New Home Proposal meeting with Plantation

Yesterday, the "fun" officially began with our New Home Proposal meeting with Plantation. We set aside 3 hours of our afternoon to go to their office at Springwood and review the tender, siting, plans and some elevations. Basically this was our last chance to make any structural changes to the house. Luckily for us, we had already decided and advised Plantation of 95% of our structural changes, so it made the appointment very quick and simple.

There were a few quirks that came up during the tender presentation. Firstly, because we have an easement running along the back of our property, Council requires us to have a 2.5m clearance between the boundary and the house to allow for access should they need. Due to the width of our house, our Garage had to be slightly relocated to allow for this clearance. We then had to move a few other walls inside the house so that everything still 'lined up'.

The second issue was also to do with the easement - more specifically the sewer connection coming off the main sewer line in the easement. Due to the length of our house this time, it sits too close (within 1.5m of the connection). As such we need to put piering under our Master Bedroom and WIR which is an additional cost. To try and counter this issue, Plantation are looking into making a slight amendment to our chosen facade so that the house can move forward on the lot, thereby eliminating the need for additional foundation works at the back. It will also save us money as Bedroom 4 will actually be made slightly smaller, hence we will get a credit back for that as well.

And the third hurdle we have hit is around our floor coverings. We decided about a month ago to organise our own floor coverings to be installed after handover by Carpet Call, as it was considerably cheaper to arrange directly with them than through Plantation. We are getting floating timber laminate floors throughout the whole house (apart from the bedrooms and wet areas) and we want it to be installed without the additional "quadding" - this means that the skirting has to be installed after the timber floors have gone down. The problem here is that Plantation will either install the skirting prior to handover, or they will leave the uncut, unpainted skirting in the Garage for us to install and paint ourselves once the flooring has been done. Given the major inconvenience this would be, we have decided to go with Plantation for our timber flooring, but still get the carpet done ourselves after handover - this way we avoid having to do any fiddly work ourselves and we can just move in :)

Update: due to the massive cost difference between Carpet Call and Plantation, we are keeping with Carpet Call for our timber flooring and will be having the scotia installed - we couldn't justify the extra cost!

After going through the tender, we were let loose in Cosham Studios to have a look at some colours and fittings etc. whilst a couple of changes were made to our plans. This was our second visit to Cosham Studios, as we went for a visit on our own around a month ago just to start getting some ideas. We have now chosen our colours for almost everything - but we will put this up in a separate post after our Colour Appointment which is in 2 weeks, once everything is confirmed.

After reviewing the updated and plans and tender, we put pen to paper and paid our next deposit instalment of $1,500.

From here, it is really just a waiting game for another 2 weeks until our contract appointment. In the mean time we are sourcing quotes for our driveway, landscaping and fencing and we are looking to go for a drive out to the display centre for the brick company Plantation use to get a better idea of brick colours etc.

Overall, it hasn't been too painful so far - but time will tell and whilst we are sure there will be some minor frustrations ahead, as usual, we will deal with them and move on.