11th April - Deposit on Allworth House

Receiving the quote from the builder is exciting, but also daunting as costs can blow out if your not carefull.. We made a few variations and then took some off and added more over the last week. Our final variation came through today and we're happy with it so we paid our deposit with Allworth and we're building the Concerto.

Some of the main variations that we're doing are raising the ceilings to 9ft, moving the entry door of garage out of the kitchen to the entry/foyer, converting the dining/lounge into the home theatre, the normal home theatre will become our lounge, making the kitchen larger, adding a bit of width to both bedrooms 2 & 3 and taking 1m in length out of the new home theatre, kicking out the BIR's for bedrooms 2 & 3...

Here is a pic of the standard floor plan, Allworth said it can be up to 6 weeks for the plans to get drawn up so I'll post a pic of those once we receive them.

5th April - Deposit for Land goes through

Today was a happy day as we are now officially land owners!!!! Its very exciting as we'll be first home owners and have lots to look forward too.

The weekend following we went down to the sales office and asked them for a SOLD sticker which we quickly went out to our land to stick it on our sign.

28th Feb - Deposit for House Quote

Well as we were very excited we rushed into Allworth homes to see how much a house was going to cost, because of the shape of our land there was really only 1 house design of theres that would fit well, The Concerto - which turns out to be quite a nice design.

We sat down with the sales guy who was really good, he's done alot of houses in The Ponds and knows all the little tricks and restrictions etc... So we paid our deposit and the waiting game started for us to receive that.

While waiting we decided to also get a quote from Beechwood (theres was free) just to compare site costs etc to make sure we were getting ripped off or anything..

27th Feb - Deposit On Land

Well our first post on our blog so let me introduce ourselfs, my name is Dave and my wife's name is Velona - we just got married in January and we're currently renting.

Our landlord asked us to move out as they were wanting to sell the townhouse, we were looking around the Quakers Hill area and near by and couldn't find anything that suited our needs and value for money. We'd previously seen a townhouse and land package over at the Kalina estate that we quite liked and it was always my dream to buy a home sooner rather than later.

About a week before we were meant to be moved out of our rental the realestate agent called and said the owner has had a change of mind and that they're looking at selling as an investment property with tennents...

Anyway moving on, so we started looking around at house and land packages for a little while around the Kellyville Ridge and The Ponds, we found out that we got alot better value for money in buying land and building a house rather than getting a house and land package. So we visited The Ponds and registered with Michelle for the land releases and the Alba 2 release came up. The email came out on the Tuesday arvo and we went down to the sales office on the Thursday night and there were about 5 people camping out, couldn't believe it... So Saturday morning we went down to the sale to see what it was all about, didn't have any intention in doing anything but we got there and were asked if we wanted to put our names down on the list. We did, we were 21st, so thought we'd see what happens.. we then got the price list and blocks available etc and sat and waited, by the time it was our turn there were about 13 properties gone and alot of people before us had left as their block was taken already so we went in and got 1 of the blocks we'd pre chosen so put the deposit down and we were proud land owners (well once our loan was approved we would be..)