We live in a small 3 bedroom house. Not only is it small but it has a strange layout and because it was originally only a 2 bedroom home it means my daughter has to walk through her brothers' bedroom to get to her own. It felt a lot bigger when we had one child but with three children now all getting older it is starting to feel cramped and we are forever tripping over ourselves. Plus no one has any privacy at all. This doesn't worry us too much now but with kids fast approaching their tween/teenage years it will need to be rectified fairly soon. I'm sure my daughter won't be wanting to walk through her brothers' room when they hit puberty!!
Anyway, we tossed up many ideas on how to achieve our goal of getting a bigger house. We don't have a huge budget as I only work casually so we needed to consider our options. We weighed up moving but for a nice 4+ bedroom home in our area (and we really wanted to stay here) it was nearly 3 times as much as we owe on our current mortgage. We looked at extending our house but it was going to cost at least $100,000 due to repair work that would need to be done and engineering the ground floor to take extra load etc etc. Finally we thought we'd buy a block of land on our equity, do up our house as best we could and then sell it and build.
We very almost did this! We discovered a cheap block in our area which was small and had a sewerage easement on two sides and started to sign the papers to make an offer because there was no way we'd get a block cheaper in our area. Blocks here go for at least $135,000 and that's more than we owe on our mortgage. Then just as we were going to sign the papers we changed our mind. Why not just knockdown and rebuild on our own land? We had already established that we owed less on our home than our land was worth (thanks to following the rule of buying worst house in best suburb if you don't have much money). We had no major sewerage easements that couldn't be built on like the block we almost bought did and our block is also a lot flatter than the one we almost bought. Plus we have a large colourbond shed already existing on our block that we could use as storage whilst the house was knocked down and rebuilt. I'm not sure why it had never occurred to us before but I am glad it did before we signed anything. What's more is that knocking down our house and building a 4+ bedroom kithome on the block will work out cheaper than renovating and extending. Plus it has the benefit that everything will be brand new and we no longer have to worry about the dodgy DIY work the previous owners have done (I swear our house is a death trap due to some of their DIY electrical work) щ (*ㅇ△ Φ☆)ノ.
This final plan felt so right. It meant we'd get our nice big, new house and we wouldn't need to leave our neighbourhood or take a risk with new neighbours. I researched kithomes from all around Australia (and even some in the UK and America) but we finally settled on a design by a local kithome company- Kitome. It was one of the cheapest we found that actually looked like a nice home instead of a rectangle log cabin:
If you would like to see the floor plan click on this link and go to Chalet.
We are going with the smaller (read:cheaper) version which is called Chalet 19. It still has 4 bedrooms and a study which is more than enough room for us and because we have our laundry in our shed we can also convert the laundry in the plan to be another room instead. This gives us 6 bedrooms. Obviously more than we need but as my husband and I wish to become long-term foster carers - it's perfect!
Until such time as we actually get around to the knocking down and rebuilding in a years time, I'll be using this blog to detail my ideas for the interior and landscaping designs. It'll be a long hard wait as I am totally impatient but I am enjoying coming up with decorating plans in the mean time. I adore interior decorating and have plans for a Victorian/French Provincial inspired interior. Fingers crossed I can achieve my champagne tastes on a beer budget
＼(*T▽T*)／
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