Wow, I think my head is about to explode with information overload!!

We just got back home from our appointment with the Plantation sales consultant at Rochedale display village.  He was fantastic, very easy to talk to and to the point without any fluffing around.  One thing we both found to be very informative was that he took us both for a walk through one of the display homes and pointed out all the differences in inclusions between Plantation's standard "luxury" inclusions and the Breakthrough series inclusions.  Gotta say, not much difference at all, which is a huge weight off our minds.

There were a couple of things that we wanted included that simply could not be accommodated in the budget as they were a lot more expensive than we expected.  Extending the garage by 1m and fitting shelving was going to be close to 8k additional!! Changing to stained timber stairs instead of mdf painted/carpeted was another 3.5k and adding feature walls was another decent cost at around $250 per wall.  All those got axed off the list pretty much straight away, we didn't mind sticking with the alternatives and still like the look of the painted/carpeted staircase anyway (he had a pic to show us of one that had just been completed), and will get the feature walls painted after the handover to save cash instead.

We still managed to get a lot of the extras such as ducted air con added to our quote and still came in $25k under budget which was fantastic news.  Next up will be our first meeting with a finance broker early in the week to see where we sit financially.  Scary times are afoot!!

John & Kimmie