Browse Forums Building A New House Preliminary Plans 2Feb 22, 2015 11:28 am So early draft plans and elevations appear below. This is a modified version of "The Ashwood " by National Homes, mainly modified by changing the house orientation to run across the block rather than down the block. Our block is not super deep but quite wide. Also a corner block. Plan Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Elevation Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 3Feb 22, 2015 3:45 pm Hi Tim That plan looks great, good use of the space and I love the raking ceiling! The scullery/laundry is a great idea. Everything fits really nicely and looks like it should be there on your plan, great work Our Custom Dale Alcock build in the Village at Wellard https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=78620 Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 4Feb 22, 2015 11:00 pm Plan looks great! Love the raking ceiling. We visited a National Homes display sometime ago and the raking ceiling was indeed a feature! Good luck with the build. Our Build Thread: The "Extended" Marina by Visionone Homes Our Inspirations: Frank Lloyd Wright | Houzz Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 5Feb 23, 2015 9:58 pm Love the rake ceilings and your plan Good luck with the build. Be warned you may need a LOT of patience. We are building with Commodore (also BGC) and they are slooooooooooow. Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 6Feb 23, 2015 11:00 pm Thanks for the replies everyone. Yes, we are quite pleased with the plan, I think it will be a good functional house. The slowness is something that concerns me, I know I will need to be in constant contact with them always pushing!! Actually to be fair to National Homes, they did acknowledge some of their past problems with slowness and they indicated that they were changing up some of their methods and procedures to improve on that. So for now I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and hopefully my build will prove them out! Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 7Mar 04, 2015 9:33 am Hi all, so just sent in our preliminary selections and no we are waiting to get a pre-start date booked in. It's a funny process as you get no idea about what any possible upgrades etc will cost, so we just went to town and added most things we think we would like, but then expect to have to reverse that decision once it is costed. Surely some prices could be made available, but hey, that would be efficient and surely we cannot have that .... One area that is still very vague to me is lighting. They ask you to do provide a lighting plan, but do not tell you what light fittings will cost or are even available? How has everyone else handled this? I know they do provide a single bayonet to each room, but if you want downlights, you need to have powerpoints in the roof. Shall I ask to leave the bayonets out and then get them to install the powerpoints instead, and add the lights later? This process ought to be simpler .... Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 8Mar 21, 2015 1:05 am timwa Hi all, so just sent in our preliminary selections and no we are waiting to get a pre-start date booked in. It's a funny process as you get no idea about what any possible upgrades etc will cost, so we just went to town and added most things we think we would like, but then expect to have to reverse that decision once it is costed. Surely some prices could be made available, but hey, that would be efficient and surely we cannot have that .... One area that is still very vague to me is lighting. They ask you to do provide a lighting plan, but do not tell you what light fittings will cost or are even available? How has everyone else handled this? I know they do provide a single bayonet to each room, but if you want downlights, you need to have powerpoints in the roof. Shall I ask to leave the bayonets out and then get them to install the powerpoints instead, and add the lights later? This process ought to be simpler .... Hi Tim, Just responded to your comment in my thread Yep - it's always the problem with prestart. Your basically guessing without having any idea of price. Sounds like you've done it the right way, get every option priced at prestart then sit there and go through it. If it can be done afterwards it's worth getting a quote or a budget price so you can compare. For example i had a budget price for a glass splashback of around $2.5k, however i was quoted nearly $5k at prestart. I wasn't asked to provide a lighting plan, only the electrical plan which does include lighting. You should have received a standard electrical drawing for your house plan which will include things like light points, power points, exhaust fans, aircon and smoke alarms. One thing that caught me out, was apparently you can no longer just have junction boxes put in. You actually have to have at least one light in the room - which is kind of crap. So try and give some thought about where you would put downlights, then move the light fitting in the room to where one of the downlights will go. A lighting store will be able to guide you about how many you will need per room and the coverage. As i mentioned over in my thread - lighting from the builder is expensive. So get the minimum done then have a sparky come and do the rest after hand over. Just pre-plan and make sure you do the things that have to be done now, like power points on internal walls. If your unsure have a conduit put in, or upgrade the light switch to a conduit - for example if you want to add one of the light/heater/fan units in a bathroom, have them put the light switch in a conduit so you can have this installed at a later date. Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 9Mar 21, 2015 8:43 pm Thanks for the reply elemist. I have done as you suggested and organised an early ClipSpec session. Hopefully this will shed some light on the whole thing. Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 10Jun 10, 2015 1:07 am OK, so time for an update. These have not been very regular so far, but then again, things are moving so slowly I barely even notice them happening. The big news is that the block I bought has been finally cleared, with the very old 2x1 house completely gone. Thanks to Swift Demolition for that. You can see my newly cleared block below. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ So only other news is that Pre-start has come and gone, and that the final drawings were issued along with a set to the council. The pre-start process went fairly well, tho you do feel like you are getting stung a fair bit on all the upgrades etc you may want. For those interested, the cost basis seemed to be that if you want to upgrade something, expect to get zero credit for the original item, and pay full retail for the new one. As an example the upgrade from $450 toilets to $800 toilets (based on RRP prices) cost $800 per toilet! Electrical was interesting as well. Tip - do not expect the ClipSpec consultants to offer any good or useful advise. You are better off doing all you own research on lighting placements and switch positions and then just go in and get them to note it down. Even then they will get it only about 90% right, so carefully review the final drawings and fix it up. Also the home network cabling was very expensive when offered by the builder but then again, blank wall boxes were quite cheap to install. So I got a heap of blank wallboxes with conduits running down to them installed, and I will add the network cables after. My plans are now waiting on the local council. No idea when we will see them, but when we asked them they said, we have only had it for two weeks, ring again after 6 weeks ..... It inches forward. Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 11Jul 13, 2015 9:38 pm How are you progressing Tim? Any action on the empty block? Our Custom Dale Alcock build in the Village at Wellard https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=78620 Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 12Jul 13, 2015 10:25 pm Looking forward to following your build, we used to live in Bicton and I loved living there, it is such a lovely suburb. Great floor plan an design! All the best with your build Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 13Jul 13, 2015 10:34 pm Hey W2T, no action as yet. Still stuck at the council approval stage It's a bit disappointing really. There are two issues that have caught us out. The first is that apparently the Main Roads Dept re-classified our street as a main road, and as such decided that we are not allowed to reverse out the garage onto it. So we have had to widen up the garage door, double the driveway width, and create an on-block reverse/turning bay so we can turn the cars around to drive out forwards. This really caught us by surprise, and we were a bit freaked out by it, but to Nationals credit they have come up with a good solution. We were also lucky by having a bigger block. Had we bought a smaller (front strata say) block, I think this new requirement would almost be impossible to comply with. The second issue was second street setback. The R-codes for my area say you need to have a 1.5m setback on the side street but Melville council wanted 3m. Just because. You would think after paying around $900/m2 for land you would be allowed to use it, but apparantly it is not that easy. Anyway, they did agree to allow the smaller setback, if we improved the appearance of the side of the house that faces the side street. So we have done this and have re-submitted to the council hoping they will now approve. I guess we will find out in due course. One thing we have not found out yet is the cost impact of all this - and that is worrying me too ... Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 14Jul 14, 2015 3:10 pm Hi Tim, That sounds frustrating about the turning circle thing, will you lose some of the activity room having to extend the garage? Actually I just re-read that, is it just the door you need to make wider? Sounds like another expense either way. Sinurt who lives near me had a similar issue with having to jazz up her side elevation for a corner block, I guess the bright side is that you can keep your set back. Our Custom Dale Alcock build in the Village at Wellard https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=78620 Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA 15Sep 09, 2015 11:40 pm Hi everyone. It's time for another update. So we got all the above issues sorted out and now have planning approval. The solution to the parking issue was to have a 6m wide crossover and a 12m wide driveway - enough room to do a reverse 3-pointer. The garage door is also 6m wide. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ We also had to jazz up the side street elevation. Actually I quite like the end result, it looks great I think. Elevations below (Ev 4 is the side elevation): Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ And for completion, this is the final plan: Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ The other good news is that I was told today that my build has finally progressed from Admin to the Construction Team. So YAY! I guess this means only another 8 - 12 months to go For the record it has taken roughly 13 months from initial sign up to reach this point. I was quoted 7 months, so it was only overshot by 6 months - groan. I will have to see if I can encourage the builders to make up some of this time during the build phase. I should add that not all this delay was down to National, our local council did give us a pretty hard time in getting our approvals. That said, there is much National could do to improve these times. The quality of the work however, and the solutions to the problems offered, was excellent. Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA - Siteworks underway 16Sep 18, 2015 8:30 pm Can you believe it? Because I can't. After a mammoth 410 days since we paid our first deposit to National Homes, the siteworks has finally started. We were starting to wonder if we would still be alive when this date came around, but it seems we are. So yay. Here's hoping we can last to the very end!! Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA - Slab underway 17Sep 30, 2015 12:43 am So things appear to be actually moving now, which is great. Let us hope the momentum keeps up. The siteworks are done, and the slab is happening. Below you can see that the footings are done and maybe a slab tomorrow. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA - SLAB DOWN !! 18Sep 30, 2015 11:05 pm So now it feels like it's actually happening We have a slab. Super Yays all around!! And boy the build has progressed so very well to this point. I visited the site at lunch today wondering if anything might be happening and I was so pleasantly surprised to find Bodi and his team just finessing the last bits of the slab. Thanks guys, it looks great. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ I cannot wait to see what happens next ... Re: NATIONAL HOMES Build - Bicton WA - SLAB DOWN 19Sep 30, 2015 11:55 pm Conslabulations! I'm now following your thread, no particular reason just living vicariously through others as we patiently wait for our day haha 1 4697 Thank you so much everyone. This all makes a lot of sense. I guess when you talk to a builder who butters up everything to look very polished, you get to start believing… 7 17616 3 48400 |