Browse Forums Building A New House 1 Dec 27, 2013 4:43 pm Now that Christmas is over and our minds have turned to the new year I wanted to get started on one of the easier new years resolutions I had set myself for 2014. That is putting some material on here about our new home build with Metricon Homes in Sydney. Putting some material here will keep me distracted from the need to get started on my far trickier new years resolutions like getting to the gym...My wife is a little concerned about our privacy and doesn't want me to post too many details or pictures on the forum so I will share what I can and welcome anyone to contact me if they have any detailed questions. Anyway I have been lurking on here for 6 months regularly coming to take in the details of what other people were doing in their builds and I have taken a lot of very useful tips and advice from people who have documented their progress in detail on here. Many thanks to the many people who have shared so much detail about their new home build experience and I really wished I had found this place earlier as it is such a great resource. Our build is now drawing to an end - just before Christmas we got the fixing stage invoice which means that the plaster-work inside is largely complete and the base cabinets have gone into the kitchens and bathrooms. We expect to be finished early in 2014. So far our experience with Metricon homes has been extremely positive and we are very pleased with the progress made so-far. Building a home in an established area is a pretty complex undertaking for a volume project builder and we have been very impressed with the quality of people inside Metricon who we have dealt with as we have had one or two tricky issues come up during the process. I will divide my post up into several parts to allow myself ample time to get to the gym and work off the Christmas pudding. Our background: We are building in the Willoughby LGA. We currently live in the area in a unit and really wanted to stay living here - the convenience and proximity to everything that we value was very importance to us. Living in an apartment here has been great save for one major problem - we have a single bathroom. It has been driving my wife and I crazy for a long time and we decided to start looking for a place ages ago. Like many people who are looking in established areas we really saw two options for ourselves at first which was to either buy a finished house that has been renovated or to buy a house in need of renovations that we could decorate to our taste. We quickly discovered that newly renovated housing stock in our area cost an awful lot of money and we really didn't find any houses in need of redecoration - everything we were seeing needed major renovation. As we dug more deeply we came to realise that the sort of renovations many houses we saw needed were going to cost a substantial sum of money - the idea of buying a 3 bed, 1 bathroom house and converting it to a 4 bed, 2 bathroom house with an open-plan living area seems very simple but in the face of development restrictions in conservation areas we have seen people spend almost as much on major renovation projects as we are spending on a new home. We have done renovations before but they have always been limited to new kitchens and new bathrooms etc, we have never taken on a major renovation project and it seemed very daunting to us. The idea of knocking an old house down was something we had not considered doing until we went to inspect an old home in a street we liked that was surrounded by new homes and the promises of being able to rebuild. As we looked into it more the idea became more appealing. The exact house we wanted in a location we loved. The hammer fell on the auction day and one of the places we had our eye on became ours. The place we purchased already had a CDC approved custom home on the block so we knew that we had a something we could fall back on in the event that we couldn't get a project home onto the site that we liked. The ability to a CDC development on the site was the thing that was very appealing to us - not having to go through a protracted council DA process has been a blessing. Our early experience with Metricon We started looking into the possibility of using a project builder early on. We went to Homeworld and had a look at what was on offer. Not all builders would take on a job in our area and that did limit our choice a lot. Metricon were only prepared to develop in our area via CDC and would not develop if a council DA was needed. Early in the process we really liked the Metricon houses we saw. I know that I was suckered in like everyone else by the high-end finishes and nice displays but looking beyond that and unlike a lot of the other project builders we spoke with, Metricon was able to give us a very accurate picture of what they could and couldn't do on our lot during the pre-tender stage and importantly what costs we were facing. A lot of other project builders we dealt with would only unveil their detailed costs at tender stage. Metricon was able to give us a very detailed and what turned out to be very accurate pre-tender estimate by one of the sales people. As you walk through their displays they make display option lists available and you can get a reasonably accurate idea of what the costs are from that process. Probably the only thing they will not be able to tell you is what to budget for upgrades in their colour studio but it is possible to go the studio and look at the taps and doors and everything was labelled so you could see the cost. It helped us get comfortable going in that we could set a budget for the build and we could decide what areas we wanted to invest in. What are we building We settled on the Laguna 33 with the facade where you get a balcony upstairs. We made one fairly major change to the floor plan - we are unable to access the house from the front street because we have a couple of large trees on the council nature strip blocking access and with the ability to access parking at the rear of the house by laneway we decided to convert what would have been the garage into habitable space by making a guest room with ensuite bathroom. The other change to the floor plan we settled on was changing the location of the upstairs living space and putting it at the front of the house with access to the balcony - we increased the size of the balcony and we are delighted with having the upstairs living room have access to the balcony - we are fortunate to have a pleasant outlook over the tree tops to Chatswood off the balcony and it will make the small upstairs living space very inviting. Everyone is different but to us it seemed like a bit of a waste to have the upstairs balcony accessible only to a bedroom rather than making the space accessible to anyone in the house off a living space. Our tastes are modern and we love the look of rendered houses. One of the big attractions of Metricon to us was the ability to build with Hebel which is giving us the clean modern look we love. Some would say it is perhaps a little stark and not interesting to look at but we decided to upgrade all of the upstairs elevations to Hebel (from weatherboard) and with the glass balcony it will give the home a very modern look. Because we have made what would have been the garage a guest room it gives the house a very different look to most display homes where we think the double garage can dominate. We are building on a narrow 12m wide block and having 6m taken up by a double garage would have changed the appearance of the house a lot; not that we had the luxury of being able to have the choice to put a garage at the front. We will need to use landscaping to overcome the relatively stark build and create some interest at the front of the house. Will post some more later on. Will post some more later on. Hi, I am looking into doing a KDR in Melbourne and am contemplating using Kialla Homes. I am looking for feedback on them from others who have built with them. 0 8204 We were lucky in that our old house was so small (86 square metres) compared to the new house, they were able to take enough readings around the old backyard house before… 8 24885 |