Landscape design

While our builder is preparing documents for council submission, hydraulics engineer's report was organised by them, and we received the good news that we will not need a stormwater retention system burried in the back garden. However we will need to move the rainwater tank up to the side of the garage which makes the side access on the right hand side quite a bit narrower.

We decided to use our own landscape designer to do our landscaping for council submission. There was originally $1000 or so allocated for a landscape design in our builder's tender, but it would only get us a basic "lawn and shrubs" type of landscaping drawn up just to get the DA in. So prior to signing the contract, we asked to have the allocated landscaping cost taken out from the tender. By spending just a little more and going to a landscape designer we chose, we were able to have a really nice manicured front garden and low-maintenance but attractive side and back gardens designed. This designer happened to have worked with our builder before, so they will send the finished landscape design to the builder who will then submit it to council along with the house plan.

Our landscape design for front, side and back gardens are brilliant with great plants selection, and very nice features in the front garden to really dress up the house. We are advised of the rough cost for building and planting out the landscaping based on this design, so we will set aside a budget for it.

Side Garden

Front Garden

Building contract signed

A few versions of house plan and tender updates later, our sales consultant came out to our house again for the occasion, and we signed our building contract on 26 May 2011.

We did read the fine points in the contract carefully prior to signing and had a couple of clauses changed to our liking. We paid the 5% deposit of the tender price. This was the first payment (except for the survey report) to our builder in the 4 months of our planning stage.

House design revisions

February, March, & April 2011 - We revised and fine-tuned the house plan, sometimes changing things based on our sales consultant's advise or on costing, sometimes based on what we read on internet forums.

We were originally going to have the house rendered, and have hardwood flooring throughout the house. But due to cost blowout we had to make a compromise somewhere and choose between (a) have tiles instead of floorboard downstairs, or (b) have smoothfaced bricks (sales consultant's suggestion) instead of render. In the end we decided to keep the hardwood flooring throughout (tiles are so cold and we take shoes off in the house), and give up the render. Hopefully the smoothfaced bricks will look streamlined and smooth as we were told, but if we are very unhappy about the bricks we can always have them rendered 5 or 10 years later when we can.

Another thing we had to give up was the skylight in the pitched roof in the foyer. Because of the direction the roof is facing, if we were to put a skylight in it would have been visible from the street on the roof above the front door. We really liked the idea of having a very high pitched ceiling filled with natural light in the entrance foyer, but instead we will have to put in lots of lights there, and hope that will still give us the WOW factor.

We went back and forth, did a lot of research because we didn't want to change anything major further down the build process. During this time a new survey report and bushfire report were done. Our sales consultant was helpful and communication was very good on email and phone, we also had a meeting at our house and picked his brain for ideas and recommendations. We took our time in getting the house plan the way we wanted, and quite enjoyed this process.

What the house will have:

• Nice open entry hall with high racked ceiling
• Large butler's pantry off the kitchen with window and sink
• High ceiling on lower levels
• Open plan living leading out to alfresco area at the back
• 4 bedrooms, study, media room, open plan kitchen/living/dining room, play room
• Main bathroom, ensuite bathroom, powder room
• 2.5-car garage (storage/workshop)
• Landscaped garden
• Swimming pool
• Polished floorboard throughout except wet areas

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.