Thursday 7 October 2010

Blissful storage.

Dave designed this storage unit for the living room and our kitchen company, Castlewood Kitchens will be building it. It will hold boardgames, toys, CD's etc.... and of course books!  It is fairly expensive but we think it will add value to the house, as well as being extremely practical.

Final House Plans

Here are the final house plans. It is a big house (39 squares I think), but there are lots of rooms and a layout that suits a family like ours with an almost teenager, primary school age children and a toddler. We wanted to create different zones where the kids could entertain their friends, and we also wanted a study with no doors close to the main living area so we can keep an eye on computers.

Downstairs
                                                                         
                                                                             Upstairs


After a trip to IKEA yesterday Matt is planning the layout of his room with a to-scale plan.

Tuesday 5 October 2010

The grand plan.


Over the next 2+ months we worked with the architect to come up with a design that ticked all our boxes. Lots of light into the house, plenty of storage, 5 bedrooms upstairs and a guest bedroom downstairs, different living areas and a large alfresco area/deck.
At times this was an extremly frustrating process as we were not always on the same page (or timescale) as the architect, but in the end we are extremely happy with the design. We spent a fortune on magazines looking for inspiration, but figured that the cost was a drop in the ocean compared with what we were about to spend on our new house.

Saturday 2 October 2010

The promised land….well not quite.

I started looking for a block to build on and somehow came across The New Rouse Hill. I didn't even know this development existed even though we lived just down the road and I shopped at Rouse Hill on an almost daily basis.

We originally put a holding deposit on a block down by Caddies Creek but then had second thoughts thinking about possible mozzies, and the fact that we couldn't even tell which way the creek flowed because it was so stagnant.
The only other block was a large odd shaped one opposite the tennis courts. It had been for sale for a while and the price had been dropped by close to 100k (it was way overpriced originally). It was large (over 600m2)  and flat, and after chatting to the architect from Right Build we were convinced we could build a great home with beautiful north facing living areas, so we snapped it up.



  aerial shot

All coming along nicely.











In the beginning...

How did it all begin? How did we come to be building a new home?

It all started when we returned home from a camping trip at Easter 2010.

 "Wouldn't it be good if we had a drive-thru garage and we could open out the camper-trailer to dry before putting it away in the garage?". (Dave)

Well, that was it! That was all I (Jo) needed to start thinking about a new house. We had been living in our big Clarendon box for 10 years, and while it was a solid well built house, it was really lacking in good design. It had only one north facing window in the whole house! It had a huge void, was extremely noisy, and very expensive to heat and cool. While the house had served us well, I was keen to build again and try and fix some of the mistakes we made the first time.