House design

And so the design began. We visited many display homes, focusing on narrow lot designs, and saw some that were quite good, although none met all our erquirements (namely bedroom not at the front of the home, and  back of the home for the living area). So we decided to design our own. We (I) spent a ton of time on the internet researching narrow lot designs and council requirements (garage can't dominate facade and boundary requirements) and ended up coming up with something that would work for us.  We took it to a few builders to gauge costs, both volume and boutique and also to a company that puts the plan out to tender.  During the process we refined the plan a bit and in the end we decided to go with Impresions. They had a seperate division which dealt wtih subdivisions and their sales rep seemed very experienced, knowledgale and didn't try and push us to upgrade anything.
Anyway, this is the final design we gave to them

There was a fair amount of to-ing and fro-ing involved with getting the plan as we wanted, and it was actually quite hard to get things included in the plan, the sales rep was always trying to talk us out of it. Things like higher ceilings, aircon, floor coverings etc we had to fight pretty hard and send several requests to get included. Most things he ended up saying that we should just deal with at the prestart stage, and we thought that this would be ok (a decision we would later come to regret). Anyway, the plan finally went to costing, and came back about what we were expecting, knowing that we were going to be including a fair amount of 'extras' at prestart. Anyway, this is what they ended up putting into costing after their designers had changed bits and pieces