Building the Havana with Plantation

After choosing our block we had the task of choosing our builder. There are some really awesome Builder Display Villages around Brisbane and the Gold Coast but honestly in terms of base price and getting what we wanted the only builder we found was Plantation Homes (aka Henley).

Especially with their Summer Sale - we just couldn't better their price with any other builder. Just be warned, don't make too many changes from base price and try and do as much as you can afterwards as some of their options are ridiculously expensive!!

For example $37k to render the place when we have gotten a quote seperately for under $12k including painting! Thats a 3x markup. Bast4rds!!

So far they have been exceptional though. They call once a week to let us know the progress and so far we are just waiting for contracts. Their display centre where you can choose the finishings, colours and interior options is fantastic and visiting it early really has given us a chance to choose our colours and styles well in advance.

Here's the house and plans - with the exception of the WIR which we have upgrade to be 2.5x bigger to make a proper dressing room! The Living Room will become the Theatre Room and the Theatre Room will be the Rumpus Room.

New Land in the City?

Well, this is it - our Blog! My name is Peter and my partner in crime - her name is Kassandra. I work as an IT Contractor in Brisbane and thought that despite all the doom and gloom of the evil recession monster, we should look for our own place to live in and give a shot at suburbian life!

We currently live in the city, and where I live it is a 200m walk to work and Kassandra works about a 10 minute walk away. Yes, VERY VERY convienient and frankly it's been an absolute blast living here!

Still... it is time to grow up (We are both 24) so we've decided to build in what we have classified "the sticks", because really anything more then 2km from the CBD is considered far from us and means we have to use good ol public transport or the car. Yes, we're soft but we thought we'd toughen up and venture out a bit :)

Even though it is a big change in lifestyle for us we weren't prepared to live further then approx 10km from the CBD. We know this kind of limited our choice of land/demolished blocks to prebuilt areas and didn't really think there could be new developments or estates.

To our surprise there wasn't just one new estate but two! They were situated right next to each other in a suburb called Mitchelton. I've never heard of this suburb "Mitchelton" before and had kind of ruled it off as being way to far out, but on further investigation we realised how unique this development was. It was surrounded by protected bushland and best of all it was only 8km to the CBD! We couldn't believe it! Within 1 week of seeing it we had a contract signed and picked the Lot we wanted. All of this happened in the first week of December 08.

Now the special part of this estate is there is a farm, yes a real farm with animals about 50m down the road from our block. There are a few horses and other animals there so it really does give the feel that you could be 100km from the CBD and not just 8km! Apparently if we ever decide or want to get a horse we can keep it at the farm. No we aren't planning too - just in case hehe ;)

Thankfully the block has already been titled and construction of the estate is meant to finish by the start of Feb 09!















Our Block! Yay!
















Facing the street and to the trees
















Facing the Farm with the Horsies! (Yes we really are only 8km to the CBD!)