Not much on the forums about builds with Simonds in Brisbane, so I thought I'd add our "Harcrest" which begins construction next week out in Runcorn.
Apparently it will be the first Harcrest design built in QLD so were feeling a bit special lol. We customised the floor plan slightly from http://www.simonds.com.au/mobile/home.php?mid=336 to expand some rooms out, add double shower heads etc. Happy to post plans if anyone wants to see
Construction starts next week, eta end August. Will be very happy if that deadline is met!
So anyway.. Stuff ppl probably want to know about before we got to this stage..
Initial Sales phase - the rep we worked with was excellent and unexpectedly realistic about costs. I appreciated her overestimating the site costs at 20k to ensure "no surprises" later as our land was still being subdivided (Site Costs ended up being only 6k, including some minor peiring for the slab, setback relaxation fees and three phase power upgrades. I thought was excellent value).
Inclusion wise they threw in a 10k discount and a 30k "free upgrade" budget for their gallery/showroom stuff.
Restraining ourselves here was really really tough. Our gallery Consultsnt was very friendly and I didn't feel excessively upsold to. We'd already done considerable research and knew showroom prices were pretty inflated. So, we focused on things not easily changed later. Eg raise both floor ceilings, wooden floor done by Simonds (pain later), but landscape and carpet ourselves post build. An example is carpet upstairs thru Simonds was 10k vs 5k from someone else. Comes down to convenience I guess.
We also paid extra for non standard stuff like ducting rangehood to outside of the house (amazed this is non std), ducted a/c, etc.
Big tip - for two stories, make sure to add all the lights you want downstairs on the plans. It's damn near impossible post build to add them freely due to the joists n beams. First floor/roof is easy though.., so we changed everything downstairs to GU10s and relocated the batton light allocation upstairs, at no extra cost. This means we can get a sparky to change them over post build for upstairs but not have to mess around downstairs.
With several versions of plans and changes going back and forward it was inevitable mistakes would be made. We went thru every version with a fine toothed comb and cross referenced to our emails, etc. I feel not doing this is how people end up with surprises later on. Can't stress enough rechecking every single thing on every revision!!
Final sign off day went largely without a hitch with only 2 very minor corrections on the day.
So, so far a positive experience which is funny because reading a few sites around the net led me to believe I'd be having to push them intensely.
I'll update the thread as build progresses
)
freemike
and are busy looking through the basic plan - adding extras, removing unneeded and changing a few things and trying to get the cost reasonable 
