House design

With our block purchased it was time to decide on the house plans, being that this house is to be our long term home we wanted to do it right the first time, and that included the build being as sustainable as possible within our budget.

I had been studying up on sustainable design principles with resources such as the "your home technical manual" and the ATA website(links below), we even attended a "speed date a sustainable designer" event and found that the beechwood design we had in mind just wasn't going to achieve what we wanted.

Basically our aim is to build a home that does not need air conditioning. A big feat but something we think is certainly worth a try. If nothing else the design we want to end up with will mean that if we do find we need aircon it will only be needed on the hottest of summer days which should drastically reduce our electricity bills.

Being that our corner block has a 22m frontage and the Oran Park landscape design rules have some pretty stringent rules on secondary boundary fencing we needed a design that was as wide as possible to enable us to have as much of our land in the back yard as we could, as opposed to it being in the front yard. This meant a design of approx 17m wide which would still allow for side access.

So after many more weeks of visiting display villages and looking through hundreds of designs we found that there was nothing "just right" for our block as most designs were up to 15m wide or the acreage designs which started at about 22m wide.

Feeling a little deflated from all the searching I decided to have a go at drawing up my own design. I began cutting up house floor plan brochures and sticking all of the rooms on a piece of paper and shuffling them around. This was quite a long process, I spent a few weeks adjusting it while getting inspiration from the huge stack of house design brochures we had accumulated. With a tape measure in hand I revisited some display homes just to make sure all of the dimensions I had used were actually going to be functional. 

Armed with my "collage" of a house floor plan we visited some builders to see if they could build our design. Most of the custom home builders we spoke to were VERY expensive, so for this to work we would need to use a project home builder. A lot would only build their own designs but there were plenty that were willing. 

After speaking to many salesman/women we came accross Adenbrook Homes, there was no pushy sales pitch from their staff and after speaking to the owner we felt we were onto a winner. For a small fee they got a draftsman to draw up our plans and after many nights going through the Your Home Technical Manual and a few rounds of changes we were finally happy with the design.

A few of the areas we focused on were insulation, light colours to bricks and roofing, double glazing(think argon gas filled, tinted, low e coatings etc), ventillation, thermal mass, orientation, shading, and passive heating/cooling.

For more info check out

http://www.yourhome.gov.au/technical/index.html

http://www.ata.org.au

We put just about everything we could have possibly wanted into the tender and no surprises when the tender came back it was over budget.

After a small reality check we cut back on some of the more extravagant inclusions (like a 20,000L in slab water tank) and signed the tender.

Here is a draft of the plans.

 

And a rough representation of our facade.

Choosing a block

After a few visits to some display homes in Oran Park my wife and I had fallen in love with the idea of building a brand new home, we really liked a Beechwood homes design so we set about looking for a block.

We had narrowed our search area to either Caddens, Mulgoa Rise or Oran Park, however after seeing the prices of the different estates we felt that Oran Park was much better value.

At the time the only blocks available at Oran Park were those that were being sold privately on realestate.com.au and were not really what we were after as based on the house design we liked we needed a minimum 540m2 block.

We had not registered for the land release emails from Oran Park but by chance I looked online and saw that stage 5B had just been released and there was one block in particular that we were interested in.

It was block 5209, a bit of a compromise and not what we were initially after being a corner block but being both bigger than what we needed at 660m2 and cheaper to boot we decided to go and have a look at it. With the block being surrounded on three sides by retaining walls and being up against a main road we were expecting it to be overlooked, have drainage issues or have a large slope but to our surprise on inspection it was none of those, it was flat as a tack, had a great outlook, was higher than both the main road and the block behind,  as well as having uninterrupted solar access from the north which would be in the back corner of the block which was probably the most important thing to me being as I wanted to build this house to be as energy efficient as possible.

The only problem was that the block was not going to suit the house design we liked, so we went back to Beechwood and they showed us another slightly larger design that would suit the mandatory garage position and solar access for the living areas.

With that sorted we put our deposit down and the block was ours :)