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.