NZ Home Loan Blog

Build Update: Site Visit

Written by NZHL | Tuesday, 15 December 2015

We had our first site visit with the new design team, and understandably quite a lot of time was talking about placement of the house. The house is unlikely to be larger than 150 sqm meters and it’s a 3000sqm section so there are a few options.  Being a hill site we are leaning towards maximising the view and minimizing the encroachment of the neighbors’ houses.  A side effect of this is increasing the wind exposure and it is a pretty exposed site. The design team is working on at least providing some shelter spaces from the Easterly.

This being the 3rd design we have worked on it is interesting noticing some of the discrepancies. For example our previous design did not have a laundry in the first sketch up, whereas the current team were asking how much wardrobe space we needed.  It certainly feels like we are dealing with a bigger organisation with a pretty refined system, I hoping we don’t sacrifice the individuality we have got from our previous designers.

We have been told that they will have the initial design to us in the next couple of weeks and this will include the costing. This is a major difference as previously we were presented a design, refined that, then got it priced. That would take a few months and obviously if the price is too high then you have to start cutting back a design you like and have attachment to. This time having both at the onset will hopefully avoid a lot of stress around the price. Too high a price to start with we can send it back while if the price works then we can move forward with the design without stressing about the money.