Firstly, let us introduce ourselves. We are Natalie and Ash Durham with a pugalier puppy named Roxy and we have purchased a block of land at The Ponds. As it stands we are about 5 weeks or so away from action happening on our block with the recent development of the approval from council. Before we get into that though, we'll start at the beginning of our adventure at The Ponds.
We first decided to make the move to building at The Ponds after evaluating our position in our first home. It was a 3 bedder, single garage brick veneer home in Dean Park. We owned the property for roughly 4 years and thought it was about time we made our move into a better property. After extensive looking around at pre-existing homes around surrounding areas, we decided that there just wasn't anything ticking all the boxes we wanted in our next house. On came the thought of building.
After venturing through a few options, we found ourselves loving The Ponds area. Central to family, friends and work, land at the right size and price and the quality of homes being of a high standard, we immediately felt at home. Starting the grueling task of then deciding which block, in which release, of which size was our next battle.
We're quite eager people and were naturally very keen on getting something to be able to begin our long and exciting adventure. This brought us to the fun task of selling our existing residence to be able to manage the start of our new chapter. Fortunately the designing ability of Natalie allowed the house to sell on the first day of hitting the market fetching over our asking price. Over the moon at this point? No doubt!
Shacking up with the parents wasn't something we thought we would be doing after getting married, thank god we're loved. This allowed us to continue with placing a deposit on a block of land and then continuing our search of choosing a house to put on it. We had started looking at display homes prior to the purchase of the block, but didn't think too seriously of them until we had a block to put it on. I know some of you would be thinking, "That's the wrong way around." and our parents did say that too, but we had a fair idea of what we wanted and were confident that the block would happily house the dimensions.
4 bedrooms, double garage and 2 bathrooms was the criteria of our choice. Anything after that was a bonus. A theatre room was a big selling point for Ash as his mass collection of DVDs would fit perfectly well with it ;). After many viewings of display homes through the ponds, kellyville and eventually Oran Park, we chose beechwood to be our builder of choice. The chosen plan of the Cabernet ticked all the boxes and beechwood provided the best value for money out of the couple of choices we had to choose from.
In further plans and changes to this floor plan, we have added an alfresco area to the rear of the living area, moved some doors and windows and modified the kitchen and laundry layouts. An updated version of the floor plan will come in a later post.
Hi, we are building with Beechwood and have gone the Vogue 1 facade. We are tossing up between the gun metal and coal tile. Is the coal a black tile or does it have grey in it?
ReplyDeleteHi there, we originally picked a tile that i think was called luna eclipse but i found it to be "too black" if you know what i mean. We went for the coal coz at Austral, the tile still looked dark but not as harsh as the black. Hope that helped :)
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