First Stage: The beginning

I'd be lying if i said that this was my first blog regarding the house my Wife and I are going to build. We were originally looking at a Metricon design we fell in love with, but once we received our Construction Quote we knew it would be over our budget and therefore would make life less enjoyable later on. So we always kept an eye open for other ideas. We have already found our dream block of land and were contemplating whether to build our dream two-storey design through Metricon (and struggle to live week by week), to build a smaller design and re-sell for profit, or to keep looking for a similar design two-storey that we could work with and make affordable.

Luckily, on one random adventure down South, we stumbled across Simonds Homes at Seaford. The designs they had there didn't appeal to what we were after for our own residence, but we did notice the way the houses were presented, and the appliances used were very close to the level of standard we had come accustomed to with Metricon. So that's when we grabbed a House Designs book and started crunching numbers.

I automatically fell in love with the Avalon, i liked the floor plan and liked the size. My wife liked the biggest house they had, a 55sq/m monster that, even though would fit on the block, surely wasn't practical enough for the two of us....and i don't think having five or so bedrooms all with ensuites would be fun for me to clean every day if we were to have that many kids.

So the focus was on the Avalon and what options and additions we could make. We travelled down to Simonds Blakeview and after a few face to face meetings with the Consultant there we received a quote for all the inclusions we wished our dream house had.....we literally had three or four pages of extras we wanted, some cosmetic, some structural, but all we felt was what would make a dream house a dream home.

The quote blew us away. After the adjustments we made the house would end up being bigger than the Metricon design we liked, would have top spec appliances and extras, and still be over 100k cheaper. We even got to treat ourselves with adding a few "maybe" extra inclusions in that we thought would be a nice little touch but not necessary.

So this is where we are currently at. We paid the $500 deposit to start the paperwork. The Consultant has been very formal and fantastic with us and we have got an appointment booked in their gallery to view Colour Selections so we can have a more indepth look as to the extras we are after and the available options too. We are in no rush to build, we made that clear with the Consultant, but felt we needed to at least lock the contract price in so we arent faced with a fluctuating price later on when we are ready to build. With the price being cheaper than our actual budget, and cheaper than what we expected, it has bumped forward our projected starting date. We were aiming to start by the end of the next year, but with our current savings and budgetting setup we could be possibly looking at early to mid next year. So excited