Finding a House to Fit!

You would have thought finding a great size, level block of land would make it easy to find a house plan to suit ...... that was not to be!

We didn't really want to go to a designer to get the house done as we were keen to go with a project builder this time as we found it very hard doing it all ourselves when we built in NZ.

Time to work through our first building issues.  These were caused by:

•  a sewer easement near the west boundary fence (which takes up a 3 metre area that you can't build over)
• The entrance of the property being off the side of a dead-end street (great for privacy, not so easy to site a standard house plan on) - as per the below diagram

We worked these these issues and decided on the Plantation Homes Retreat 18m Q2 plan that seemed to fit pretty well.

We booked out appointment with Plantation Homes for the Sunday where we were to sign off on getting these underway.

At this point a colleague from Craig's work who just happens to be a Designer cast her eye over the plan and let us know that she felt it was all wrong for the indoor/ outdoor living and also very importantly the cooling summer breezes.

This was something we had not considered and in NZ, this couldn't be a consideration - so we were very thankful of the advice.

So back to the drawing board.  We needed a plan that had the outdoor living at the north end (entrance end) of the property and the main entrance on the west boundary.  We started to look at other plans and came across one with Ausmar that we quite liked.  However, on visiting the exact house plan that was currently being built we felt that it was too small in many areas.

We kept on coming back to the Plantation Home that we really liked and came up with an idea of how we could make it work by flipping it around so that the alfresco was at the north end, swapping the garage and the master suite around so that our garage would now be by the alfresco area which would lead out to the pool.  We also created an entrance way where the ensuite was.

Original Retreat 20m Q2 Plan by Plantation Homes

and voila .......!

Our Redesign of the Retreat 20m Q2
(Ignore the colours - was trying to define the room types)

We approached Plantation Homes with our re-design and although they are not a 'custom home designer', they thankfully agreed to go ahead with this!!