The Rain Water Tank Saga ....

Our first major introduction into Council red tape with this build has been to do with the provision of a Rain Water Tank.  Up until earlier this year, there was a Council requirement that RWT must be installed when building a new home on the Sunshine Coast.  This was also a requirement set in the development approval document for the Peregian Springs area.

Now Council do not have this requirement and the Developer who has bought this section of the subdivision off the original developer have told us that they will not be imposing this rule.

Decision made .... we will save ourselves nearly $8,000 and not install a RWT at this stage.

Not so simple .... because the original development approval document still says it is required, Council have to enforce the rule.  So we are now trying to get the new Developer to make this change official in the approval document.  Not sure how successful we are going to be, but for $8,000 its worth putting up a fight!

Watch this space!

Tile selection

Today we visited Beaumont Tiles to start gathering some ideas on what we want for our tiling. As most of the house will be tiled, apart from the bedrooms and media, its a decision we need to get absolutely right. 

We had gathered a few ideas from websites and magazines and thankfully our tastes are pretty similar, so it wasnt a too difficult task.

The hardest part was trying to find suitable wall tiles as within the size included in our contract, they only had limited stock of. We managed to find some more options on their website and hopefully the next time visit Cosham Studios for our colour selection appointment, we will have even more options to choose from.

We pretty much have our main floor tile chosen and have a good idea of our kitchen cabinets and stone bench top colours, so we are getting there slowly!

Watch this space ......

Preliminary House Plans by Plantation Homes

It was exciting to get our first set of preliminary drawings this week (click to enlarge).

New Home Proposal Appointment

Our first official appointment for our new home proposal was down in Brisbane, so it was a bright and early start for us all as we needed to drop Taylor to preschool early and Caitlyn to a friend's house.

The appointment went well and it was a good chance to go through everything again and make some minor changes.

Our costs (as expected) had increased quite a bit from the initial quote - contributed by our soil test coming back as H1 Highly reactive as opposed to M Class Moderately Reactive, the overall floor areas being extended (by us), plus they had thrown a few other requirements in there like a water tank (which we have since found out is not a regulatory requirement), higher pitched roof (which we should be able to have changed) and a few other Council related  fees.   Hopefully as we work through these, some if not all will be able to be taken out.

Following out appointment we had a chance to explore Cosham Studios which shows all their tiles/carpet/door/fittings/roof/kitchen/bathroom/ colour options that we are to choose from.  It was good to have an initial look before our further appointment in 3 weeks time when we have to make all those decisions.  

At the same appointment in 3 weeks time we sign our final contract off so that working drawings can be ordered and everything sent off to Council for approval.

It seems a very long process just to get to this point - but they are very thorough in ensuring everything is covered, so I guess that is a good thing.

Our block of land goes unconditional!

A very exciting day!  ...... our block of land has finally gone unconditional and is 'officially' ours!!

We have now paid our deposit to Plantation Homes to get the soil testing underway and the re-drafting of the plans.

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!!

Finding our Block of Land

After looking at a number of blocks, we kept on coming back to one we had found in Peregian Springs that was a great size 800m2 (40m long x 20 wide) at a great price!

We put our offer in and it was accepted  !!!!