




UPDATED

Here is the site and final house layout, we had to change around the front of the house )swap garage and main bedroom, WIR & en suite) so we can actually drive into our garage - the driveway would have been too narrow if we'd crossed it over onto the other side as the front fence narrows at the front. Happy enough, doesn't make any real difference except an extra 2m down dead side of house where we will situate our garden shed and water tank at a later date. It also actually gives us an extra 300m spac ein the lounge, kitchen and family rooms as they extended the wall out to meet the one of the main bedroom, so YAY for that!


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larger image: http://lh4.ggpht.com/_Mbuvwy4dYVg/Su_2R ... siting.jpg

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larger image: http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Mbuvwy4dYVg/Su_2Y ... s%20II.jpg





Cheers
Caz