GinaUK

It's starting to look like a house!!! Lol .

Do you have especially "fat" bricks? I counted around 15 or 16 courses for the ground floor. I know our ground floor will be 31 courses, so I was wondering if your bricks are "fat" (doube?) ones?

Gina

ACE

The way I understand it, these batts come in sealed packs. So, when the house is finished, you could have them added then. Either do-it-yourself or pay a man to come and do it.

That's a good idea, we may just look at upgrading the insulation ourselves.

Pictures look great. Keep them coming!!!
Haven't been up to site for a couple of days but it is my birthday tomorrow so I may well pop up there after work for a little birthday cheer


We now have to be patient and wait and wait and wait: (1) For the contract. (2) For the building licence (which comes when the council has approved everything). We've been told that we are lucky and our local council is an "easy one". Apparently it varies greatly how local councils do this and how long it takes.




This stage can be quite frustrating but just when you start to think it will never happen you will get the call from your builder requesting that you set up your Synergy account and that's when things will really start moving.

ACE

Hi Tiawamutu,
Yeah we are so excited and really suprised by how fast everything is happening. I think we have chosen the right time to build as there doesn't appear to be too much building work going on round here at the mo.

ACE

Yes the bricks are bigger than usual. We have also gone for 31 courses upper and lower which I guess is based on a standard brick size

debbie76

hi sorry for being nosey but whats the all in cost of new builds [roughly] as its a route were looking to go down.

GinaUK

Sorry, but there is no straight answer for that one. There are sooo many factors that affect the price, for example:

- Single storey or double storey.
- Double-brick construction or not.
- Additional insulation in the roof or not.
- Wall insulation or not.
- Glazing: ordinary, ComfortPlus, double glazing

These are just some examples for the construction. Then there are a myriad of options for the inside, all with cost implications: flooring, skirting boards, window nosings, covings, blinds/curtains, lighting, kitchen and bathroom fixtures. The list goes on and on and on. (I've got a big spreadhseet with everything listed.)

There are builders that specialise in the lower end of the market (Impression, Content Living) and those at the higher end of the market (Atrium).

Building a one-off house is VERY expensive. It is much cheaper to start with a pre-existing design and then amend it. ACE is building with In-Vogue and we are building with APG; have a look at their websites.

I started by listing all the builders with display homes in the property supplement of The West Australian. There were about 70. I then went through their websites. I discarded the single-storey builders (because we wanted a two-storey home) and all the expensive ones (some say they start at $800k )

The builders' websites will give you plans to look at and details of the basic price for each design and the basic specification. Read the specification carefully, because not all builders include the same things. And nobody buys a house with the basic specification. There may be some things you want to downgrade, but there will be many more things you want to upgrade and things you want to add that aren't included.

We then visited lots of display houses.

We wanted a house design where the kitchen was not directly in the living room. This is not a very popular idea and there were not many house designs that fitted what we wanted.

Using a basic house design we liked, I then did a scale drawing of how we wanted our version to look: All the rooms were made much bigger. The theatre room was moved to the back behind one of the bedrooms. Where the theatre room was is now the laundry (L-shaped) and a store room. The kitchen got a walk-in pantry. We now also have an alfresco. Upstairs has the bedroom at the front and the retreat at the back, no balcony at the front but a large balcony at the back. And the en-suite and WIR have been completely re-designed. The only reason it's still their design is because downstairs has still got that L-shape overall with the kitchen to the side. I have written this just to give you an idea that you can change a lot of the basic design.

Obviously all the changes mean it's more expensive than their basic design. We've then added a lot of things like insulation, double-glazing, air-con, solar hot water etc etc. To make sure that it fitted into our overall budget, I went round at an early stage (before we had proper plans) and got quotes for all the add-ons to figure out what we could and couldn't afford on top of the basic price.

This turned into a much longer post than I intended. But hopefully it'll give you some idea of how to narrow down "the price".

Gina

Tiawamutu

Impossible to say, as there are so many different houses you can build....

Tiawamutu

Very informative Gina, but I wouldn't say Impressions stand out as a lower end price range. We built with them, and the design was a 'one off'. At the end of it all the cost came close to $500K! (including the land that is)

ACE

Welcome to the thread Debbie.

Gina has given you an excellent answer and pretty much covered everything. There is such a huge difference between the cost of various house types, building materials, builders, block sizes, orientation and locations etc that before you know what you want it is impossible to even estimate a ball park figure.

We are building with a project builder but we are not building a project home and have designed our home from scratch. Once we had finalised our design we looked at their fixtures and fittings i.e benchtops, spa, windows and upgraded to what we wanted which again worked out cheaper than going to a luxury builder many of whom include a number of luxury fittings in the base price. Using our own design is obviously more expensive than using one of their designs but going through them was still cheaper than using an architect and a small builder and we are still getting exactly what we want. If you are lucky enough to find something within a builders design range that you like or that almost suits your requirements you can always do as Gina has done and change a few things.

Our problem was that we wanted an upside down house with a central living area downstairs for the kids and balconies to maximise the views. At the time that we started on this journey there were very few of reverse living designs around, there are a few more now but still not a great choice and nothing with the right layout and orientation for our block. By the time we had altered some of the designs which were closest to what we wanted we had practically changed the whole thing and it was easier to start with a blank canvas. Some of the builders we spoke to refused to do our design as they said it was too far away from what they usually built or was too complicated and would cost too much which went against their policy of building within a certain time frame and price range. In the end we found a company that we are really happy with and so far we have no complaints.

If you have any other questions fire away. As well as the experienced and helpful people who have been posting there are many others who read but have not yet posted on this thread who have been through the whole process and will be able to give you lots of good advice.

ACE

ACE

Good news, I was just looking through our final pre start schedule and noticed that they have included the anti-con blanket in the base price.

julesandco

I love that idea, but wouldn't like the thought of carrying all my shopping upstairs everytime. Lazy cow, eh?

Jules x

ACE

Hi Jules,
That was my first thought so we had the provision for a dumb waiter in our original design. Our consultant happened to mention a previous client who had the provision in their house but when they actually came to installing the mechanism it cost them 25K so we decided to turn the dumb waiter into two cupboards which now also conceal the ducted air con pipework. In hind site we could have carried out our own research into dumb waiters and had a simple one installed much more cheaply but I reckon our knees (or should I say our two lads knees) can handle carrying the shopping upstairs, for now anyway We haven't ruled out the idea completely and may well get something designed and installed at a later date.

ACE

Went to the block again on Saturday and discovered that most of the internal walls are up.

ACE

More pics

ACE

We have decided to just visit the site once a week now, mainly because we are so busy but also because so much seems to happen in a week. We get very excited about what has been done and look forward to our weekends even more now.

We got a rather distressing message in the week from a security and communications company. They said they needed to speak with us urgently regarding our home build. My first thought was that the house had been vandalised but it turned to be our smartwire company wanting to meet with us as our supervisor has told them to go to site to install our system but they hadn't contacted us to confirm what we wanted so I think they are panicking a bit. The supervisor must be expecting to get the upper floor timbers in place within the next week or so which is good news.

We went up this afternoon and we couldn't believe how much the guys had done. All the ground floor walls (including internal walls and double bricks to all outer walls) are in place, the front and back balcony piers (including the steels) are up and the garage and front balcony arches are also in place. We climbed to the top of the stair bricks which brought us level to a metre or so below where our upper floor is going to be. We were blown away by how lovely the outlook is from up there and just sat on the top of the walls for ages imagining what it is going to be like. I must say the beautiful 22 degree sunshine really was the icing on the cake.