Clarendon Build - Boston 36

We now have our design plans with the changes we discussed at the tender appointment. We really stayed away from moving too many things around. After all, home design and build is their area of expertise. We removed a door, changed a couple of window sizes, and added an additional slider door to the alfresco area - we really wanted an open, airy, bright space. That was about it. We are now a couple of weeks away from the contract date. Nugget of wisdom: This might be an obvious one but ask a LOT of questions. The tender appointment is your opportunity to do the real big changes - if you do this at a later stage you will incur additional costs, and delays. Or may not be able to do them at all! Also consider the position of the home on your block of land - make sure you have thought about how you will use the home. Where will the water tank go, the air conditioning unit, the clothes line? Those 'ugly' things you may not want to have in the section that will become your mai...

Well that was something! What an odd, and emotionally draining meeting for me. The tender appointment. The good news is we came in under budget - our additional site costs were just under $5,000. The big surprise that we got was due to the slope on our block - which initially didn't seem that large. It seems there is just under a 2m slope running diagonally across the block. What does this mean in the long run? We need to think about the final appearance of our home once the build is complete - to fill or not to fill? The issue it seems is that we will either require some drop edge beams built with the slab which would then mean our alfresco would be about 1m off the ground, which means it'll need railings... eg a balcony. Which is not what i ever imagined so its been quite hard to shift my thoughts ... my imagination to visualise something else. The other option is to put in a ton of retaining walls - which we got a quote for $24k. The drop beams once everything is fin...

We are about to embark on our new home build and i will be posting all updates and notes here. I found information scarce when i was searching for details regarding your experiences with building with Clarendon; so i am hoping this helps some of you with your new build. In the meantime, live vicariously! We are looking at building the Boston 36 with a Gallery facade (image of facade above, taken from Clarendon website). We have a 600sqm block in the Penrith council area. Our initial goal was to build the Sheridan 39 but we were told due to council restrictions this home could not fit onto our block of land - something to do with the ratio of living space you are allowed to have . We have our tender appointment coming up next week so we will have more information then. The starting price for the Boston 36 with the sapphire specifications was $412,000 so it'll be interesting to see what price we will end up with. We have a lot of upgrades that we want to do, and we think need...