Browse Forums Building A New House 1 May 01, 2016 12:24 pm Hi all, Long time reader, first time thread starter. My wife (K) and I (M) are commencing the journey to build our second home together and this time I decided I'd start a thread for it! So here we have M&K's Build Thread. We built our first home with Celebration Homes in 2011/2012 and I stalked the forums then but never posted anything, so I figured this time I should give back for all of the invaluable contributions you have all made in the process. So where are we: We've selected a block, paid our deposit and spoken to a couple of builders about different designs. It looks like we're not going to get a home and land package done in time for settlement of the block as we've got to sell our current house and we dragged our feet a little on getting the process started, so we'll likely settle on the block first and then take another couple of months to save a bit more cash, sell the house and get going. Apparently it takes money to build a house, you think we'd have remembered that from last time? The Block: Its a 375m (12.5*30) block in the Anchorage Village section of Amberton Estate, which is a fair distance from our current place in Wellard but we wanted to go North and live near the beach! The Builder: We talked to a number of builders trying to find what we wanted. We liked the Vegas from Home Group WA, the Alto from Dale Alcock and we also saw a display called the My Place from Lauren Steadman Homes in the Providence Display Village just behind us in Wellard. The display was for a 15m block, so we were curious as to their 12.5m designs and they had a couple that we really liked. We'd never heard of LSH before so did a bit of digging to try and find more about them. I'm still not an expert but I found they are a new boutique brand from the Steadman Building Group, who run Signature Custom Homes and Steadman Homes - Two much more luxury brands than we can afford at present! Anyway, after making some changes to all three designs and seeing how they'd fit on the block etc, we have finally decided to go ahead with Lauren Steadman Homes and a variation of their Project X 12.5 home. This home has kinda been built in the Allara Estate (although obviously a much nicer version) but it was good to get the basic dimensions and layout sorted so we could stand in there and get a feel for it. This house will be narrower than our existing home (15m v 12.5m) so we didn't want to end up with a 'tunnel' - Which is the feeling I got from a lot of other 12.5m designs. We're still waiting on final changes to come in and be costed etc, so I haven't got our final floor plan just yet to show you all, but I'll post it when I get it. If anyone has any experience with the Steadman Building Group, feel free to share! Its a little nerve wracking not going with a builder whose homes I've seen all over the place and I know can deliver hundreds of homes a year. The Timeline: April 2016: Paid deposit on block. June 2016: Settlement due on block. November 2016: Planning to commence build around here. Christmas 2017: Moved in? We will see... M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 2May 01, 2016 12:29 pm So our block: Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ And the Project X 12.5 floor plan, subject to our changes: Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Comments welcome. We are adding in 360mm to the theatre and living room, changing the pantry to a little scullery type area and removing the IT nook to have a built in pantry. Also extending the ensuite bench to have double basins and a couple of other bits and pieces you can see when we get plans! Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 3May 01, 2016 6:45 pm Looks great! Those changes are smart ones and will make better of use of the space. Potentially could have a lovely big alfresco too. Look forward to seeing your plans and progress Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 4May 01, 2016 9:01 pm deejay08 Potentially could have a lovely big alfresco too. Great suggestion - Its one of the changes we're waiting on. Extending it out just enough (5m length total) that I don't have to have another pillar, so to around the end of the window in the Activity area. I also wanted the fridge recess to be 100mm deeper (our current recess is 600mm and our fridge sticks out a fair bit), so we might pinch that space from the bathroom and switch the bath/sink location to accomodate. The main bathroom feels large already so I think removing the 100mm won't make a difference there. I'll see how that turns out. I think about the only other change we made was to remove one of the linen cupboards from the laundry and replace with a bench and broom cupboard in there, and we converted the robes in the rear bedrooms to have sliding doors. We should hear back on Thursday and I'll post the plans for a bit of a critique here with everyone! Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 5May 01, 2016 9:26 pm Great idea about the laundry...we added a bench and bottom cabinet to ours but now I'm thinking a small broom cupboard would be great for the ironing board (and broom!) lol will try and sneak it in at our colours appt! Sliding doors on wardrobes are heaps more practical too. Sounds like you've got heaps of experience out of your first build! Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 6May 01, 2016 9:41 pm Haha, lots of reading here and the experience the first time around certainly helped, plus our builder has been fantastic with a couple of suggestions. I'm sure there are loads of things we'll miss again, but we're trying very hard to get most things in. Good luck sneaking in a broom cupboard! Initially we just wanted a bench and my builder suggested the cupboard, and I think its a fantastic idea so we ran with it. Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 7May 01, 2016 9:54 pm Yeah this is an amazing forum...so happy I stumbled across it. Has been an invaluable resource and the support and advice from people in the same boat is awesome. I'll let you know how I go with that broom cupboard I've subscribed to your thread now so will be following along Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 8May 01, 2016 10:23 pm Welcome to the north of the north! We are just starting out build in Alkimos Beach, so a couple of suburbs down from you. All good family suburbs so when you finally move up this way I'm sure you'll love it Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 9May 06, 2016 11:00 am Cool, so I got the updated plans from the builder yesterday. I'm liking how it has turned out so far. One thing that isn't on here is that we'll be dropping the ceiling in be kitchen to 28c I think, because we want overhead cupboards over the bench in the scullery and the cooktop and like the idea of the ceiling being dropped the whole way around for that. We ended up pinching the 100mm extra I wanted for the fridge recess from the actual kitchen benches I believe. Not sure how I feel about that though, but I also don't know where else we could steal it from unless we went back into the theatre room (which is already pretty shallow and we added 360mm to in the first place). So this is where we are at... We've told them there aren't any other major changes we would like to make so we are waiting for them to price it up for us and we will see how much room we have in the budget for everything! Comments welcome, naturally. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 10May 11, 2016 10:05 am We had a pricing meeting yesterday with the builder and they came in pretty well spot on for budget and had most of the things we wanted in that price, so we requested a couple of other things that we thought about: - Replacing the window to the alfresco with a door so we have doors on both sides of that corner, joined by a pillar. - Changing the alfresco to plasterboard (we thought this was something we requested before but possibly not after talking to so many builders). Certainly don't want the PVC joining strips out there. And then just a bunch of things we can change at prestart when we proceed (or they could put in for us in the quote, we'll see), such as an undermount sink, bin drawer in the kitchen, replacing the kitchen cupboards with drawers, a recess in the shower etc. I'll see what our man says but we were quite happy with their presentation last night and the cost of some things came in cheaper than we expected. I expected to have to cut things out rather than add in a couple of other extras that we wanted as well but thought might be over the top. Things that we asked for like: Stone to the entire house (kitchen, scullery, ensuite, bathroom and laundry) is stupidly expensive but not as expensive as I thought it would be; Waterfall edges to the island bench (also stupidly expensive and about what I expected); Hobless showers really good price and less than half of what Dale Alcock quoted us. So we'll probably sign with them and go ahead, just pending the window/door change cost etc being returned to us. We just wanted to take it all away and evaluate the spec and compare to the spec we had elsewhere, but we're pretty happy on the surface. Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 11May 11, 2016 12:19 pm Good idea with the proper al fresco ceiling, we did that and also in the portico ceiling too. Cost maybe $500 all up so not too bad and definitely worth it in the end. I have never been around a LS show home so may have a nosey at the weekend. Our slab went down yday (Alkimos Beach) but I love looking at show homes lol Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 12May 11, 2016 3:36 pm ZoePerth I have never been around a LS show home so may have a nosey at the weekend. Our slab went down yday (Alkimos Beach) but I love looking at show homes lol Congrats on the slab! The LSH display is in Allara Estate if you're up that way. The other two they have are down South of the River, in Providence and Springtime Estates. The one in Allara is very close to the design we're building - The living/kitchen/laundry area and rear bedrooms are all the same dimensions... And like you I spend a lot of time in display homes having a look around! Its where I got so many of my ideas from. Actually a good pickup; I hadn't considered the porch would be Hardiflex as well - I'll make a note to ask about that. Thanks! We only have a small porch area, so I would imagine it wouldn't be too much to change. Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 13May 11, 2016 4:58 pm Yes ours isn't huge and it most about $120 - our pre start girl mentioned it and suggested we change it otherwise I wouldn't have even thought of it. We were up in the freezing cold last weekend when the new park in Allara opened and I noticed the LS. Must be a new company or is it an offshoot of another? Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 14May 11, 2016 7:37 pm Hi ItsMartin, Looking forward to following along! What's making you move North? Fellow Wellardian here, we are on our second build (in the Village). I liked the LSH home in Providence too, it had a good feel to it compared to others in the display village. Our Custom Dale Alcock build in the Village at Wellard https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=78620 Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 15May 12, 2016 12:52 am ZoePerth Must be a new company or is it an offshoot of another? New offshoot of the Steadman Building Group (Signature Custom Homes), they're a boutique builder still, not a large volume builder like Dales/HomeGroupWA etc. AFAIK they only started building homes under this brand late last year, so their first homes are being handed over now. Wellard2ndTimers What's making you move North? Truthfully, my wife! She wants to be closer to the beach, and not any further south than we are now, so we started looking north instead. Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 16May 17, 2016 5:10 pm Got a call from the builder today... He gave me a verbal indication of the price over the phone with the changes I requested. They're still $10k more expensive than DAH for a similar level of inclusions, but I suppose it isn't all about price... Or thats what I keep telling myself :/ All good, we'll get a formal quote to sign off on next week and give them some cash to lock it all in and start the admin process. We put our current house on the market today which will help us to get our deposit for the house (or save for a few more months if we don't sell immediately), so the builder suggested signing up and getting admin out of the way and that way we've got a firm price etc, we can then get through all the admin stuff and then the moment we've got our house sold and finance sorted we can go to site straight away. Seemed like a good idea to me, so thats what we'll do next week when my wife returns from work! Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 18May 17, 2016 10:14 pm I feel like I already have! But you make a valid point. I say they're $10k more expensive, but I think we've got better quality 'builders range' stuff being used (appliances, tapware etc) which is where the difference is. In reality I suppose its closer. But honestly I don't care too much about the oven. Maybe K does. Lets assume she does. Their pricing on upgrades was much better in general though. Hobless showers was less than half the price DAH quoted me for example. Our rep knew from the start budget was a thing we'd have to stick to and he was competing against HGWA and DAH, so he's been good with inclusions etc. As I mentioned before, at our pricing meeting I was surprised at a lot of the things we managed to fit into our budget! I think the initial price of the house might have had more margin than DAH and they've been good on the upgrades, whereas the initial DAH margin was lower and the money is made on the upgrades. Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 19May 17, 2016 10:58 pm Exactly right, you've gotta consider everything that's included and consider like with like. Sounds like you've done a heap of homework. Are they both offering flooring and window treatments, air con etc? Or will you do that afterwards? Re: M&K - Lauren Steadman Homes in Amberton Estate, Eglinton 20May 17, 2016 11:20 pm I have spreadsheets with every little inclusion and columns to match them all up, I've been driving K nuts hahaha. I've gone off to find what type of tapware and basins are in the range and things like that (which much easier with DAH and their prestart showroom), so I think we've got a good handle on it. Hopefully. All of those things we're getting done by the builder. DAH weren't offering window treatments, whereas Lauren Steadman are doing horizontal blinds for us. Carpets, tiles, air con and painting was all included from both builders. We were going to do paint/windows afterwards (hadn't decided on floors at that stage) but it was a promo that Lauren Steadman are running and taking them out made no difference, so we figured we'd leave them all in... Plus its far less hassle. We also got K's mother to paint our current home when we moved in, as it was her gift to us, but after going through and patching the walls and repainting sections in the last few weeks I wasn't too keen to do an entire house so I would have got a pro in for that anyway I think. Plus the finish should be far better than what I can achieve! Ask for references and speak to them. If they are defensive or try to avoid the request, walk. 1 74709 I would never build with Fowler homes. I built with them in 2021 and till date maintenance issues are pending. All their existing trades and businesses don't work with… 14 105573 |