Knockdown rebuild- Clarendon Hamilton 36

Hi all. After more than two years of changing our minds about what to do with our house (sell, renovate, rebuild) we finally made the decision a few months ago to rebuild. We love where we live but our small, poorly built house has a strange floor plan that will become very difficult once our kids are older.

We had originally planned to build another single level home, but our block is too wide for most plans and because we want to keep our pool, we can’t really go any deeper onto the block. After pretty much deciding on the Bahama by Coral, we checked out Clarendon and found the perfect house for us, and we were very impressed with the quality of finish by Clarendon.

Our salesperson has been excellent and so far everything has been going great. We will be going to tender this week.

Here is our current house- it’s on a 1100m2 block with a huge park behind.




The block as it is now



Proposed siting of new home




New home drawings. I’m a musician and I teach from home, so a soundproof studio at the front of the house was a vital part of our plan. My husband and I both have hobbies that take up lots of space so we are each having our own room (living room and media room). We are also adding a third garage and will still have plenty of space down the side to park our caravan.






It’s going to be like Buckingham Palace compared to what we’ve been living in for the last 13 years!

Looking forward to sharing our journey and hearing advice from experienced new home builders.

Great to see - and the Hamilton is an amazing design - I would have built it if our block was wide enough.

Looking forward to following along!

Excited to follow this thread.

It’s a lovely design. Our block has a 25m frontage so it’s too wide for most designs and not wide enough for acreage designs. Hopefully with the third garage the house will sit nicely on our block!

Update: We signed the contract two weeks ago. Have made our appointments for colour, tiles and electrical. Still haven’t 100% decided on a demolition company!

Hi Funkynoodles, how is the build coming along? I would love to know how the process has been & the final outcome forthe home.

I have sat down with Clarendon to also build the Hamilton 36, but there is no photos or any display homes which are readily available to view. Would much appreciate an update on your build & any photos along the way. Thanks!

Oh my god, I just typed out a massive reply and it disappeared! Gah!

Well, we haven’t started building yet due to COVID-19, idiots at NAB who took 7 months to give us our finance, a demolition company that turned out to be useless, and Energex not abolishing our power when they said they would. It’s been very frustrating but I’m happy to Rupert that the house was demolished last week, this week sees the retaining wall built, and hopefully Clarendon will take over before the month is up.

Clarendon have been awesome every step of the way. Nothing is too much trouble for them we are so happy with our design. They’ve extended our start deadline which was already really long.

Not sure whereabouts you are but there are some new Clarendon displays at Rochedale Estate. We looked at one there which had a very similar floor plan to the Hamilton and loved the feel of it.

I’ll update again soon!

Some photos of our tile selections and the demolition....

Damn! That’s a shame, I’m sure you would have been well into the build if it all went to plan!

We will be building in Brisbane, but have gone to most of the display homes & was settled on the Crestmead 40, but won’t fit the particular block we are looking at, hence the Hamilton 36 being the option.

Look forward to seeing the progress & the final pictures of the home!

Hey funkynoodles, how’s the progress coming along with the home?

Clarendon only just started work on our site last week. There had been lots of back and forth because they told us the $10000 retaining wall we’d put in was in the wrong place! It turned out that it was their mistake- their surveyor had marked the survey incorrectly. The wall is a bit too close to the house but it’s workable, so they proceeded with the build last Tuesday.
So far they’ve scraped the site, taken delivery of the piers and marked out where the slab is going. Hopefully this week the slab will go down. I’ll post pictures once there is something worth photographing!

Yay. Looking forward to pics

What kind of extras are you going for in your build?

Hmm, I’ll try to remember!
-3rd garage
-timber staircase
-soundproofed study with solid door (it’s going to be my music studio)
-extended alfresco
-door on living area and pocket doors to media room


I finally have some pictures to share. The slab went down last week!

That is not a whole lot of extras. How much did this house end up costing you?

$410k including absolutely everything (site costs, council fees, upgraded carpet and underlay, etc). Oh and we also got ducted aircon.

Thats not too shabby. What capacity is your aircon? How many downlights did you get? What about tiling in alfresco?

Sorry for the barrage of questions

The aircon is 21kW. We got approximately eleventy billion downlights 😅 I’d have to dig out the paperwork in my mother-in-law’s garage to get the exact number. We wanted to make sure we have plenty of light. I think we spent another $400 on top of the $8k electrical allowance so not too bad.

We didn’t opt for tiling on the alfresco. Because we already have a pool and had to strip out everything around it, will will need to do a lot of land/hardscaping so will leave the outdoor area until after we’ve moved in and saved up a bit of money! We did get an extra ceiling fan in the alfresco as we made the area quite a bit bigger.

Interesting, thanks for the reply

We have a two storey house!

Can’t believe how quickly this went up. Three days!

All of the bedrooms have pretty nice views of the surrounding parklands.