Over the Christmas break, we had a chance to visit the Fortitude 32 display house in Cranbourne, Melbourne. Those regular readers would know we visited the Fortitude 37 in Shepparton some time ago, so why the need to visit this one?
Basically the 37 gave us a great idea of the layout of the house, to give us a sense of the floorplan in reality. The problem was this was 10-20mm here and there different to our plan.
This made us slightly worried that our (smaller, but still big) floorplan would feel somewhat constrained. While it may have been a 30-40minute drive, it was well worth it. We confirmed the 32sq Fortitude still feels spacious and if anything made us want the house even more now it feels like we've walked through it.
There are obvious differences between the display (some options we couldn't afford), other we chose differently, the biggest and most obvious being a different facade. This does change the sizes of the office and main bedroom. We also did an alfresco extension that wasn't done on the display. As with the Fortitude 37 in shep, this display also featured the living room, WIR, Ensuite and main bed extension that we didn't opt for.
The different facade, like the landscaping, but glad we opted up for the Vogue Facade.
We opted for a full wall between dining and rumpus and dining to hallway for noise reasons. We also have sliders to the hall and rumpus, again a noise isolation technique we hope will pay dividends in years to come with noisy parents and kids.
The office, looks smallish, but the built in cupboards and the different facade will make a big difference, as long as it fits my racing sim and my computer desk, we'll be fine.
The location of the towel rail has been a big point of contention for us. We were never sure where it was meant to go with this layout. After a lot of back and forward, we decided this section of wall is it, we may need a 600mm towel rail to fit, but is seriously the best place.
Congratulations on your new house! We too have just decided to undergo a rebuild and have chosen the Fortitude 32 as well. I look forward to reading your posts, giving us ideas for our new house. I have found it really hard to lock in a design though, I'm constantly looking at others and wondering…….One thing we have decided to do is install sliding doors on each end of the pantry, just to hide away all my pantry items. Good luck!
Thanks Kate, we decided to flip the butler's pantry, then run a glass splashback all the way from the back of the kitchen wall, to the butler's. This should achieve a pretty seemless effect, and allows us to hide our pantry mess (food etc) on the opposite side you can't see.