Our House is now 5 Year old!
This picture is an artist impression of the Simonds Home Hillcrest 2600 [©Simonds Homes]. Our house has 1 metre of extra wall to the left of the garage door. The house was on display at Brookland Green's Simonds Homes display centre, [which has now closed].
This is how our house looks after 1 year [below]! We have a security mesh door fitted and garden bed planted. The photo below that is how the house looked after we had the basic landscaping done at the end of February 2008, but before they laid the grass.
Please click the above and below photos to see a larger photo
You can see the shape developing. Notice the additional height above the windows, due to increased ceiling height (2700 mm) and the additional 1 metre width of the garage to the left of the opening. Also the frame photo [1st above] was taken on the Saturday 17/3/07. By Thursday 22/3/07 they had bricked this much [2nd above]! Then it took until 18 April 2007 to complete the brickwork [3rd above]. The fourth photo above is how the house looked when we moved in July 2007.
Here are the latest photos!
July 5th 2012. We have now been in our place 5 years! Where has the time gone! Here is the latest!
Through the gate on the left side, we have built paths to walk and store the 6x4 trailer. These paths consists of (3") 75mm of crushed concrete base with (1") 25mm Dromana toppings. This is good to walk on wet or dry and creates good drainage away from the house. We also built a garden along the fence and planted Australian Natives that are currently mostly in flower (in July/August).
This is how the back yard is going. We built Bernie a raised veggie garden and have now doubled it size, in the north west corner of our block. We have lots of vegetables growing.
This is the east side. We have built a pergola with deck from the house. We have installed a second 2400L tank at the back of the garage and space for our other trailer. We built this little rockery in front of the tank. We recently finished (in May) the last project of paving in front of the deck.
Links:
We have bought land from Melington Estate. Oliver Hume does the marketing. Brown Property Group are the Developers. Unfortunately their information is lacking post signing and not very factual. I would NOT deal with them again. Most people we have met on the estate have experienced a 6 months wait over the original "stated" release date, so we are not alone.
- Melington Estate, Lyndhurst
- Beware of The Avenue, Cranbourne - Brown's new development!
We have bought a Hillcrest 2600 house with Heritage Facade from Simonds Homes. We have enlarged the garage by 1m x 1m (to the left of garage) and gone for 2.7m ceilings. Standard ceiling height is 2.4m, but ALL display houses have higher 2.55m to 2.7m ceilings to make them feel more spacious. We stayed with the standard windows and doors. We swapped the door from the family room with the window in the dining area (as most people do for this design).
Follow the link to Simonds Homes, then choose "Our Homes", "Single storey" then "Hillcrest". The floorplan is Hillcrest 2600 [which is now unavailable]. NOTE: Simmonds had released a revised Hillcrest 2700, [now unavailable]. Neither were available as part of the "Vision" do it yourself house designer program.
Here is the story of building your own home: