You Have Your Land and House Design - what next????

Apologies for not writing for so long, the world has gone a little crazy in case you all hadn’t noticed! Work has been busy, things have been tough and stressful at home, as I’m sure so many of you are experiencing as well! And we are currently packing to move to our newly built home in less than two weeks!! It has been almost 2 years coming so it’s very welcome that’s for sure!!

So, once you have your land and you have locked in your house design, it’s time to decide if you want to make any changes or upgrades and pay your deposit for your first set of plans to be produced. It’s time to consider any structural changes you may want to make to the floor plan, keeping in mind that major structural changes with a project builder = $$$$ and lots of them! This is where you sit down with your sales consultant and nut out the finer details of your floor plan. Make sure you accept any ‘promotion’ that they are offering as usually you will get some great upgrades for a fraction of the cost, eg free alfresco, free ducted airconditioning, free appliance package, free ceiling height upgrade, free insulation upgrades, vouchers to use on upgrades etc. Our original floor plan below:

What did we change at this stage of the process:

- We extended the entire house by 2 metres so we could add a study for a cost of about $19000. This also meant we had to extend our kitchen cabinetry for a further cost of $2300

- Our old house had 3.3m high ceilings. I decided that I was going to have to live with standard 2.4m ceilings. However after walking through display homes (one with 2.4m ceilings and one with 2.7m ceilings), I decided it was an upgrade we had to do. So 2.7m ceilings for a cost of nearly $12000 (yep, that is not a typo!)

- Once you raise the ceilings, you need to decide about your doors and windows – leaving them at the standard height of 1.8m or raising them to 2.34m to suit the higher ceilings. Again, I suggest walking through display homes with the raised door heights and without to get a feel for what you are happy with. We decided to raise all the doors (make sure bulkheads and openings and wardrobe doors are included) at a cost of $1300. Note that this does not include stacker doors, bi-fold doors or any sliding doors, so if you want these raised this is a separate charge – I have heard of so many people being caught out by this, so this is my hot tip!! A separate charge will also be needed for your front door. Another great tip – raising your windows up, rather than increasing the size = $0. We decided to raise all of our windows in line with the doors rather than making them bigger which would have been very costly. Why does this matter? To some people it doesn’t, but to me who loves symmetry and all things perfectly aligned, I knew that it would drive me crazy if all the tops of my doors and windows were at different heights

- We chose our facade, which was not the standard facade, at a cost of $7250

- We extended the garage by 1.5m, added a back roller door and a window at the front for a cost of $4300. This is probably a really important consideration as most new builds have quite small garages and even though you would fit two cars, it is very tight and swinging open doors to get children out, etc would be quite difficult

- We changed some of our window types from awning windows to double hung (also a no charge change)

- We added shower recesses to both showers (no, they are not included in the build!)

- We added a butler’s pantry, walk-in-linen and picture recess for $4500 – absolutely not essential, but one of our luxury items

- We added an allowance for our BASIX requirements and our BAL rating (I will explain these later on)

Once this was all worked out we were given a quote for what it would cost to build our desired design. The base price of the house initially was $277000. This had increased with site costs, statutory requirements, piering, allowances and our changes to $379000. This is where the rule of thumb comes into play – take the base price of the house and add $100k-$200k to get your final price as the base price of the house does not even include your site costs.

We accepted the quote and paid our deposit (in our case $5000). We then went through numerous deposit variations where we tweaked the house design even further until we were happy. What else did we change?

- We extended as many of the bedroom robes as we could (relatively cheap change)

- We extended as many doorways as we could to 820mm as opposed to the standard 770mm (no charge for this change)

- We added a cavity slider to our ensuite and a door to our walk-in-robe

- We change the opening of the home theatre to a different wall to make it more like the original design we wanted (no charge to swap two walls)

- We added laundry cabinetry to the laundry (the standard is only the laundry tub)

- And we decided to go all out and add feature doors to the home theatre and games room as they both opened into the main living space

- We had to adjust the allowance for our BAL rating after realising it was a higher rating that first anticipated

Bringing our new total to $394000. Once we were happy with the design, we then accepted the final Deposit Variation and were presented with our Consolidated Tender. Once this was accepted we were then on our way to picking all the colours and exciting stuff for our new home and were awaiting contour surveys, soil reports and our colour studio appointments! Our finished floor plan: