Building a new house

[~ Zarava Flutterby ~]

We are in the process of building at the moment, well the contracts are signed but still sorting a few things out.
We ended up needing a stronger slab than usual, also a tree root barrier ($11,000).. our price ended up being something like $18,000 over what we had originally estimated and thats not including air con, curtains etc.

It's very scary but i can't wait.. so what if i have to live with sheets on my windows for a while and a portable aircon in the lounge? lol
The girls will have curtains as they are at the front of the house and we have some nice ones for their rooms now anyway, DP is going to do the driveway himself and 2 sides of our block already have fences so am hoping we can get away with minimal costs there!

GL with it all, i would suggest either way you go have a look at display homes, ask whats included and go from there!

[LimeSlice]

yes - beware of Site works!
Generally they will allow $5k - however, tehy will never know what the ground is like until they begin - flat or not.

Ours unexpectedly got up to $17k for the site works alone! So bear in mind that this needs to be covered.

Shop around and take your time

GL!

[Cupcake]

Generally they will allow $5k - however, tehy will never know what the ground is like until they begin - flat or not.

You will need a soil test to go to contract, (atleast in QLD we do?) and the Soil Test will let you know what you are in for site works wise. Its part of our Preliminary Agreement to provide a Soil Test, not sure about other builders?

[LimeSlice]

Yep but unfortuntely the soil test wont always show things under the ground. Turned out we had a big hunk of sandstone in the middle of our block about 2 meters down or something. Everything was fine until they actually began site works

[Cupcake]

Our tests consist of 3 bore hole digs, 2 under the house and one under the pool going down 3m.

But i understand what you mean about finding nasty suprises! Always good to be prepared!

[Diamond Girl]

Hi we are building at the moment, so I can give you some advice.

First, forget the base price. There are so many extras you need unless you are purchasing a turn-key home package (even then there may be extras) that you probably dont even know you need yet. For example, the base price only includes the basic (plain) facade, but if you want a better one with a nicer brick or some render then you could be looking at an extra $30k. Also most builders dont provide overhead kitchen cupboards, so theres another $3k, and so on and so on.

Our $200k base price home is now well over $320k after including carpet, tiles, fencing, turf, etc. And our land is almost perfectly flat. If you have a slope at all I would add $10-30k to the price. Our home is double storey and 34 squares so if you were building a single storey it should be much cheaper than mine.

Good luck with your decision, Id speak to a builder and get them to give you an estimation, but just so your aware they never tell you about many of the extras you'll need.

[~Kim~]

First advice would be to check out what your local builders offer. Ours covered site costs up to $25K, all our floorings, tiles, aircon overhead cupboards, screens etc were covered. Ours wasn't a cent over the advertised price of the house.

[somewoman]

I wouldn't let other people's stories put you off... You really don't know what costs you're in for until you find out more about the block of land that you're building on...

For every horror story, there's probably someone equally happy with their deal.

Personally, we're building on highly reactive clay soil. Our site costs were huge. I've also built houses in Melbourne and Canberra where there were no nasty surprises.

TBH - you can easily spend a whole lot more than that on upgrading your finishes...

If you're happy with the base house, then the extras such as driveways, gardens, flooring and the likes depends on the quality of finishes that you're going for, and also how much you would be willing to do yourself. If you like the look of wooden floors there are some really nice quality, realistic looking vinyls around at a much cheaper price. You can buy a cheaper acrylic carpet that looks as good as a beautiful woolen plush pile - you just might have to replace it in ten years instead of twenty or thirty.

One thing I would definitely recommend, though, is upgrading the insulation as much as you possibly can. This cost would be a matter of hundreds rather than thousands, and will save you thousands in heating and cooling over the years!

And I'd have to recommend taking a look at the homeone website... There are forums on there for each state, and you can read up on people's experience with many builders - both happy and sad, cost and quality.

Don't give up yet - it could be worthwhile! =)

[Mum2SweetCs]

Thank you all for your replies. I have read through them and yes there are hidden costs and there are definitely some great excitement from building but I guess for us we need to look at the worse case scenario. We factored in an extra $100k for the house on top of the base price but once we worked out our budget, it is likely to go over that which we didnt really want to.

The problem here is not the house but finding good land. Land around our area costs from 300k upwards for a 500sqm block!!!

We really want a bigger block of land and if we could have found a block for $250k it would have worked great (since we will have that 50k extra for the just in cases).

Once again thank you all. I will keep to updated if we are going to move towards building a house but everytime i look at the new houses i fall in lvoe! LOL

[Jaycee]

Personally, we're building on highly reactive clay soil. Our site costs were huge. I've also built houses in Melbourne and Canberra where there were no nasty surprises. =)

Somewoman, I see you're from Adelaide, do you happen to be building in Freeling? We're building there too on highly reactive clay soils, our site costs are around $50k!