Shane and I have been married for 5 years and have 3 gorgeous little kids! We are currently living in a 3 bedroom cedar home which we purchased last year to renovate and sell. We've replaced all the carpet, repainted, redone the bathrooms, redone the floors and tidied up the garden. So everything but the kitchen. It's a gorgeous cozy little house that we really do love, however with 2 very active older kids and a little bub we just don't have enough space! The house is approx 12sqm and boy do we have some stuff crammed in.
Approx 2 months ago we decided to sell, this house just isn't working for us like we need it to. We listed it with an agent and 2 weeks ago it SOLD! We were ecstatic! We had previously discussed what we wanted to do and knew that we wanted to build. We had met with our mortgage broker to discuss options and what we could borrow, so we knew where we stood and what we could afford to spend. We drove around for hours a few weekends ago looking at blocks in 2 new estates near our current home. We narrowed it down to 3 blocks, all had pros and cons and we couldn't really make a decision. The following Tuesday I'd gone to Ikea with my Mum. We'd left early that morning to head up to Melbourne and Shane starts work late on a Tuesday, so he'd been left to his own devices and had been driving around checking out the blocks again. Just as we arrived Shane called and all I heard was "I'm not sure if you're going to love me or kill me?!". I was wondering what on earth had he done when he told me he'd bought a block! He'd put an offer in and 15 mins later it had been accepted! Despite being in total shock, there was a lot of relief from my end that he had made a decision! So we have a 586sqm block with a nice wide frontage! Now that we had our block, we began looking at display homes. As I'm sure you all know, there are a lot out there! We didn't have to look too far to find what we were after. We had a look at the display homes near our estate and found a few we liked but they were through private builders and honestly, to have what we wanted in our new home we couldn't afford them. About 10 mins away from us is the
Estuary Estate where there is a multitude of display homes. We already knew what we had to have in the home... 4 bedrooms, 2 living areas and a butlers pantry! This is the first home we will have built but we have lived in and owned a number of homes between us. So we knew what would and wouldn't work for us, which made our decision fairly easy! We walked into the
Metricon - Lancaster 25 and liked it immediately. It had everything we wanted, it sat on our block well and there was a deal on at the time that included an Outdoor Room! Perfect! We met with the sales agent who did a quote for us, we went away and crunched a few numbers and just as we had almost perfected the quote a rather large speedhump came up! The way we wanted the house on the block meant that we needed to change the crossover. We'd been told that there would be no worries with the council in doing so and all would be fine. That was until we realised there was an
Opticomm pit right where we wanted to put our driveway. So after a few quick phone calls we were told that the pit would need to be relocated, which would be at our expense. That is money we weren't prepared to spend. So after going back to the sales agent and trying to switch the garage and master bedroom in the Lancaster it just wasn't going to work. The poor Lancaster was to be no more. When we had been looking at display homes we had also had our eye on the
Metricon - Lindeman 28 which was also on display at Estuary Estate. So we went back through that and threw some ideas around. Everything about the Lindeman was great except that it didn't have a butlers pantry! For us, this was something that was not negotiable. So we have added one in and slightly extended the dining area. Perfect! Everything has now been sent off to the drafts people to create our plans! Hopefully they wont take too long! Will be back to update once we have them back!!
