Moving House, again

Life certainly does have a strange way of happening at times. I seem to recall that after moving into our current home I said "never again".

In early October 2020 my wife and I visited the new home display village just up the road from us and from that point on we started talking about either building a new home or putting an extension on our existing home. We like the location of our current home and the view from the roof of the house is pretty good, so we thought that putting a new master bedroom suite upstairs could be the way to go.

We drew up some basic plans and my wife reached out to some builders. We found it pretty hard to find a builder that was interested in putting an upstairs extension on our house, most of the ones that did reply said that we were wasting our time and that we should just build a new home that suited what we wanted.

The more my wife and I talked about it, the more we started to agree that building a completely new home was probably the way to go.

The first step was to find a block of land to build on. We started looking at the blocks that were currently available and none of them seemed right for us. We tried to talk ourselves into a couple of them and my wife was really keen to get things moving, but I wasn't going to compromise on the block, it needed to be right for what we wanted to build and the blocks that were for sale at the start of our search were the blocks that no one else wanted.

The developers that were releasing the blocks usually used a ballot system so we signed up our interest and waited for the next release of land. The way the ballot system works is that they release details of the blocks and you have about week to register your interest. They then draw names out of a hat to determine the order in which people will select their blocks. When your name is drawn out, you select your preferred block and pay a deposit then and there. You need to have a few blocks in mind as depending on when your name is drawn out, the block or blocks that you were interested may no longer be available.

I was pretty convinced that it would take a long time before our name was drawn out early enough in a ballot for us to be able to select a block that suited us.

One morning in January 2021, we received an email from the sales office advising that they were doing a small release of land on a first come first served basis. My wife and I jumped into gear and started looking at the 20 or so blocks that had been released and immediately short listed four or five of the blocks. We contacted the sales office and requested further information on the blocks we were interested in. There were some blocks in the release that didn't appear to be available so we asked what the go was with them too.

We received further information on the blocks we liked and basically ended up with two blocks that could be suitable, but we really liked one block in particular that didn't appear to be available. It turns out that their was a "Builders Ballot" that was conducted prior to the blocks becoming available to the public so we asked the sales office if they could tell us the name of the builder who had the block. Whilst we waited to hear back, we heard that one of the other blocks that we liked had now been sold so we were down to one potential.

The sales office supplied us with the name of the builder and we did us much research as we could on the builder and we couldn't find any negative reviews and then reached out to them. We contacted the builder and arranged to meet with them at the display village on the weekend.

The meeting went really well and we decided the following day that we wanted to go ahead so we paid them an initial non-refundable deposit of $1500. 

So we now had the block we wanted, we just had to choose a design that we liked so we could get plans drawn up. It all happened much faster than I expected and we hadn't even talked to a broker to know if it was even going to be possible to do what we had planned. I didn't mind too much as it was only $1,500 that we were risking at this stage and the block was exactly what we wanted. There is a small local park directly across the road which has four existing large gum trees on it and everything slopes away from the block so we should get a nice 180° view of the surrounding ranges from the rooms at the front of the house.

Next week I'll let you know how we went about choosing the design for the new home and the ups and downs along the way.

Bomber
Never say never, I guess.