Coming close to what we want

So after going thru a pile of brochures, house floor plans, design and architecture magazines, price lists (most important!) and more visits to display home centres far and wide and revisiting the same home display again and again, are we getting close to what we want to build?

We both agreed on the Nolan 45. We liked it.  We'll lose the rumpus room, and maybe go for the smaller version - the Nolan 41.  Have you seen the Butler's Pantry?!? Wow!!! We'll take that.  Double car garage workshop extension? Oh, yes, please.  Look at the staircase. That's what we call a staircase. How much is the base price again, I'm sorry? Not bad, but ... it's probably higher than what we're willing to go for.  Now we're wondering if there's a house design we missed that really is just the perfect fit for what we want.

Then the salesperson muttered ... "Have you been to our Arena Estate Display Centre?"

Arena where? "In Officer" ...

The House that M Built

After trawling thru most of the display home centres that we can humanly go to, we have short-listed 2 house designs that we liked - the Nolan and the Laguna.  Both from M.

These home displays ticked all the boxes from our home criteria list.  See them for yourselves.  Especially the Nolan, almost all double-storey houses that we see being built by M is the Nolan.  Our favourite blog, the source of most of the insights and information about building with M, the one that kinda egged me on to start our own blog, built a Nolan.

See them for yourselves ...

Sold !!! Another Metricon house sold at auction.

As part of searching for that dream house design (and in our case at the moment, waiting for site start), we looked at already built houses and go for open day inspections, if possible.  Why is it that once you decided on something, in our case, build a house, you start noticing other houses being built and being sold. Isn't it amazing, that considering we live on an established suburb, we have more than 5 new M houses being built within a 5 kilometer radius from us.

Yesterday, a Metricon-built house was sold at auction.  Here's the agent's spiel about the property (I've changed identifiable landmarks to protect the innocent):

Status Update #1

When we first created this blog (14th June 2011), our old property have just been demolished. At this point in time, we're just waiting for M to do another site survey and second soil test.  But we would like you to come and go thru this journey with us from that "one day" we started to make the dream real. We're hoping that we'll be able to post most, if not all, of our building notes, in logical and chronological sequence, before the actual "Site Start".  Before then, we're posting some "Status Updates" from time to time just to let you all know where we are really currently at at this stage of our "building our home" journey.

 "Approvals and Permits" should actually be yellow or "Complete". It's just that my CSC has forgotten to mark the "Tree Removal" bit as "Completed".

Search continues ...

PD's Santana was one of my top choice. Everything was just perfectly in place. It's got the right width and length that will suit our block, too. But as we go up and down the stairs, we realise, this type of staircase is not really that suitable for a family with active little ones! It's also the very first thing you'll see as you enter the house from the front door.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but you have to have a darn good-looking staircase as this becomes a centrepiece of your house.  And it's not cheap.

We'll park the PD Cremorne for now.  Maybe we can have the design varied to remove the rumpus room and maybe replace with an extended outdoor room.  We did say we didn't want to have a rumpus room before, right?

Focus on what you want for your house.

And the search continues ...

Let's try M, their display homes look quite contemporary and classy.