Which Builder?

In the beginning we had planned to build with GJ Gardiner but we were making SO many alterations to the house plan to make it essentially look like a plan we loved with Plantation Homes. In the end we decided it was a better idea to stick with the plan we loved (and had for a year or two) and switch over to Plantation Homes. Plantation Homes really do have some great designs with nice open plan living and innovative spaces.  The Retreat Vogue Q1 is absolutely perfect for us and it has everything that we want in a home. I still have to pinch myself that we are actually building it as our first home!

Our land

You can see why we fell in love with the land - beautiful bushland (conservation park) across the road with a kids playground and no adjoining neighbour to the righthandside. We have a footpath to the righthandside of the house so the neighbour will be 12 meters or more away. That, along with no neighbour to the front giving us even more privacy was a high selling point for us. We are only 3km from the beach so it's walkable and only a minutes drive - winning!

 

Dreamin & Schemin

Deciding where to live definitely took us a long time to figure out. We had first made the decision to buy and renovate an old Queenslander home or unit within a 5-6km radius of the CBD. After moving up from Gold Coast and living close to the City with City views we decided that we wanted a similar location and setting for ourselves and starting searching for properties with these qualities. We thought we could use the Brisbane

property as a stepping stone to get us on our way to the Sunshine Coast – which was always the end goal. Well, as the year went by (and many realestate.com searching expeditions later) property prices started to go down the plug hole, as a result we decided that this plan may not work after all so we skipped a few steps and decided to start searching for properties on the Sunshine Coast.
A few factors that we were looking for:

§   Proximity to the beach

§   Proximity to the highway to get to the airport

§   Proximity to shops and cafés

§   As much privacy as we could get in a residential setting

Alex and I jumped in the car and drove to the Sunshine Coast and started to check out areas that we liked around Mooloolaba and Alexandra Headland – I’m not sure how we ended up north of the Maroochy River but as soon as we drove into the Estate we instantly liked what we saw and proceeded to drive around and check it out. Next thing you know we were talking to the Sales rep and he was chauffeuring us around to all of the vacant blocks. It was almost dusk at the time; we used the rep’s iPhone to light up the paper work with the vacant land details on it! 

We were dreamin and schemin about the block the whole way home and decided that we didn’t want to pay more than a particular amount for the block (which was a lot less than its advertised price) so we’d make a cheeky offer and if they accepted it, we’d go for it but if not than we would keep dreamin and search for something else!

To say the least we were blown away when they accepted our offer, and now we are building our first home. We couldn’t be more excited!