Hi and welcome to our journey building our second home.
Our first house we built just before we were married, almost 8 years ago. A lot has changed since then. We have 4 beautiful children and have grown out of our old place so time to upgrade! We put our old house on the market and sold it a few months ago and are now living with my parents until we build again.
We purchased a block as soon as we found one suitable. We bought in Aspiri estate in Piara Waters. We wanted a decent sized block. Easier said than done when the majority of blocks these days are 400sqm average. We managed to bag our selfs a lovely block at 614sqm which is perfect size for us. We were going to keep hold of this block and save as much a possible until we felt we could start building. So now is the time!
We have been looking around at building companies and house designs for what seems like an eternity now. Our requirements for our home were
4 bedrooms - decent size as 2 of the kids will need to share and main bed to have a nice bathroom incl double shower and bath
2 bathrooms
study
theatre
activity room with a store room attactched
alfresco
kitchen with scullery or large pantry
Now i would have thought this was quite an easy thing to achieve, but I found that most companies had either the activity or study, not both. We found a few designs with all, but the house size was very small and we needed something decent in size that was within our budget. It was also at this time we decided to try and find a company that were including things such as air con, stone bench tops, high ceilings and a few luxury extras. As I see it, Aircon is a necessity in Australia so to have it included in the house price was wise.
We finally found a company that was inc all the things we wanted and the house on display was nice too. It certainly wasn't the layout I was envisioning but nice nonetheless.
Now for those of you that have built before I'm sure you imagine the high spec of a show home and that almost none of the over the top fancy things are included with what you get in your new home. But we were surprised to see a lot of the fixtures/tapware/shower heads etc were all good quality, nice designed stuff. So we started working on our design.
The building company we are working with is home group WA. Now I haven't heard of anyone I know that has built with them, so we are a bit unsure of how they will be through the process. I normally like to go with someone I have heard good reviews from, a recommendation is always a great thing, but not to be in this case.
So we set to work with HGWA. Our consultant was great from the start, very helpful, very knowledgeable and seemed to care about our home which is great. He showed us the base design which was slightly smaller and slightly different to the show home we were in but the closest they had.
He then showed us the promotion plan that had been drawn up already, adding a 1200 wide door, high ceilings in the entrance, kitchen had been made bigger to reflect the show homes kitchen.
The first thing we asked him to change was the size. He cut a line across the plan and extended the house out. We also added a store area to the side of the garage. In total we added around an extra 50sqm to the home.
We then decided to upgrade the base ens bathroom to the one that was in the display home, and add a bath in.
He drew up our first draft. Still a lot of changes to be made. This was going to be harder than I first thought!
By adding the larger bathroom, we had lost our study. I wanted the study in the house so we had to find a way to put it back without loosing too much area in our bedroom or living area. Few other minor changes, shelving for the store room and changing door position, changing around the scullery, and we wanted to add a half height wall to our alfresco so we could make an outdoor kitchen and have it like an extra room almost. So back he went to get the draftsman to draw up the changes. This is what came back.
So our study was added back in, but in turn our bathroom had been shrunk and non existent WIR was not good. Other than that, we were starting to get closer to our design.
At this point, the consultant we had been dealing with had to go away and said we could continue our drawing of plans with a colleague of his. We met with his colleague, he was also very nice and helpful. He informed us he usually does more of the drawing side of the process which was great as he had many great ideas and drew them up there and then for us.
He put everything in that we wanted and suggested a corner window to the front room so we had some feature to our front door/entrance way. This is what design came back.
Much better! The WIR had been made bigger, ens was back, study was in, store room was right. We added a window and cupboard to the scullery, extended the children's bathroom out to the eaves to make it larger.
This was almost as we wanted it. We had a couple more small tweeks, the corner window hadn't yet been added and I wanted to centre up some of the windows in the lounge, study and activity. Our plan was then sent into costing.
We received our costing and as we suspected we were quite over budget. We knew we had a little bit of money up our sleeves but wanted to keep as much aside as possible so we had some money to finish off the home.
We didn't expect to have flooring and carpet included but it was, so that was a cost we no longer had. We had them delete out our paving as we wanted to get aggregate done. The other big cost we had was double wall oven in the kitchen. With 4 kids, I don't really like the idea of ovens that are under the bench height and a single oven just won't cut it for the amount I cook/bake.
It was getting close to the point where we sign up. One more thing I requested as I guess a sweetener for us in the deal was that they included stone bench tops throughout for us. I didn't want stone in the kitchen and then laminate in the scullery so Lee said he would see if he can get it all included and fix the last few changes and then have us come in to look over and sign our contracts.
We are meeting with him tomorrow and I will update what happens after that....