Queenstown Re-Visited

We had a very full on day looking at display homes with my parents today.

When we woke up Ash and I had decided that we'd go for another drive up to the displays at Mernda and see if we did actually like the place and basically decide if we actually wanted to build or we were just getting super excited for no real good reason.

When we got out of bed my parents were pottering about and they mentioned that they were going down to Mernda so that they could take some photos of the front of the ex-display house that is the model they're getting. Ash and I decided we might as well just go over with them as it'd be silly for us to drive seperately. We hadn't told them our plans or thoughts on building yet though so we were still a little hush-hush on that aspect incase we weren't actually going to go through with this.

We went back through all the displays and wised dad up on the situation. We took them to the Queenstown display and told them that this is the house we think we want to build...only to find out that it's almost exactly the same as the Hayman house they're building (Which is no longer built). It was very weird to find we have such similar tastes in what we wanted in a house.

We all went through it pretty thoroughly and got a good idea on what we'd want to change in the place and so on. Dad and I also went to the land sales office to get an idea on the size of the blocks and how much they were going for. They had a release of land that was titling in April of next year and we'd most likely be looking at a block of land 16w x 32 deep and it was going to cost us around $188,000 for the land.

After we'd finished up there we went for a drive to the Craigieburn estate and had a look at the Lifestyle and Access houses they had on display there, but none of them appealed to us as much as the Queenstown did.

We got home around 530 after a long day of walking and looking at houses, but with the knowing this is definately what we wanted to do.

In The Begining...

Ash and I went down to Hawkstowe to look at the area after reading about it in the Sun, more as a curiosity than anything else and to see how much a house and some land would cost us roughly. We had a bit of a drive around the estate and the area seemed appealing enough so we went and looked at some of the packages they were offering over at the sales office.

The options seemed like they were within our price range, but we liked the look of some of the options they had over at Mernda a little better, so we went for a drive up the road to the Mernda Villages estate to see what was what over there.

We arrived at the Display Village and opted to go for a walk through the Porter Davis displays, as they're the builder my parents are going through so we're already somewhat familiar with them. They had 3 Lifestyle and 3 Prestige houses on display so we did a walkthrough of them and of course we really liked the Prestige houses the best. We liked the Churchill, although we think it may of been the lovely lap pool that was selling that house to us, but we loved the Queenstown 33 they had on display there. It was a house that we could very easily see ourselves living in and raising a family in. We grabbed some pamphlets for the place and headed home from there, pretty excited about the place.

There Can Be Only One...

The following is a journal depecting the journey that my partner (Ash) and I go through in the process of building our own home, in the new Mandalay estate in Beveridge.

Ash and I have been living in our current house in Roxburgh Park for almost 2 years now, with our 3 dogs - Sorcha, Bailey and Lulu. We also live with my best friend Steve and my parents, who are staying with us while their house in Wallara Waters (Wallan) is being built.

The decision to build was a rather quick and unexpected decision for us, as it wasn't on our radar at all a few months ago. We'd only just bought our current and 1st home in 2008 so we were pretty set where we are for the long haul. We knew that the next house we'd buy would be one that we built, as we were finding there were a lot of things we wanted to change about our current home, so we'd just skipi that problem by putting in things we want everywhere, hopefully eliminating that problem. But that wasn't going to happen for several years.

We came about the decision from a random newspaper article I read about the estate of Hawkstowe, between Epping and Mernda. I commented to Ash that it'd be a really nice place to live (Visually) and we decided to go for a drive to go and check it out.

The rest as they say, is history