building our first ever home: Upgrades and Selections

So , with a slight stretch of our initial budget (say about 6%) we could get most of what we wish to have in our new home. Lucky that we signed the contract when Carlisle Homes were running a promotion which partially offset some of the upgrades we were considering already.But still we had to spend about 20K purely in our selections.

Our list of upgrades -

Adding flooring , not included - 16 K
Shower to powder room downstairs when we have guests or elderly parents with us. - 3K
Stair case upgrade - not a very fancy/modern one , but a very classic looking timber stair case. This was a must for us, as we hate having carpet on our staircase, but that's what all builders include. - 5K
better quality security alarm - 2K
ducted vaccum - 2K
Nicer looking entry door and handle - 1K
An extra kitchen tower next to fridge space which includes built in microwave
feature tiles in bathrooms
Extra LED downlights all over ground floor, and extra batten points upstairs to replace to LEDs later.
Sound proofing and pre wiring home theater room for projector and in built speakers in roof - This will be very difficult to do after built so we had to do it now - 1K

And there is one more thing, since our block was wide and didn't meet our developer guidelines , we had to extend the garage door by 1.5 m , that means we have about 7.4 metres wide and 6m deep garage with a rear roller door, so we can drive thorough, and park in the side garden securely if we ever had friends over night. But wait ... did I mention that its free for us , because of a mistake Carlisle homes made while drafting our plans? that's cool :) I like almost anything that is free or comes with that 50% discount offer.

that's most of them.

Now selections. See that blog picture? that's how our facade going to look with the same colours. Husband did a small photoshop job, once we came back from selections, to make sure we didn't pick up something that's going to look too odd.

External selections:

Bricks - Austral truffle (almost dark chocolate coloured bricks) with offwhite color mortar

garage door - wooden look garage door

roof - dark charcoal colored roof tiles

and the picture exactly shows our render color choices

Entrance door - pslm 208 double doors

here is the picture of door and handles. We will have 2 such handles on each of the double doors.

Internal selections:

Kitchen selections:

See this picture from display? No ours is not like this. The only things that are similar to this are

1. The fridge space and the tower thats next to fridge. Exactly same like that.

2. That big long window, which we LOVE

So whats different from that picture?

1. Directly above that window we are going to have over head cupboards like this.

So this is the sandy grey colour door shown in the above picture and the other kitchen picture shows the black colour high gloss upward opening door already. (See directly above that window and next to fridge space the top shelf has the same)

And the other thing that's different is , we are going to have the center island bench like this.

All the wood work (laminate work) in kitchen and bathrooms is charcoal color. Here is the sample.

Now onto bathroom selections:

Almost similar looking cabinets in the bath room. With charcoal color wall tiles and these feature tiles.

bath room

This goes in to pink colour of the above bathroom sketch and the below tile goes in the green color like a border to the above tile all around the bathroom.

This tile goes below the powder room morror, the blue portion will have this colour and pink portion aboe the morror will have the charcoal color plain tile above.