Homeowners - for the very first time

Home owners – for the very first time

Message from a reluctant first home-new build owner

Buying our first home hasn’t been as smooth sailing as we had imagined.

We set out on our mission to leave no property unturned on the major property portals, flicking through the weekly property guides and newspapers and putting some feelers out to a few we knew in the industry.

In our minds, we had two options to get into the area we were after.

Firstly, our most ideal option of buying an established older home that may have had a tidy up already (we were happy to do further down the track if needed) along with a decent backyard for entertaining and the future (kids that is).

The other option, which many people insisted was the best way to ‘get on the ladder’, was to purchase a new build in a subdivision that was looking more like Coronation Street on some roads (think… shared walls) than our previous ideal and the spacious option we had, for years, imagined.

These town house options may be in a great area… growing, developing and with a lot of our generation (Y) moving in; but you’re also able to watch them wash their dishes and themselves. Anything else you can imagine can be seen, and in some cases can’t be unseen. You could knock on your own internal wall and your neighbour would be able to respond on the other side, just like you were at school camp again.

Fast forward nine months… Four sale and purchase agreements where our offers were ‘not quite enough’, a serious amount of disappointment and deflation at the process not going as imagined, and we’ve now gone unconditional on a house and land package in a new subdivision. A different one to the previously mentioned ‘Coronation Street replica’, might I add.

We’ve gone for somewhere in between. We’re in a subdivision where our boundary is in the single metres off our neighbours, but we have a freestanding home, brand new; and don’t worry, we got the back yard in there. Smaller than first thought, but we’ve got it.

It’s funny what we think we need, when realistically it’s not actually necessary.

At some point during the frustration and deflation of our search for our first home, we realised that we didn’t actually have kids, we didn’t actually need that much space between the two of us, and were, in fact, looking for that forever home instead of what was actually right for where we are in life, now – just the two of us.

It has been such a drastic mind shift that I personally wasn’t prepared for. Mostly, because we didn’t think it was an option.

Never did we think, let alone imagine, we would be building our first home.

Financially, it wasn’t even a consideration.

We went from looking at 1950’s homes and wondering how many years the roof had left in it, to deciding where we would be positioning the door into a bathroom and gauging this by looking at a flat plan with lines on it representing walls.

Very quickly, we have had to change how we think. Instead of walking into a house and imagining how we would live in it, we are creating something to work around us.

Simple things like a roof – hips? Gables? The unfamiliar terminology that was asked of us in how we wanted our roof was met with our unhelpful response of ‘one that covers the house’.

We’ve now looked at several roofs, colour schemes of weatherboard and painted brick, and different sized eves. And that’s just the exterior.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Quite the privilege, really.

Don’t think I’m putting on a builder’s hat and purchasing my first pair of steel cap boots to traipse the site though. We are leaving it up to the professionals to manage it all.

UNDERSTAND