Final consultation and Colour selections

Finally the time had arrived to finalise the layout & plan of the house.

We started in the morning looking over the design of the home, what needed to be put in, such as piering for the southern side of the house as it sit next to a 3m high retaining wall. A much needed extra otherwise, without some sort of anchoring system the house could slip due to ground swell. I.e. Not good.

Other things to cover were modifications to the internals of the house such as which way the doors swings, wall movements or extra storage even cuboard space. As we had to change the layout of the house to cater for the driveway placement and the alfresco there were bits and pieces we changed to cater for the loss of certain parts. The theatre windows were modified to be two tall vertical windows on either side of where the tv would be placed. The door was changed to a cavity sliding door and the wall moved out a little father into the dining room - not by much. And extra closet space was creating by halving the second walk in robe for the front bedroom.

The last thing to be addressed was to install or not to install a  retaining wall on the northern side of the house. To have plantation put in the wall would be 30k something a little more costly than expected , however we went with someone else would put one, unfortunately that almost cost us our sanity but I will expanded more on that in the next update

Remember anything you change or add can cost extra.

Colour selections, were thankfully straight forward for the two of us, we agreed before going into the appointment that I have zero ability to match clothes let alone colours to go in a house. So it was the best interests not to choose colours.
However I did have the ability to veto the colour selections should they not have be to my liking,  we both thought that a decent compromise as we both get the colours we want.

I suggest before anyone goes through this colour selection process that you make the effort to go into the cosham studio to get an indication of where you both sit with what colours, taps, tiles, flooring, carpets, basins, handles the list goes on. What will really make your time easier is having most if not all the choices made before hand, the last thing you want to do is be making tough choices on the day with only three hours to decide. 3 hours is not enough if you aren't prepared.
 You start with the outside of the house and work your way in side to the large areas such as flooring and wet zones like the laundry/ bathrooms to progressively getting to the nitty gritty things like basin shapes and handle sizes.

The exterior colours for the house ultimately we removed the bottom right tile and the Gray coloured sheet was going to be the render, however that proved to be a costly choice, so we kept just face brick.

These were the original colours we were going to go with, ultimately we removed the God ugly black tile on the bottom right as it didn't fit with how the rest of the colours came together, also the mosaic tile in the centre

A clearer view of the wood we chose.

What we changed our black tile to, after going to Beaumont-tiles

PRE-BUILD - Sienna Q1

After the last few years of squirrelling away and fancy living in rentals its finally time to bite the bullet and look at getting a more permanent place for myself and my partner to set ourselves up.

Her friends had recently finished building houses, 1 couple with plantation homes and another with Dixon homes.

Both of them looks quite awesome, however El and I felt a particular affinity towards the Plantation house, it felt a little more Balinese(?) having more wooden features through the home, whilst still maintaining a modern look at the same time.

When building, there are a few things you want to do, figure out where you want, what you want/need in the house and what you can afford, taking both the previous criteria into consideration, - fortunately having been saving for the nearly the past decade gave us a little bit of room to play with our options and scale accordingly.

Our first thing to do was decide on a plot of land. Where that was, had been decided upon, due to El's friend living in the area with nothing but good things to say the local estate.
We looked at a few within our estate and found a corner block we really really liked.
We put our deposit down and had the land settled in March (2015)


Next the builders; for roughly two months whilst we still had our hearts set on plantation, we continued to look at all the builders display homes for ideas, layouts and getting the size of things. No exaggeration - we walked through ALL plantation homes in Queensland. and it was well worth it each has differing schemes of colours, lighting, applications, feel, etc. Doing that gave us an idea of what we wanted our home to feel and look like.
By the end of mid March we had decided on a design and placed our deposit.

The Sienna Vogue q1 with a bit of a modified design

We modified it to have what is beyond the garage on the right hand side of the above picture, mirrored - usually the alfresco is behind the garage however that would put it in the shade, and ensuring it stayed on the north side was a must. Swapping the garage was not a choice either due to the geography of the lot.

And an illustration of the facade look.


Onto the colour selections!!