Building a new house

[~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

[somewoman]

have you looked at buying a really dodgey house as a knock-downer? You might have better luck getting a bigger block at a cheaper price. Factor in about 10-15k for demolition

[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!

[somewoman]

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!

We're in Hectorville. I've read a few homeone forum entries on people building in freeling, seems you guys have very similar soil... Who are you building with?

[Jaycee]

I'm building with Format Homes, 320m2 house, what about yourself?

[somewoman]

Longridge Homes - and approximately the same size house =)

We have a building blog up at house dot yeoh dot info if you're interested. Or anyone else on this thread who may be interested in checking out some of the stages that you go through when building a new home. We've gone the demolition and rebuild route.

[Jaycee]

Where is your house up to?
How long before you're finished?
We're still going through selection processes at the moment, site work should start in January.