Begin at the beginning...

We currently have an old fibro house, built in the 1960s in a suburb of Bankstown Council. It's on around 670sqm of land (standard 15.24m width).

It's a two bedroom home which was fine while it was just the two of us, but now with two young boys, we're running out of space. The boys share a bedroom but they won't always want to and we'd love to give them the option of their own rooms.

So we spent the last few years (yes years!) househunting. While there are some lovely houses around in this area, all the newer ones seem to sacrifice a significant amount of yard space, and one thing we're adamant about is having a reasonable sized backyard for the boys to run around. So we've decided that the way we're going to get what we want in terms of house and yard space, is to build.

There's not much in the way of new land being made available in the local area, and we want to stay here... so the best option for us is to knock down and rebuild.

Even while we were househunting, we were keeping an eye out on building plans that we liked. we finally settled on a home by Masterton Homes. The design is called the Santorini. The things we love about it are a nice sized study, a large family meals room right off the kitchen, a rumpus room at the back of the house that we have earmarked for a TV/entertainment room which will keep noise away from the rest of the house, 4 bedrooms and a living area upstairs.

We spoke with Eileen at Masterton's Warwick Farm office and so far she has been fantastic. We expect this to be a long and stressful process but hopefully at the end of it we'll have the house that we plan to raise our family and grown old in.