And We're Off!

Exciting times. After a little over a year in the planning, we've made it to the start line on our build of a Clarendon Bowral 42 with loft! We've made a few alterations, both to make it fit our block, and to increase the size of the living room. We began our journey of looking for a replacement home in August 2021. We hadn't intended to do a knock down, but as the estimates for renovating the existing home came in, it stated to point us in that direction. We'll pay more in total than the renovation, but we'll get the home we want, without the restrictions of the existing floorplan. We first got to the display home in August 21 and signed contracts somewhere around October 21. The journey through council was slower than we had hoped. We had weeks of delays due to the need for an arborists' report. We should have got the chainsaw out before putting the plans in. Final council approval didn't come through until ~April 2022, and then the demolition was to come. Demolition took a little over a week from start to finish by Site Demolition. The firm got the job done fast at a time we needed them to do it. They were 4-5K more expensive than other quotes, but they were the only ones who could get it done on time. We made some compromises during the planning stages. Our block is half a metre too narrow for the house, if we want to maintain a 2/5M driveway to the side of the house to give us access to our yard, so we made the difficult decision of cutting our a metre in width. The only place we could reasonably do this was in the master bedroom, so half a metre has been cut out on the Walk in robe side and another half metre has been cut out in the parents retreat/study side. We also needed to recess the air conditioning in the bedroom, and the laundry. It means that the master ends up being smaller than we'd hoped, but the compromise was necessary to fit the home. The laundry is also smaller due to the recessed air conditioner, but it'll still work out being spacious enough.

As a trade off, we added some extra space to the rear. This gives us a 2 metre patio running the full width of the house underneath the main roof, and extends the living room out by a couple of metres. The patio is tiled and there are 4 Hamptons style columns holding up the roof, which are similar to those at the font of the home.

In addition, we also get an extra 2 metres of depth to the rear loft dormer, as the roof line comes further out to cover the rear patio.

Overall, we're pretty happy with the floor plan. It would have been nice not to compromise, but the rear access is important, particularly given our large shed at the back of our block. One area that I wish I had persisted with was the loft. As you can see from the area in the red square, the subfloor of the loft continues beyond the loft area. I had asked to have the area converted to a storage room, but was advised that it couldn't be done. Since then, the display homes at Lochinvar and Braemar have both opened, and both include this loft storage room. We'll likely end up boarding this out some time after handover. The space is as large as the dining room, so it's a real shame to waste it.