Retaining walls and roads going in

Have been running around display homes today for inspiration on what colour schemes to use and while we were up north we thought we would drop by Ellenbrook to see if anything had happened with the land.

To our surprise there are now some nice paved roads going in which meant we could get a bit closer to where our plot it and you can now also see some retaining walls going up which means the plots are being separated.  Sorry for the crappy photo quality only had my iPhone on me

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Signed up a builder

Well we have signed up our builder and its full steam ahead!

We were tossing up between two companies, Homebuyers Centre and Ultimate Homes, they both had great plans but Homebuyers were more of a "starter" building company while Ultimate are considered to be much better quality and part of quite a well regarded building group.  The trade off if we went with Ultimate is that we would have to lose the pool (sob) until we can afford it as $30k can go a long way towards kitting out the house properly...

Ultimate won in the end purely down to the house design and what we considered to be a better standard specification which we thought would save us a bit in the long run once we started to look at furnishing the house, we had asked them both to add certain things to their plans and Homebuyers were quite a bit more expensive on their extras so for flexibilty we decided to run with Ultimate.  We can live without a pool until we can afford it and will leave the space there for it to be put in later, its a shame but its obviously a lot of money which we dont have at the moment.

The Ultimate House rough plan is below shown sat on our piece of land, the house is called the Newport but we have made quite a few changes including:

• Removing what we thought was a useless open study area behind the kitchen
• Extending the Kitchen into the study area to make it much bigger
• Removing a games room to the left of bedroom 4
• Extending Bedrooms 3 & 4 into part of where the games room was and also extending the Alfresco area
• Raising the ceilings throughout the main living area and foyer to 31 courses to make it feel more airy
• Sunken the floor in the Home Theatre
• Double shower into the main bedroom En Suite
• Removing the Power Room and relocating the basin into the main bathroom, although that change isnt on this rough plan

If I get a second i'll scan the unchanged plan so you can see what we have changed better.

Have a few months now for the proper plans to be drawn up, to have site surveys and to choose finishings before things can start properly.

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Swan Valley calling

Have been up to Ellenbrook again this weekend to see more builders and have even more meetings, think we are almost there with the decision but just need a few more days to mull things over as we have two plans which we really like but we arent in any real rush not yet even having PR (grrrr).

We drove round the other way out of Ellenbrook tonight though and didnt even realise just how close we are to the Swan Valley wine loop until today!  The Vines resort is literally 2 minutes from our house and the wine loop is well within 5 minutes.

Family are going to hate it up here when they visit!

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