Choosing A Builder & Design

This one was easy for us. We have looked through many display centres over the last 2 years and came to decide on Simonds Homes, we just like their homes!

We sat down with the sales agent and told him what we liked and didn't like about a few of the houses they had. We were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was for him to alter the plans to suit our requirements, at a relatively low cost. We sat for a couple of hours and went away with a modified Torino design and a sales estimate.

During the next few days we decided on a different plan, the Avalon. A quick phone call to the sales agent and he got to work on making the Avalon into what he already knew we wanted. Brilliant.

The following week we attended an appointment to go over the plans with the Simonds sales agent and signed off on the modified Avalon 3512. We also paid a $1500 deposit at this point.

Above: Standard Avalon 3512 plan

Below: Our modified Avalon 3512

Starting at the ground floor, it was an easy straight swap for the front living room to become bedroom 4 and the "library" room to become our study.
We also took out the wall between the powder room and toilet, and inserted a shower making this a full bathroom, which will serve bedroom 4 (our guest room).
The pay off for the bathroom above was pushing the laundry upwards to accommodate the shower, which took the massive pantry down in size to large-huge.

Upstairs, bedroom 4 is replaced with a balcony (fingers crossed no one builds a double behind us, this will have ocean views for now). Bedrooms 2 & 3 were pushed towards the front and the WIR's rotated in place. When then decided to shrink the massive master WIR's to a still large size.

It's really not a lot of changes and was quite easily done by the sales representative. +1 for Simonds, thank you very much.

The Dirt - We Bought It

Ok, so we bought some dirt last week! Having looked around at many of the available lots of land in our area we finally came to a decision. We are on a budget so we had to way up:

1. Location
2. Cost of the land vs size
3. Site costs
4. Size of the house to be built on the land

Location was tricky, as there is loads of developments in our area. However, in the end it was easy, close to the boys school and ten minutes walk from the beach.

We decided to buy a slightly smaller block in the location we wanted, this saved us some dollars.

An easy decision was to find a flat block. We were looking at some slanted blocks that would have seen our site costs sky rocket 200-300%. We figured every dollar saved removing the dirt we just bought would come in handy towards our build. Not to mention having to use a custom builder on some of the slanty lots, that was not an option for us (from the investigating we did the custom builders were approximately $4k per sqm dearer).

With the smaller block and the low site cost savings we could afford a double storey! Building a double storey home would give us more backyard space than if we bought a larger block with a single storey home, so we were very happy with this.

Background Pre Build

Having decided to make the move from outer eastern Melbourne down to the Bellarine Peninsula early in 2012, we started searching for searching for land and sold our first family home. It was mixed emotions on selling as we had brought our first two sons home for the very first time in that house, however we were very excited of things to come.

It took us some time, but without going into all the details, we finally moved to the beautiful surf coast town, Torquay, in late 2013.

Having studied our options and looking at land for several months, we finally decided on a lot literally a stones throw away from the primary school our now three boys will attend.

We are so excited to be building our own home and going through the whole process I thought I'd do this blog for something to look back on in years to come. Of course I have benefited from reading many other home building blogs around on the web and hope that some of you will benefit from mine :)