The Santorini Mk2 House Plans

Here is the Santorini MK2 standard plan by Masterton Homes.

We have not made any structural changes to the plan at all.

The double story house plan suits us well, having double garage, formal lounge & dining, study (for me), powder room/toilet, open plan kitchen and family room plus rumpus and laundry. From the rumpus room, we will later on add an alfresco decking.

An elegant stairway leads to upstairs.

Upstairs includes family lounge/kids TV and play room, master bedroom with walk-in-wardrobe and en-suite, 3 good size bedrooms, bathroom and separate toilet to service the bedrooms.

With our inclusion of Contemporary Façade selection, a balcony will be added from the main bedroom.

Final plan ready in 3 weeks

We have now finalised all of the changes and hope no other changes are now required.

We now have to wait for Masterton to take 2 weeks to provide us final tender and 3 weeks for the final plan.

I mean, why does it take 2 weeks to amend 2 or 3 lines of the current tender, and the design as per plan, nothing changed, so why take 3 weeks? Unnecessary and annoying wait.

Another annoying catch 22 is that, the bank will not release any funds until the DA is approved and Masterton wants 5% to submit all the plans for DA approval. This means we need to come up with some cash.

We are opting to go with CDC rather than blood-boiling, time wasting and ignorant Warringah Council. Hope this will give us a turn around of 10-12 working days for the plans to get approved.

Wish us luck! LOL

Banks and budgets!

Well, our lovely bank home loan manager kindly informed us of how little we can borrow. very nice of him.
So we have to now give up some of the options we had opted to include. This includes the alfresco outdoor area. Gone.

Also gone the option to chose from upgraded range of bricks and roof tiles, so we are stuck with limited range of bricks and roof tiles. Just great!

But we are definitely having ducted rangehood to outside and cold water outlet behind the fridge (future proofing) for cold water and ice dispenser fridge.

After having visited the display centre yesterday, we have chosen for all walls to be off white paint. White marble benchtops with ultra-glazed pearl-white cabinets and very light wood-grain design for the kitchen bencktop (see photo below).

I asked the sales ref to include same brand microwave (Smeg) for free, so all appliances in the kitchen match. I hope/sure he will :-)

4/6/2012 Update: Looks like we will end up purchasing the matching microwave. Oh well, I tried :-)

Things looking up, so far..

Saturday and I get a call from the Masterton sales rep with answers to my questions and our final decision for the alfresco/pantry addition and new steps from the alfresco to the backyard. I was impressed.

Today we drove to Masterton Display Village to have another look of the house, take some photos and get better idea of what we are getting for our hard earned money. It was well worth the travel.

Cheers

The Santorini Mk2

The Santorini Mk2 with Contemporary Facade

Formal Lounge

Formal Dining

Kitchen

Family Room

Upstairs Lounge

Master Bedroom

Our current house

Our current house

 Front

Backyard

So the journey begins...

Welcome to our blog of building our new house.

We have chosen Masterton Homes as our builder with Santorini Mk2 Option 2 design, having the Contemporary façade.

We had looked around for home designs, including Clarendon Homes and Metricon etc, but Masterton designs had the most practical and logical layouts, with minimal changes to the design. Santorini was a good choice.

We visited Masterton Homes at Warrick Farm and physically looked the homes in real life to see how it feels standing and sitting in one. We probably will be revisiting the home several more times in the next few weeks to get better feel and decide on changes to the standard options.

Ground floor having tiles I think is the best choice for us to minimise any dust/allergy issues with having carpets. Upstairs, laminated timber floors (except wet areas). The only carpet is the stairs.
We have had our first meeting with the sales rep few weeks back to help us decide and come back with a quote.

Our second meeting was few days ago, going over the first quote and changing, adding or removing options.

We have now paid our $3500 deposit (non-refundable) to get the initial plan drawn.
While waiting for the plans, we now have to meet with our colour co-ordinator to help us choose the exterior and interior colour scheme, possibly our ground floor tiles, kitchen, bathroom and toilets etc.

Our plan is to start the ball rolling by end of next week (end of March 2012).

Cheers!