New builder

We went out to Homeworld at Kellyville on a Saturday and spoke with a Sales Consultant at H's office. We had our contour survey reports from our dealings with the previous builder, so took that along. Discussed what features we wanted in our house design, and using their Monash design as a template, drew in a lot of modifications to their plan while we were there. Because we previously already had a custom house design made by another builder, we knew what layout worked for us, so in the end our modified Monash plan looked very similar to our old builder's custom design.

Downstairs and Foyer levels sketch

The sales consultant seemed to know what he was talking about. We were explained how the process of building with them would go, and we asked a lot of questions, which were mostly answered on the spot, others were answered in subsequent email and phone communications. We were promised a mock up of the proposed floor plan to be emailed to us in the following week, which we got. We were told that a lot of upgraded finishings were displayed in their new Avalon house at Oran Park so we drove all the way there the following weekend to look at them, and to have another meeting at their office there with the same sales consultant. Based on the brief we provided, a draft tender was submitted to us for review. The price looked doable, in fact it was about $70K less than the previous builder, and we were going to get larger family/living areas. However we were well aware that there would be additional extras if/when we upgrade features and fittings later on. Thus our relationship with our new builder began.

Our Story

We bought our old house in Sydney's north in 2006, umm'ed and ahh'ed about renovating it (circa 1952) or rebuilding, but decided in late 2009 that we would look into knock down and rebuild. In early 2010, we had a local small building firm custom design our new house and submit tender for it, but at the time our budget didn't quite extend to having that design built in the way we wanted it to, without compromising too much on the quality and features in the new house, while maintaining our lifestyle comfortably. Also around the same time we found out that we were expecting our baby no.2, so the house rebuild project was put on hold until the baby project was done.

Fast forward a good few months, after baby no.2 arrived, in February 2011 we decided to restart our rebuild project, and this time looked at some project homes to see what bigger builders had to offer. We had nothing against the original builder we talked to, they were nice people and their process was efficient, so we could have gone back to them (after all we spent $6000 to have that design drawn) but we wanted to see what was out there. Custom build is great as the customer has freedom to choose anything as long as they can afford it, but at the same time that same freedom can be a bit of a burden when you don't know exactly what you want sometimes, especially if you haven't built a house before.

As our plot is sloping down towards the back, not many project home designs were suitable but we decided to go with H's Monash split level design, heavily modified to suit our needs.