Coral Homes - Marcoola 32 modified

Hi Everyone!

Like many other people we have also been lurking around the forums here reading, dissecting, analyzing and whatever else you want to call it in an effort to try and learn from other people's experiences and hopefully get through this scary but exciting adventure as unscathed as possible. Thanks to so many people already, particularly those who are building and have already built Marcoola 32's. The information here helps fill a lot of the gaps that these building companies, their sales staff and their admin seem to leave blank.
We're using this as a diary for ourselves so we can look back and relive the journey as well as maybe helping others discover ideas or pitfalls that they may not have considered. So.....here goes!

To begin the story in December 2017 we began looking for pre-owned houses that suited our needs as we decided that our current home would be over capitalized if we tried to modify it. After so many months of looking we just weren't finding what we were looking for, not in our price range anyway. This inevitably led us to display homes and it all started from there.
After looking through many different companies display homes we tended to gravitate towards Coral. During this time we still weren't 100% sure if we would build but after coming across a nice little small scale development in the far corner of Upper Coomera we were soon committed. One of the remaining blocks left ticked a couple of our boxes, slightly isolated yet suburban and the right price.
We signed up with an expression of interest (EOI) deposit being told the land would be registered by March 2018.
Armed with somewhere to build we then went back to Coral to talk turkey. Without knowing the exact design we knew we needed a plan that could have an additional double garage sized space incorporated under the roof line. This really narrowed it down and it was made even harder by the fact that Coral (these days) are seriously focused on production building, not custom! We found this out the hard way but that's a whole another story and we're back on track now. Small changes we were told were possible especially if they involved no modifications to the external dimensions of the plan. IE: changes under the roof like adding powder rooms to toilets, moving an internal wall here and there ect. Structural changes to the existing designs are something they were really not willing to make at the time of our inquiries.
All of this in conjunction with the size/shape of our block and our budget pretty much pointed us in the direction of the Marcoola 32. Luckily we really liked this design and weren't interested in going double story anyway so happy days.
We learned about so many things along the way and had to ask questions to which the answers may have seemed obvious to sales people and builders but weren't explained to us in the first place. We soon realized that this was going to be the "norm" and now we just ask until we understand the answer, no matter what.
In January 2018 our loan pre-approvals came through from ANZ so we signed the land contract in early February 2018 and paid the remaining amount of the full deposit. Due to a little hiccup early in the process we eventually met up with our new sales consultant in March 2018 to run through our plans and get a new quote generated. March came and went and we could clearly see the land was still weeks and weeks away. We learned from these forums that this is also a very typical scenario so we didn't panic or get frustrated...thanks Homeone folk! This gave us time to do more research and more reading.
We should make known something at this point. Unlike some folk we made the decision at the start to stay in our own home (as we own it), buy the land and then use a bridging loan to fund the building process. Our calculations suggested it would be no more expensive than selling early and renting which also means a double move, something we really want to avoid. Of course there's a risk with this strategy with timing it right and selling our current property but that's a calculated risk we are willing to take. We made sure we have allowed some leeway for this strategy but are obviously hoping it comes together for the best case scenario!
The land was finally registered in June 2018 and we have now settled so all in all for us it was only a 2 month delay, very reasonable I thought compared to what some people here have had to endure! The estate is open to the public and some people who have been ready to go for ages have already had there blocks cut and filled in preparation for their builds.
Our soil and survey tests came back this month as well [June 2018], and they recommended Class S slab which we took to be good news as our quote included $11.4k allowance for Class H1. Unfortunately all is not what it may seem with this information. There is other information included on the results sheet that also mentions the makeup of 3 different test drilling locations which also has to be taken into account. So our sales consultant (Darryll) explained that the final call is actually made by the Coral Homes engineers in regards to the slab construction, it's not purely based on what you read on the soil and survey result sheet...for those who aren't aware like us. The engineers will interpret all of the information as well as the companies building guidelines to determine the class of slab. I guess they're not going to risk structural warranty claims within the 6 year period so we may still have the added cost of the H1 slab. No problem, at least we understand now.
So as of this moment at the 30th of June 2018 we are awaiting the first round of our tender and discussions with our SC so instead of long winded stories covering months of time we will be posting more regularly as each event happens. Hopefully it will be of some interest or help to folks and also a source of guide for us by way of your constructive comments.

Cheers!

Timeline:

03/12/17 - Signed expression of interest for land
19/12/17 - Paid initial deposit to Coral Homes and received preliminary quote
05/01/18 - ANZ pre-approval for land and bridging loans
02/02/18 - Singed land contracts and paid balance of deposit
02/03/18 - Met with new SC to organize 2nd quote for the Marcoola
06/04/18 - Met with ANZ to sign loan documents
11/06/18 - Land officially registered
27/06/18 - Land settlement took place
29/06/18 - Received soil and survey results back from Coral
08/07/18 - Received preliminary tender to review
13/07/18 - Met with SC to go through amendments to tender
18/07/18 - Paid 2nd installment of initial deposit to continue to contract
10/08/18 - Received contract and relevant forms
17/08/18 - Met with SC to go through the contract and sign
17/08/18 - Paid balance of the initial deposit to commit to the project and keep evrything rolling
21/08/18 - Received Coral's pre-start information pack and booked colour selection appointment
23/08/18 - Plans lodged with council
07/09/18 - Met with National tiles for our tile selection appointment and received variation cost same day
12/09/18 - Confirmation of council approval for all building and site works plans.
20/09/18 - Colour selection completed at Coral Homes
21/09/18 - Clipspec selection completed

Big gap here as the bank went frigid on us after all of the inquiries into their lending criteria. So we decided to sell our current house and become a cash customer with Coral. A much better option financially but harder to do. Kind of glad the bank forced us into this situation. Anyway all done now and moving on with the build!

22/01/19 - Site start date announced for 06/02/19
06/02/19 - Site cut and fill
08/02/19 - Meet SS on site. Site prep. Safety fences, sediment control ect.
11/02/19 - 15/02/19 - Retaining walls and minor earthworks.
18/02/19 - Piering (lots and lots of it!).
20/02/19 - Trenching for underground plumbing/electrical.
21/02/19 - Underground plumbing/electrical.
22/02/19 - Frame up for slab.
25/02/19 - Slab pour.
26/02/19 - Slab finish and site clean up.
27/02/19 - Commencement of frame layout and erection.
28/02/19 - Continue framing up.















Our land! Our debt! Bring it on!





*Edit - removed a couple of images as we made some circumstance changes to the house plan. New final plans are shown below.






Final building and site plan

Building choices in general include the Elegance upgrade, Neo modern kitchen, Colorbond roof and steel frame promo, Option #2 2018 New home promo.

A few of the changes to the standard plan are as follows:

*Hastings facade
*Added extra single garage
*Increased size of Bed 3 by 400mm (activity becomes smaller by the same)
*Added powder to main toilet (Ala Kikkihome)
*moved hallway linen into activity to create a study nook (custom desk to go here)
*Increased the laundry cabinetry to 1400mm and added overheads
*Added broom section to laundry linen
*increased pantry size (sacrificing garage space) and added butler's with cabinetry
*Reconfigured kitchen island bench and moved fridge space adjacent to pantry
*Added waterfall island bench with undermount sink in lieu of Neo Modern bench
*Added opening in living room wall at activity area for shutters
*Bed 4 to have sliding doors adjacent to outdoor area in lieu of STD window
*Cavity sliding doors (CSD) to media room
*Added 1 x 0527 high set window in lieu of 2 x 2109 windows in media room
*Added a centralized CSD to master WIR in preparation for custom fitout
*Added boutique awning windows in a few places to keep a style flow where needed
*Thermal insulation to all external walls and acoustic insulation to master, media and bed 2 walls

Welcome santo, look forward to following your build, have you got plans yet?

Hi gogo65. Actually we did have a preliminary plan sent to us but I accidentally deleted it from my email inbox....permanently . We could have asked for another copy but because we still had changes to make we let it slide. We have our own basic 2D plan and the site plan for the land which I am in the process of posting along with a listed timeline which we found helpful on other people's topics. At the moment I've been sidetracked trying to get rid of a tag that seems to have manifested itself on my post which I didn't put there. Any ideas? It's tagged with WA and we're in QLD?

Hmmm I cant see a tag at all.... I’m on an iPad Pro, not sure if it makes a difference (not using tapatalk), sorry.
Oh well once you get your state of residency sorted we can get on with the interesting stuff!

The 10 Covenants!

Well maybe not as dramatic as that but yet another new learning experience to get our heads around. We have to submit all plans to a covenant approval panel for acceptance before anything is able to take place. This turned out to be a no non issue mostly as Coral will make sure everything complies with the covenant and supply the appropriate detailed drawings for submission DA (design approval), except for the landscaping and driveway plan. Ok how hard can this be? Well it turned out to be a bit of a mission for us as we're not gardeners and we're not designers. Consequently I wasted quite a bit of time trying to look for landscaping software to help me get through this. I was told that professional drawings weren't necessary and that simply sketching on top of a printout of the site plan would suffice. However we're not artists either and we weren't happy with what we had come up with. In the end we managed to use a PDF software to make our "mudmap" containing all of the required covenant elements on a legible plan. So with a little research and the guidelines from the covenant itself, below is what we came up with. Saved paying someone $400 to do it and we learned a little about some of our native plants as well.

Main theme for internal:





External theme:




Carpet-tile contrast:

A few hardware choices:

Electrical plan:

We did most of this through Clipsal. It's our first build and were a bit scared and time poor to leave too much out and try and get the contractor to do it outside of the contract. We have about $3000 of owner supplied items on top of this. The range of choices in regards to fans and external lighting is very limited with Clipsal/Coral so we now understand why owner supplying them is the only way to go.

Electrical - What it cost:


We knew from reading other posts on here that what we wanted wasn't going to be covered with $7500 allowance in the contract so we allowed $15000 in our own budget with Coral's included electrical being $5800 (Inc. 3 phase for AC) that gave us a total of $20800. Clipspec total was $18146 so we have about $2650 left out of our budget for pendants, fans and external lights. We're hoping those items will cost no more than $4000 so that will put us $1350 over budget.

Network cabling plan:

This was an interesting one. While we were at our Clipspec appointment we were under the impression that they are able to do data cabling as well. Well they can...like maybe a Hills setup...but apparently nothing like what I have outlined in my network plan (see pic). We're pretty sure at a guess you wouldn't want to use Clipsal to do this anyway but we were keen to see what their price would be.

Clipsal told us that for extensive data cabling such as ours we would have to liaise with the contractor and organize for them to do it. We called the contractor and they advised me that they charge a flat rate of $165 per point! That makes what we have here almost $6000! We asked them if they can install and label the cables so we can then punch them down into the terminals and patch panel ourselves to which they said, we can talk about that closer to the event.

We have sourced all of the hardware including the patch panel, server cabinet, cable, wall plates, RJ45 mechs ect for around $1100 and are now in the process of finding an external qualified cable installer to to do this for us. I'm pretty sure it won't come to $6000!



For those of you wondering why so many data points and virtually no TV points I'll briefly explain. The data cable will act as a universal cable for anything we might want it for. For example it can be used to carry a HDMI signal for Foxtel, media servers and the like. It could also be used to carry the FTA RF signal to any chosen point in the network should you need to. It can be used for a normal old phone point and certainly for VOIP phones should you want landline style phones. The obvious use is to provide internet to consoles, TV's and computers. Another use can be for POE security cameras or other POE devices such as doorbells or wireless AP's. So in a nut shell it gives the flexibility to make any outlet in the house anything you want it to be. If anyone would like any details about the setup we're no experts but we're willing to share what we've gleaned and will be using ourselves.

I loved my old 1914 built house in London with the stubs of the gas light pipes still visible here and there on the walls. Cost 'em a bob or two then. Me, today, with this sort of stuff? Couple of wi-fi thingies and away you go. Might be wrong though.

I had electrical appointment on Thursday and as soon as they mentioned the cost of the points i said no thanks.

I have my cabling license but was just hoping to get a few put in by them to save me the hassle later on, as yourself i have all my equipment ready to go but they wanted to provide switch cabinets etc.

Will just wait until after my build to run them myself and save a couple grand on the install as well.

Yes Garath. Pretty much the same here. We're very time poor and concerned we won't have the time to catch up with the SS or other contractors when needed so were trying to minimize hassle by getting as much done using Coral where affordable. By the way where do you live Garath...how much do you charge haha.

It's horses for courses I think kks. In regards to the internet itself wifi can be all some people need while others have more demanding uses...I mean who wants to be shot in the head before you get a chance to react when your wifi lags out in a FPS online game lol. But seriously without getting into the pros and cons of the bandwidth debate between wifi and ethernet the uses of the cabling we are planning go far beyond an internet connection as I mentioned in that post.

Gone are the days of all things simple However having said that I'm a bit geeky at heart and I'm really looking forward to setting all this up. After all the misus got an elaborate walk in robe with jewelry draw dressing table built in...fairs fair right?

Same here i was hoping to just get the bare basics run with them so it saved me the time in running down walls etc, most of my cables will go to WAP & POE cameras so they are an easy one but i just hate running down the walls if i can avoid it.

HAHA I am building in Hervey Bay.

Yes my wife realized we had seen you at the Coral colour selections showroom on Thursday! She scours these forums for Coral builds and had already seen your posts.
All the best with the build...we shall follow with interest

Santo, all your selections are so amazing 😍 You went for Gold selection carpet is it? We have actually planned to do a underlay upgrade and stick to silver range for carpets. Looking forward to see your house pictures.

Thanks MrsAJ! Hard to go too far wrong with neutrals I guess but we just like 'em With the carpet we almost just went for the builders range thinking we'd wear it out and replace it in a few years. It's a strategy that some people use I'm sure and it's a reasonable one. However at CarpetCourt we came across a couple of carpets that we loved. The two tone of the cut pile twist, the lush feel and the promise of hard wearing/stain resistant solution dyed nylon had us drooling. So we we thought we'd check it out at colour selection and see what the damage would be. We already made a $3000 allowance in our budget as it was high on the wish list. Although they didn't have the exact carpet we showed them, we found this one in the platinum range that was virtually identical. So bottom line it is platinum range (sorry!) but considering we have about 80m2 to carpet the extra cost (we have one of the flooring/aircon packages) was $3800. Because of the thickness of the carpet we were able to stick with the standard underlay. We're definitely going to be doing the "star fish" on this carpet in the media room when we finally get in there!

Thanks for your reply Santo We dont have a budget for Platinum range currently. Might be next time though 😉. Don't forget to post the Starfish carpet picture after you move in.

Hi Santo,

Nice to see another SC neighbour there are a few of us in here building in the estate. I love your plans and very jealous of your 3 car garage. It’s something we really wanted, but by the time we bought our block there were only 3 left (other than acreage) so unfortunately nothing was wide enough.

So many houses being built now. I look forward to seeing your progress.