Happy New Year! So lets get down to it!

We finally have some progress after the Xmas and New Year's break! I can see some work done to our street and pedestrain walking. So it shouldn't be too long before our land gets titled (end of Januray 2010 we were told, meant to be November 2009) and then construction can finally begin!





















Our street sign is up!

Being content :)

Ever since we started out on this building our first home experience, i very quickly became engrossed with everything to do with real estate and home renovation. I would be reading the realestate sections everytime i pick up a newspaper and checking in on http://www.homeone.com.au/ a forum for home owners and builders.. so engrossed about realestate that i was already on the lookout for our future purchase! Crazy as it sounds, but its true.

The news yesterday on the Copenhagen Climate talks nearing collapse brought me back to earth. At that moment, i realised how lucky i already am, enjoying life as it is and taking so many things for granted. Victorians especially would understand the issues of climate change even better than others having just been through the Black Saturday bushfires last summer that killed 173 lives, burnt down many beautiful homes and destroyed many families and dreams. But the impact of climate change is far far greater if we all care to look deeper, but yet many of us conveniently ignore it and justify our actions with excuses. I know i do too.

Hence i would recommend anyone looking at purchasing their next home to seriously consider building a new home with high energy efficiency rating. You not just help the climate, you help yourself financially in reduced energy bills. That is why we chose to build at Aurora. The main attraction is definitely its environmental credentials, masterplan and affordability. So moral of this blog is that we should feel very fortunate to be building our first home at Aurora, and we are :) To find out more about this awesome development, look at my 1st post!

Juggling landscaping ideas..

This is one thing we definitely DID NOT budget for.. Landscaping! The surprises keep coming when you build... all part of the "fun" :/ As part of the deal building a house at Aurora is the "inclusion" of front landscaping, but to what extent we really don't know so we have to set aside a little bit of money for that as well as landscaping around the rest of the house which we will need to do ourselves. Anyhow, landscaping is a never ending money pit as you can spend close to nothing nothing and have just dirt and lawn as your landscape or as much as 30% of the home purchase price to have all the bells and whistles!! (Think massive water features)

Well, we decided we wanted practicality and contemparory, "low maintenance" landscaping but at what cost? We decided to set a budget and draw up something that we think we would like and see if we can fit it all in. What we saw at a display home earlier last year was something that we liked and would like to acheive if our budget allows. If not we can always break it down into a few stages. Look at the drawing and pictures below for a rough idea.

The look of the 1st outdoor living area we are after, minus water feature.

The look of the 2nd outdoor living area we are after, minus spa-bath.


















We may go with plain simple concrete with a small water feature and neat vegetation.


















Clean lines are what we are after and white pebbles+pavers look great.

A Balinese Thatch like this in the backyard will set us back approx $3000 without decking!

So there we go, some ideas of what we would like but it will all come down to cost.

Waiting for land development

So now we wait... patiently. Wait for land to be developed so it can be titled and registered in our name. And then we wait again for the builder to commence construction.. then we wait again for the various stages of the construction to be complete.

Anyway here are some pictures of our lot and the works around the development so far..

Thats our lot! Lot1366:

Feldgrau Rise, our street under development. Shot taken on 28/11/09 from the East:

Check out the uninvited guests i spotted eating grass in the estate!

Stay tuned for more developments!!

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