Demo & Rebuild - Introduction

Covid has proved expensive!! With no where to go and spending larger amounts of time at home, Amanda and I have decided that our home in Booragoon is no longer fit for purpose and have decided to do a knock down rebuild. 

Around July 2021, after deferring our trip to QLD due to Covid restrictions, Amanda and I managed to get away for a lunch without the children and had a good talk about our family home. Our home was built in 1971 by a reputable local builder, Les Friday, and while it's still a lovely home, it's reaching a point in its life where many parts of it could do with a substantial refresh and repair. However, performing a refresh and repair can't necessarily resovle some fundamental issues like room sizes and placement, without more substantial renovation. The more we discussed and looked into it, the more we found ourselves leaning toward a rebuild.

So at lunch, we made the decision to have a good look into the rebuild process and spent the next three months going in and out of display homes, developing budgets (and then increasing them, and increasing them again), talking with builders and conducting extensive internet research. We want to retain our in-ground concrete swimming pool and after visiting many displays and talking with many sales reps, we developed a bit of an understanding about what we thought we wanted out of our new home. Trying to compare builders though is like comparing a horse to a bowl of fruit - there is simply no direct comparison.

After narrowing down the seemingly hundreds of builders in Perth to a handful, we moved forward with getting some preliminary concept designs done up by a few. Each builder took a difference approach to the design process and our design remit and we had a lot of fun taking their intepretations and tweaking them up to better suit us - moving walls, swapping rooms, a nip here, a tuck there. After getting some costings down, more discussions and looking at the proposed designs of each builder, we eventually narrowed down our preferred builder. We have chosen to build with Stannard Homes, which is a second generation family owned and run custom home builder. We signed a preparation of plans agreement today, October 5th and are currently awaiting formal plans to be drawn up ready for submission to council.