September 25, 2006
Spec Home Design - First Looks
Much walking around of display homes today. Before I get into the houses we've looked at I'll just quickly discuss the market that we see our home targetting and the requirements we believe these segments have.
1. Two mid level income couples with no children or 1-2 very young children.
2. Couples looking to downsize with no children at home
With these two segments in mind we see the primary requirements of the house as being:
1. High street appeal, a front elevation that is fashionable and attractive. But nothing too 'leading edge' that may look dated too quickly.
2. Internal fixtures that give an impression of quality without going too over the top. The suburb where we are building will not support a house that is fitted out with the best of everything, but certainly some improvements will be looked for by younger couples looking for some 'wow' factor. These improvments will largely be confined to the kitchen and bathrooms, as these allow for the greatest amount of individualization.
3. An internal layout supporting either a young family, or a couple with diverse interests. To us this translates to a 3 bedroom or 2 bedroom + study configuration. It also means that a separate master bedroom bathroom (en-suite) and living area are vital.
4. 2700mm (9ft) ceilings for a feeling of extra space.
5. Covered outdoor entertaining area.
6. Low maintenance modern garden.
Based on these requirements, and the size of the land we found ourselves looking at the villa homes (suitable for a 8.5-10m (28' to 33') frontage) and courtyard (suitable for 38' to 43'frontages) homes. The width of our land (11m, 33') means we are restricted to single garage versions of the courtyard homes which are almost universally double garage designs. We are happy to settle on an existing design of a contract builder as we believe this will lead to the house being completed faster and will lower the overall cost of building.
The two designs we saw today were the:
No need to make a decision yet. We're still waiting for a lot of design brochures to arrive from different builders, I'm sure we'l find what we want.
Posted by mnemtsas at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2006
Weighing up the Designs
My wife and I sat down and did a decision matrix on the three designs we're considering. It became pretty clear that the Heathcote (AV Jennings) and the Portland Mk2 (Fairmont) were the two we would be choosing from. The other design just feels too small, and the bedrooms coming off the main hallway is a real negative to us. The outcome of the session was that price would likely be the final deciding factor. I should say that the price is not just the building price, but also the likely time to build and the associated interest costs. My wife will call both builders during the week and get some ball park prices on the upgrades we will need.
Posted by mnemtsas at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2006
Another Look at Spec Home Designs
Another trip to a housing display village. A worthwhile one too! We went through a house today that pretty much met all of our requirements without being too expensive. As a bonus it also had what the builder called an 'alfresco'. This was simply the main roof of the house extending over a courtyard on the back corner. The courtyard was a decent size, perhaps 3 x 4m (10x13.5ft). This would save the trouble of putting up a pergola/verandah on the house when it's built. A saving of perhaps $3,000. Anyway here's the design:
Portland Mk2 - Fairmont
As you can see it meets all of our requirements. Again I liked the main bathroom/bedrooms being partitioned away from the living areas. The wall in the main living area has an interesting bulkhead built into the wall, it certainly is a feature and grabs the attention of someone first entering the room.
Posted by mnemtsas at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2006
Getting the Final Building Quote
We went to see the Fairmont Homes salesman today. He gave us a final quote based on our selections and talked us through the whole process.
Firstly, we put the list of house requirements to him which he dutifully entered into his computer to produce a quote. He must have used an existing quote and modified it because there were a few things included that we didn't really want. The final price came out to $118,156. This was around $2000 less than we were expecting and still included roof insulation ($1200) and a full range hood for the oven ($350). So really the quote was around $3500 less than we were expecting. The main reason for this is that he ended up giving us the spa in the main bathroom for free ($1500 value) and then gave us another $1500 off because he said we were low effort customers. I think we're going to end up keeping the roof insulation but we're definitely going to drop the range hood, this gives a final price of $117,806. This doesn't include any upgrades to tapware or tiling in the bathrooms that we want, so I'd expect this figure to move up a little still.
One other inclusion I should mention is that they are throwing in a 6 outlet evaporative airconditioning system. Pretty good deal really, I figure this has around a $3200-$3400 value and saves us time getting three quotes and so on after the house is built. This means the only jobs we are likely to have inside the house now are:
The salesman threw a spanner into the works with regard to the floor covering to the living area. We had been planning to install floating laminate timber floors in the house with me doing the installation, saving about $1500. However this was on the proviso we could install the boards with the edges under the skirting boards. The usual method is to use 'quad', a quarter round wooden section to line the edges of the flooring. This looks ugly and we were hoping the builder would allow us to lay the flooring and them to attach the skirting afterward. Unfortunately it doesnt look like this will be possible.
A brief discussion of time lines was had. It looks like the concrete foundations will go down 2-3 months after signing the building contract. The majority of this time is taken up by local government development approval (which takes 4-8 weeks) and local governement building approval (which takes around 2 weeks). With a building time of 6-7 months it looks like 11 months is the shortest time to completion we can hope for. I'm expecting 13-14 months. The only positive to come out of this long delay before building is that the first installment of the building loan will not be required for at least four months. This leaves us paying interest only on the additional $140,000 we borrowed to pay for the land during these four months. Quite manageable.
One interesting point that came up was that the salesman had actually looked at the block of land we bought a few months before, interested in buying it himself. Apparently the vendor had wanted $170,000 for it, we paid $136,000. Clearly the vendor had toned down his expectations a little!
The only outcome of the meeting was to set a time for next week to go and sign the building contract and pay the initial (unrefundable) $1560 deposit.
Posted by mnemtsas at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)