A big hello to all here in the homeone forums!
We've been lurking around for the last year or so picking up some really good advice and thought it was about time we stuck our heads above the parapet and started to keep a record of our building journey.
We arrived in Perth in July 2011 from the UK with the intention of giving it at least two years before we thought about buying or building just in case we decided that we missed the UK too much and wanted to go back. By the time we had been here 6 months we knew we weren't going back so started to look at houses that were coming up for sale and pretty quickly knew that we would rather build and (hopefully) end up with our dream home.
Towards the end of Feb 2012 we started to look at land around the Joondalup area but Mrs Elliott was adamant that she only wanted to live at Burns Beach. So, off we go to see the very lovely lady at the Burns Beach sales office and after some very hard bargaining followed by some very tense days waiting for offers/counter offers bouncing back and forward we finally managed to get a great deal on a really good sized block which we finally settled on in April after a nightmare time with the bank!
As soon as our offer was accepted we started to look really seriously for a house to fit on our block, unfortunately our block is what you guys call a 'traditional' block in that it is 21.5M wide and we quickly discovered that most of the project builders were only building houses for 15/16/17 metre wide blocks and these weren't best suited to ours. We then ended up visiting probably every display village in Perth and every display home and finally settled on two houses; the Dale Alcock Stoneleigh and the APG Tasman. The Tasman finally won out and we signed a PPA at the end of May last year,
As soon as we had signed the PPA things started to go wrong. The sales guy we had been dealing with left and we weren't contacted by anyone at APG and we only found out after a few emails had been bounced back and we walked into his display house to be told by the new guy that "he had erm...well....kind of....left APG.....maybe....erm....someone from the office should have called you, did you not get a call?"
After a long conversation with the sales manager we got a new consultant and the new guy was really sympathetic and really good with us. It became obvious that the first guy had been pretty economical with the truth in a lot of things he had told us and we had a couple of months of trying to sort out some things and in the end there were a couple of issues that could not be resolved to our satisfaction so we walked away a few thousand dollars out of pocket with nothing to show for it except a couple of hard learnt lessons.
Fast forward to October last year and we got in contact with a couple of building brokers with the intention of getting our own plans drawn up to suit the block and get some competition between the builders in the hope of getting a good price on the house. We settled on using Home Builders Advantage in Balcatta and after paying the necessary dollars they started on the plans and we finally had plans worth sending out to builders for quotes by mid November. Two weeks later and the quotes were back in, exciting times! The variance in the quotes were incredible, with there being almost 100K between the cheapest and the most expensive.
After selecting a few of the quotes for follow-up we had a chance to meet with the builders and quiz them and after getting the chance to view some of their work we finally decided to use a builder called Ravlich and Clent and paid a sizable deposit with them towards the end of February this year.
It has taken us a really long time to get to this stage and we have had more than a few bumps along the way but we ultimately feel we have a fantastic house design that will really suit our lifestyle and so far we have a really good feeling about our chosen builder but it is very early days for us at the moment and this will be the first of many posts about what the next nine months or so bring for us.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope our experience will help a few others, as we have been helped out by the posts on the forum ourselves. Our target is to be in by Christmas so let's see, eh? Watch this space.