Colour Selection .. continued

Resuming from where we left off.. these are some of the colours chosen together with our very pushy colour consultant, for different areas of our home. Note that these are just colour charts and will not represent the final look. Under different lighting conditions, these colours will also look lighter or darker.






































Our kitchen will look a little like this one pictured below. The layout is the same and our overhead cupboards will have a similar finish, and the same 900mm rangehood, oven, stove and dishwasher. The pantry cupboard will be different in design and finish and we have no refrigerator overhead cupboards. *Note that the kitchen ceiling height in this display home is lowered. Our caeserstone benchtop will also be slightly thinner at 40mm thick (display home's is an exagerating 60mm) and ours will be in the colour "Snow", which is whiter. We will also be getting Glass Splashback instead of the grey wall splashback tiles seen here.























The Glass Splashback will look something like the picture below and it will be brownish in colour. Can't remember the actual colour because our colour consultant has failed to include it in our documents.

























Look of our bathtub in main bathroom.


















Below is a picture of how our vanities and basins will look like. Our benchtops will be in Concept Oak Laminate, the same colour and material as the cupboards.




























Okay i think we shall stop adding any more display home pictures or else it will make our finished home look pale in comparison :P

Part 5 coming up!

Colour Selection / Electrical appointment (16/10/2009)

So after we secured our land by dropping off a 10% deposit, met up with our conveyancer and mortgage broker etc etc.. It was finally time for our all exciting "Colour Selection" appointment!

The "Colour Selection" appointment was basically broken up into 2 parts. The first session in the morning was our "Electrical" appointment where we chose where and what we wanted for our lights, switches, tv points and anything to do with electrics. It was actually quite tempting to want to upgrade to all the fancy shiny switches and dimmers and all that jazz.. but we told ourselves to keep to our "needs" hence we left with a very respectable $1000 bill which might seem like much but if we break it down, its $300 for 4 additional powerpoints, $200 for additional power circuit and safety switch, $200 for 4 exterior flood lights, $350 for 3 exterior coach lights, and $39 for 1 additional downlight. What we get as STANDARD really is inadequate. So for anyone thinking of building, always always ask for more power points and light points if you can! If not to do them further down the road is going to cost a lot more.


The 2nd session in the afternoon was our "Colour" appointment where we chose our colours! If only it was that simple.. To break this down periodically, we started off having to choose our roof tiles (colour and design), brickwork (colour and design), front facade colour, main door colour, garage door colour, interior wall colour, interior ceiling and cornice (colour and design), skirtings/architraves (design), interior doors (design), door handles (design), door stops (design), door locks (design), kitchen appliances (design), kitchen benchtop (design and colour), cupboards (design and colour), kitchen splashback (design and colour), kicthen sink (design), laundry (design and colour), bathroom vanity (design and colour), bathtub (design), shower (design), shower screen (design), toilet sinks (design)... and lots of other little things!! Pheeew.. as you can its pretty full on!! Things like toilet paper holders, towel rails etc etc are also extra $$!

To be honest we found it a rather stressful day as we had to complete the Colour selection and Electrical appointment in less than 8 hours (i know it sounds like a lot but it's not!!). And anything chosen during that appointment was pretty much final. We can pay an administration fee down the road when we change our minds about something, but its like $500 and it can also hold things up. So the pressure was on to get things right and we knew we had to do our homework before turning up but theres only so much time and so much we can do, so we turned up hoping our colour and electrical consultants would be patient, helpful and professional, and were they?

Well.. our electrical consultant Renee was fabulous :) She was patient and friendly and offered us drinks twice during our 2 hour consultation with her. But as soon as we met our colour consultant Sabrina, we knew she was going to be a bitch (pardon me language but she really was not very nice). Arrogant, unprofessional, impatient and poor customer service on her part so it was a terrible experience.


Also one thing we expected was that the builder will always try and upsell things during the colour and electrical appointment, and they did. But i think we did pretty well, walking away with a $7500 bill in total. To break it all down, besides the $1000 for Electrical mentioned above, $3000 were for carpets alone because we had to purchase an additional 65m2 worth of carpet, plus we opted for a carpet upgrade to something a bit more decent with better durability. The standard item is paper thin and only comes with 3 year warranty, and considering majority of our floor is going to be carpetted it is a good investment because we now have a much thicker carpet with 7 year warranty. Plus we paid trade price so saved ourselves some hardearned $$!

So enough talk already, here are some pictures of what we have chosen. We will not have pictures for everything but you will get a brief idea.

This is a picture of the brick we selected (or we think it is). We think it's Austral Brick's Category 2 brick called "Malt" with natural mortar.

This is a picture of someone else's home using the same bricks.



















This is what our roof tile would look like. Its a Monier Concrete roof tile in Traditional low profile design, in the colour Sambucca. The house pictured on the left has the same roof tiles, shows you the colour. Aurora estate covenance only allows "Low-Profile" roof tiles and this is the design we liked best.






More pictures to follow.. :D

Securing land

To be able to build the Lumino, we needed a block of land. As mentioned before, at the Aurora estate, builders have "pre-allocated" blocks of land. So they would tell customers which block of land they need to secure in order to build their desired home. Simonds told us we only had 2 choices left in Stage 13 if we wanted to build with them, as the rest had either been sold, allocated to other builders or were unsuitable. Lot 1366 ended up being our final choice as it was a north facing, rectangular block, and it measured 18m x 30m (540m2) slightly bigger than the other block of land that was on offer which measured 16m x 30m (480m2). It meant we would have a slightly bigger outdoor area, every centimeter counts you know!

However, choosing lot 1366 came with a price, of nearly $10k more which bumped the total cost of the house and land package closer to the $400k mark. We went away for 30mins thinking through it, as we were considering waiting for future land release in the coming months just to give us more options. But due to the government's deadline on the FHOG incentive, we risk losing thousands of dollars in incentives. Land in future realeases were also going to be priced higher so from a budget standpoint we would be worse off, plus having to wait longer before we get a house to live in. We finally made up our minds and returned to drop a deposit on lot 1366.
Just can't expect to get everything can we!

Funny thing is if we had taken another 15mins to decide, we would have missed out on lot1366 as that same afternoon 2 more couples expressed interest only to find that it has been taken.



*A pic of lot 1366 below if you can see it! Sorry about the poor quality.. :p

Visiting display homes

Okay.. so off we went to the display homes and back in May 09', there were 6 builders building new homes at Aurora (Simonds, Burbank, JGKing, Zuccalla, Timeless, Orbit). Home and Land packages offered at Aurora back then were advertised as starting from $299k, however we soon found out that prices have slowly crept up since 2007 and we would be looking at a minimum of $320k and we would only be able to build a 170m2 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom and 1 car garage single storey townhouse on a small 250m2 block of land. That was not what we expected at all and was actually rather disappointed as we were looking at mid sized homes with "a bit" of land for around $300k. I guess we found out that homes at Aurora are affordable, but not that affordable!!

We went and looked at the 3 bedroom townhouses on offer anyway and although they were on narrow blocks of land, the builders surprised us with their very creative 6 star energy efficient home designs, and most of the townhouses although pretty narrow, were fairly deep and have high ceilings to not make them too costraphobic. Most townhouses still had ample outdoor entertainment areas. However, they still weren't quite the "Australian Dream" we had hoped for, so off we went to look at other bigger display homes, hoping to find one that would fit into our budget.

The next display homes we visited were by JG King, the biggest builder of steel frame homes and they had 2 double storey houses on display at Aurora. Now these were starting to look more like it, but we then soon realised it would cost over $420k to build one of these double storey homes on a 450m2 block of land. JG King were able to build many other single storey home designs at the Aurora estate for under $400k but they had no displays for us to view, so we left JG King feeling yet a little disappointed as there was a special promotion going on at that time.

Zuccalla Homes was next and beside it was Simonds Homes. Both these builders have at least 40 years of building history and their home designs for the Aurora estate were mid-large size single storey 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom, double garage, 240m2 homes meant for blocks of land with at least 16m frontage. We walked into the Zuccalla Galleria first and it was a nice home. It had a fairly spacious feel to it and was the sort of home we were probably looking for. The only gripe we had was that the master bedroom was right up the front of the house meaning it was next to front entry. Some people like that for security reasons apparently but we feel that it limits privacy and its not always nice having guests come through the front entry and be immediately greeted by the master bedroom. Otherwise, the floorplan was pretty contemporary and not much you could fault.

The following and probably last display home we visited put the Zuccalla Galleria back in its place though. Simonds had the Lumino on display, which they say was a house designed specifically for the environmentally conscious Aurora Estate. It was comparable in size to the Galleria with both around 240m2 in size, and both having 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a double garage. The biggest difference was in design and the use of space, which you immediately notice when you walk into the Lumino. The Lumino display home oozed a bit more flare as well by having a lot of "non-standard" touches.

What sold us though was the actual floorplan or design of the home which was designed to maximise natural light so straight away you would notice lots of glass spanning from the lounge room to the main living room. The lounge room was the first thing welcoming us when we stepped through the front door and the master bedroom was not up the front of the house! Perfect! All bedrooms in fact were nicely concealed, up the back of the house, away from a large family living area and open kitchen. There were also 2 outdoor entertainment areas due to the smart floorplan, and there was also a little private outdoor area in the master bedroom. If there was one thing we could have changed at no-cost (dream on i know..), it would have been the ensuite. The shower area could be bigger but being petite asians i am sure we will fit no problems :)






*This is a draft floorplan of the Simonds Lumino. Stay tuned for Part 3...

Our first home building experience :) - Part 1

Hello everyone! It's Zee here starting off our very first Home ownership blog :D So exciting... hehe.. Okay, first of all i think we should tell everyone where and why we are building our first home and who we are building with and what we are actually building! (A house i know..)

Barely 3 months after we moved to Melbourne from NSW, i started looking at realestate.com.au checking out affordability and the idea of owning our first home rather than helping to pay off someone else's mortgage all the time. We were surprised to find that realestate was still pretty affordable in Victoria, and along with the FHOG (First Home Owner's Grant) and the Victorian Government's FHOB (First Home Owner's Boost) = total of $32k, it made it a very realistic and attractive proposition for first home buyers like us. Then one day, a colleague of mine mentioned to me that theres this great development up north that has recycled water for every household etc and its called "Aurora". I looked it up online and was instantly amazed by this award winning 20 year masterplanned development's potential run by VicUrban. VicUrban is the Victorian Government's sustainable urban development agency committed to delivering prosperous and successful communities in regional and metropolitan Victoria. The Aurora development began in 2007.

Here is the VicUrban website that talks about the Aurora development: http://www.vicurban.com/cs/Satellite?c=VPage&cid=1148356820506&pagename=VicUrban%2FLayout&site=VicUrban

Aurora Virtual Tour (Video)-
http://www.vicurban.com/cs/Satellite?c=VPage&cid=1168844488091&pagename=VicUrban%2FLayout&site=VicUrban

6-Star Living at Aurora (Video)-
http://www.vicurban.com/cs/Satellite?c=VPage&cid=1211937398828&pagename=VicUrban%2FLayout&site=VicUrban828&pagename=VicUrban%2FLayout&site=VicUrban

After looking at a few other private developments, home owners do get a lot for their money by choosing to build their home at Aurora. They include:

*6-Star Energy Rated Living - Every home at Aurora is 6-star energy designed to optimise natural light, shade and warmth. You can use less energy and live more comfortably.

*Landscaping, fencing and driveway too - When your home is built at Aurora it comes with fencing, driveway and front landscaping. Which means that from the day you move in, your place is looking great.

*Open Space, Shopping and Schools - In addition to open spaces and recreation parks, there are 5 schools, two town centres, shops and offices planned for the future.

*Recycled Water - You’ll have a lot more freedom to wash your car and water your garden at Aurora thanks to recycled water on tap to every home. Just connect to your purple tap and enjoy a beautiful yards all year round.

*Fibre Optic Connection - Enjoy high speed Internet and cable television thanks to fibre optic connection to every home. Enjoy a world of entertainment and information at your fingertips

At Aurora, they only sell "fixed price" home and land packages. That means a block of land has already been matched up to a suitable home designed by a certain builder, which in most instances, have already been pre-approved by the developer and local council. Whereas at some other private developments, you can have the option of purchasing land only and then finding a suitable builder and house design, or purchase a home and land package.

So off we went looking at snapping up our bit of turf. However we discovered that Stage 13 which was on sale then was 75% sold, and there were not many good lots left. We couldn't decide but were actually advised by the very helpful sales consultant at Aurora (Michelle) to maybe find out which house design we liked first before we picked our land, for the not so obvious reason (to first home owners especially) that the house design we like might not suit the block of land we want to buy (ie. too narrow). Makes a lot of sense doesn't it, so before we could drop off a deposit on land, we rushed off to check out the display homes! :D

Check out Part 2....