A little while ago we realized the time has come to consider down sizing and when a vaguely suitable house came on the market on a lake near us on the Gold Coast we opportunistically purchased it with no clear plan as to when we would make the move, we just thought we were giving ourselves time to sort out the transition.
Shortly after the purchase and after the house had been tenanted we started considering the logistics of what we had done and realized we probably needed to start the ball rolling earlier rather than later.
Our previous homes have always been in need of renovation when we purchased and we have also always been over optimistic and underestimated how much renovation would be required. When we started working out what we wanted to do to this latest home, we soon realized a renovation wasn't practical.
Shortly after, we visited a display village looking for other ideas but soon found volume builders, understandably, are generally not designing for this type of lot. After fending off follow ups from eager sales people and trawling various Qld builder's websites we eventually found a floor plan that looked like it might just fit our lakefront block. Brighton Homes have neat 3D virtual walk throughs available of many display homes and after doing the virtual tour a few times we went for a 400km round trip to inspect the physical display of the Brighton Homes Jamieson 30.
As we finally stood in the Display's actual kitchen we had a slightly surprising but dawning feeling of 'yes this fits' and ended up spending more than a few minutes walking in and out of every room and back again. When we came back through the sales office, the sales guy assured us that if something wasn't quite suitable for us then Brighton Homes were quite flexible on customizing plans. After thinking it over for a few weeks we got back to him with a heavily modified cut and paste sketch of a reimagined floor plan to suit us and it was with some surprise that he came back with a 'no problem' let me do a pre quote for you on that.
Fast forward a few months and we are about to begin our build journey. The plans have been massaged and tweaked, the colours selected and the guesswork done on electricals etc. The demolition starts in 2 weeks time.