Waiting, Waiting…

It has been a while since I last blogged, however nothing of much significance has really happened over the past couple of months.

Since my last entry we have settled our land (which we frequent on a regular basis, perhaps just to make sure it hasn’t disappeared), been advised of our street numbers (number 6-8) and waited, waited, waited for movement with the build.

At this point in time, I am seriously considering either pitching a tent, or perhaps if we feel like living in absolute luxury, parking a caravan on the block as it feels like that will be as close as we get to ever living there.

The whole building process is long, drawn out and extremely emotional. We have been through the excited stage (“OMG we have found an amazing plan, OMG we can put that piece of furniture there, OMG imagine what it’s going to be like when we move in”).  This stage reminds one of a 15 year old girl.

We have also been through the doubt phase. Have we made the right choice? Did we rush into things too quickly? Will this be big enough? Etc.

My mum has recently built and the one thing we realised after looking through her house was the lack of storage space in the home. At the moment we have 3 bedrooms with large floor to ceiling robes (we have 9ft ceilings) which are all full. I was concerned about the amount of space we had and had a melt down. Although the builder was helpful in the early stages, they have been quite slow since we signed our preworks contract. This has planted far too much doubt in our minds and I have made the decision more than once to throw in the towel with the whole thing.

Given we were going so long between speaking with our consultant I decided not to say anything and rather just go around to various display homes and decide on a new builder and floor plan.

We spoke with Long Island Homes, Metricon Homes, Urban Edge and Carlisle.

What a mistake!!! They are all as bad as each other.  With the exception of Metricon!

I handed a list which I had compiled to the sales consultant at Long Island and it was as if he was paying me to build our home. Carlisle scared the heck out of us saying that we would be looking at at least $20-$25k for our site costs (so far by every other builder we have been quoted $10-$12k – although it ended up being more than this, see below) and every builder tried to talk us into something that we didn’t want, including a much smaller house!!!

We went home feeling deflated and exhausted!!! All we could think was “What on earth do we do???”.

We sat down and looked at the floor plan again for the Boutique. Although earlier I had been looking at the plan and thinking that maybe I didn’t like it so much, I instantly fell back in love with it. It was afterall the one we had picked from so many display homes earlier in the year. And looking at it now, I realised that we had been trying to modify every other floor plan to match this layout.

We had set out to build the 28sq (hence the name of the blog) however have changed our minds and have decided to build the 31sq.  The reason being that the study is an extra 0.5m wide which will allow for the inclusion of a large wall to wall, floor to ceiling cupboard for surplus items such as suitcases, sporting equipment etc.  The bedrooms are also larger, which is something I was very concerned about with the 28sq.

After much frustration with the builder saying he was going to get back to me with information etc, I finally blew my lid when a sales consultant called and asked if we wanted to book in the colour consultation. At this point we had no costings for the 31sq (which we had asked for twice in the past month), no idea around our site costs (which we had been promised for 3 months) and no recent communication of any substance. After losing my cool, I find out that our sales consultant had been trying to continue his work even though he was in hospital with a serious illness. This made me more annoyed at the builder that they had not provided sufficient assistance to someone who was so ill.  On top of this didn’t I feel like the worlds biggest BITCH!

Finally I was passed onto the sales manager who has been very helpful.

We finally got our site costs. This was a shock!  We have been advised that following the soil test we will be up for $18k in site costs due to the amount of fill on the block and over compaction.  Although disappointing we will manage and given the over engineering which will no doubt be completed as part of the site works, our house should be solid as a rock!!! 

It is likely that we will now not start building until about April/May next year as I don’t want to move in over the winter months. 

All we can do now is wait!  

31sq Floor Plan