Monday, April 28, 2008

Colour Selection & Electrical appointment


We had our colour selection appointment last week, so I was diligently preparing for this appointment. I needed to decide what fixtures I wanted in the bathroom (taps, basins, bath, colours for the cabinets) and also the kitchen (tap, sink, bench top, finish on cabinets & handles) as well as deciding on the internal & external colours.

We had already decided on the bricks so it was just a matter of deciding on the colours of the garage, moroka finish, guttering, windows & doors. I wish there was a way we could look at the facade and put the colours in to see the end result...you would think with photoshop and similar applications this would be easy to set up.

The picture above is the facade we've decided on with a few changes - instead of a gable to the front balcony it will be a hipped roof and we've added eaves to the house. As much as we wanted to have it rendered we thought we'd upgrade on the bricks instead so we're having Balmoral sandstock bricks, Greenstead moroka finish to the front balcony, Barramundi (charcoal) roof, anodic off white for the windows & paperbark for the garage. Hope it all works.

The other changes are yet to be finalised, we're still waiting on the costing.

We also had our electrical appointment, I think that went really well. We went back to the display home this wkend and looked at our electrical plans to see if we needed to add anymore lights or power points - very small changes. I feel a lot better about the extra money we're spending on electrical. I think it's a bit misleading for the display home to have upgraded the lighting in the house and not disclose how much this costs...we had no idea it would be so expensive - they should at least specify that each down light will cost $100 a pop...(there were over 70/80 down lights in the display home).

Sunday, April 27, 2008

First timers building our 'dream' home

We haven't even started building yet and our 'dream' home is already compromised...little did we know that when we walked into that display home what we would be walking into was not the house we thought we could afford but the house we would like to have if we had an extra $100k for upgrades.

It took us a year of looking in Sydney to decide that we were better off buying a block of land and building a house we liked, to buying an existing home which needed to be renovated at some stage when it was affordable to do so. It also took us a long time to finally give up the idea that we could buy a half decent house and also live close to the city. After coming to this realisation it didn't take us long to find a block of land in the Hills district; in hindsight we should have moved out of the eastern suburbs a long time ago.

So we've signed up with Eden Brae and are in the midst of selecting everything for the house which for me has been a fun experience so far.