Tender, Colour and Electrical

We have been super busy over the past 2 weeks.

We drove to Brisbane on Wednesday for our contract / tender appointment. Here we finally got to see our home on our site plan with our plans around the correct way. All the plans we have seen to date have been flipped the other way so it's nice to be able to see exactly what we are doing.
The appointment went for 2 hours, we were told to allow for 3 but given we didn't really have any changes, I guess there wasn't as much to do as first thought.

We changed a few things like closing in the study, adding a broom cupboard inside the laundry linen, changed to gas hot water, moved the garage door into the house from the hallway to the laundry and moved the outdoor tap location. All in all the only thing that cost extra was to close in the study.

We left that appointment very excited, we finally have plans!

Friday came and we drove back to Brisbane to Cosham studios for our colour selection. Again we were told to allow 3 hours but were in and out in 2 hours. I guess it helped that we went in there really knowing what our options were and what we wanted. We had a few little ad on's here but nothing too serious. We added a wood look garage door instead of the colourbond, we upgraded our wooden front door to verticle glass as we don't like the idea of people out on the street being able to see into our home. The verticle covers more space. We also upgraded our paint to a wear and tear paint. We added in a shelf in both showers, We added Jasper coloured Aluminium frames to the windows to match the colouring of the house. We did originally have in a Bin Drawer to the kitchen cupboard too, however this came back to us at a price of $500 so we decided to take that off and will do an Ikea job ourselves after handover.

The following week we had our electrical appointment, we did not have to travel to Brisbane for this as Your Home Electrical has an office at Moffat Beach...phew!
Once again we were told to allow 3 hours but we only took just over an hour. Again I think it helped that we had already been through our plans and really thought about where we wanted powerpoints and lights etc. Plantation already offers a very generous  amount of power points and light fittings. The only extras we put in were fan lights, downlights and an extra light out the front as a feature light. We had a 2k electrical allowance in our tender and we came in under that...until we added in the 7 fan lights. We could have had these done after hand over for much cheaper but we figured we will have so much to do after hand over this is one thing we didn't want to think about.

Kitchen Colours From top to bottom 
- Overhead cupboards
- Splashback
- Benchtops
- Cabinetry
- Flooring (Walnut Wide plank)

Outside Colours
- Colourbond Roof (Dune)
- Jasper Gutters and Facia
- PGH Frost Bricks
- Wood door and garage door
- Jasper aluminum window and door frames

Ensuite and Bathroom Colours 

Ensuite Vanity 

Bathroom Vanity 

Plantations Information Session

Today we travelled to Cosham Studios, Plantations colour selection studio in Brisbane for our Information session.

We arrived at 10am and were pleased to learn that there were only another 2 couples that were booked in too, which meant there were fewer people than we had thought to look through all the selections in the studio.

We were given an info booklet and on one of the pages, it had a list of the selections we need to choose items for. We were walked around the studio and shown what are the standard options for selection and what are upgrade options. By the end of the tour we were told to go around and start thinking about what we want, make note of what colours and items we would like to include in our new home.

I did not realise at the time but as we were being shown around, Dan was already taking notes of what he liked and didn't. Straight up this made me nervous as I thought for sure we would have different ideas on what we liked and didn't.

As we started to walk around I would ask what he had written down for a specific item and to my surprise its exactly what I wanted too. There were only a few minor things that we wanted something different to each other and in these cases we either found something else that we both thought was okay or we were able to come to an agreement that we were both happy with. Overall we left that session feeling very well prepared for our upcoming contract and colour selection appointments.