Selections.....

With the deposit made for a PD home, its time to look at the selections/upgrades am prepared to make. We visited the interiors shops on Saturdays for 2-3 weeks. 

One thing that i liked about the Henley selections was you get a price for whatever selection you make. With PD its a hard one! You don't get a pricing on anything and this is when you would really think whether you need the upgrade or not?

At the end of the day, we made the upgrades on what we thought was really required and we needed to stick to the budget....




The colour selection appointment and the tiles selection was scheduled for the last week of March as we were booked in for a April site start, provided the land gets titled.


The tile selection was scheduled early in the morning and since we already had decided on most of the selections, it was really easy on the day of the appointments. 


TILE SELECTION:-


We selected the Stratos Mocca Polished and grooved tiles for the living, entry,dining and the bathrooms.

This was really the easy bit as we went and straight off told the consultant that we opt for these tiles, and the consultant worked around these for the grout colour, beadings etc...The grooved ones goes under the mirror and for the bathtub.

ELECTRICAL SELECTION:-

I had already prepared well in advance about the additional power points and lamps throughout the home. So all i wanted to do was tell the consultant where i need these on the plan. Since i had already planned about this it went smoothly, and also since you get a pricing for all the options with electrical, it is easy to decide and select what you want.

We also opted for a Security pack which costed us approx. $1300.

Since we are in a fiber estate we need to have a data pack as per the requirement of the estate which set us back by $1830.

It took almost 3 hours to finish the electrical and its time for the colour appointment.

COLOUR SELECTION:-

One thing i started to hate was no price was offered on the spot, and the standard reply was that "exact pricing would be given at the time of contract".


The colour consultant was really helpful and  gave a lot of options with the selections. This is what we ended up selecting.

PD Experience!

Well, compared to the experience what i had with Henley, this was a really good experience. The sales consultant did go through the display home for a walk through, explaining what is a standard and what are the upgrades done to the display so as to get a understanding of what is standard, then giving a options list to most of the common upgrades what people normally do and also giving a pricing even though it is approximate...

It was a good starting experience with the PD and gave a deposit of 1000 straight away.

Difference a display home makes...

When going through the PD access range, looked at the Randwick plans. Even though not entirely happy with our visualisation of the plans and having heard PD being a expensive builder, we had our reservations as to whether we should check it out. 


Finally decided there is no harm in checking it out, and since there was a display home in selendra rise which was close to us, we decided to have a look as to how the home looks.


To be honest, the display home blew us out. We are not talking about the upgrades what they do to make the house beautiful, the open plan living and easy access to the rooms which we could never have visualised.


Now we need to decide between the henley home which we have only visualised and a display home which we like. Its back to the drawing board again. Time to see a PD consultant. Also at the back of my mind is the PD homes/upgrades expensive? Worth it? Will it fit my budget? 

Henley Experience

Went to the display homes in Lyndhurst, spoke to one of the sales consultant.  One thing that became evident immediately is the consultant i spoke to was arrogant in nature and certainly not helpful. There was no houses built for display in breakthrough series which was a bummer as its hard to visualise everything from the drawing.After pondering with my wife and trying to visualise most of the plans from the drawings we decided to go ahead with them even though the consultant was not up to the expectations.


Paid a deposit of 850 and booked in the house.


Now its time to visit the Cosham interiors for having a look at the range and see what options we had for our build. The people over there were helpful and knew what they were talking and had a price for all the upgrades we might end up doing. 


Tried to communicate with the consultant for the options list and made no progress as he was not helpful in any way.


At this point of time, fed up with the consultant thought of looking at other builders for a plan which we might like...  

Selecting a Builder

With the deposit for the land made, its time to start looking at who is going to build our dream home.


The Building cost to be around 200-215K.


With a initial mindset of going to build my home with one of the big volume builders as i had seen the experiences of my friends building with lesser known builders the choice narrowed down to Henley, Metricon, Porter Davis, Simmonds and Dennis.


My first choice was Henley as one of my friend had already built with them and had a good experience and also we liked one of the plans " Maya " in the breakthrough range. 

Piece of land

After 6 months of looking for a existing property, its time to start looking for a piece of land where we can build our dream home.


Started off looking for land in SE suburbs with a budget of 165-180K and the only place where i could get a decent piece of land within my budget was in Edenbrook estate in pakenham. It was a 448sq m of land with a 14m frontage.


Handed out a deposit on the 15th of Feb 2012 with the titling to be in the month of March-April.

History

To start off, we are living in a home which we purchased in 2006 and we wanted to move into a home which was a bit bigger than the one we were living as the little one needed a bit more space to move around.

Initially we started off looking for a existing home, to suit our requirements. After a extensive search for 6 months, we could not settle on anything that impressed us and the one that impressed us was not in our budget.Finally came to the option of building a home on a piece of land to our requirements.