As custom builders, we often come across clients that purchase difficult sloping sites to build their dream homes. These sites often provide amazing vistas; however, they can be fraught with challenges. Slope direction (sloping away from the road or up from the road), gradient, retaining walls requirements, soil condition, bulk excavations and removal and importing of fill are all hurdles that need to be overcome. The type of construction methodology to suit the particular site, the understanding that there is additional time required to pull the project out of the ground, and the knowledge of the additional costs that come with this is something that can only be developed with experience.
Over the years we have the applied many recommended concepts and have discovered that the most important factor is thorough planning. There are several ways to approach building on sloping sites. First and foremost is understanding the clients brief and their overall budget. Once this has been established, we can start looking at the best site-specific options in order to overcome the challenges that lay ahead.
At Seabreeze Homes, we are a professional team that work collaboratively with the Architect and Engineer to ensure the design will come in on budget. We then discuss elements and challenges with the specialised tradespeople and suppliers seeking their feed-back. This helps ensure that that end result is keeping the client’s budget in check and any required modifications are thoroughly discussed with clients so the project doesn’t run off course. We also use a revolutionary pier system that, although it has been around for some time, it is underutilised, as it needs to be implemented into the design from the initial sketches.
Below is a testimony from a client whose ground works and framing have been completed, when they approached other builders, they couldn’t work with the client’s budget of $430k. However, with the experience and knowledge that we have in building on sloping sites at Seabreeze Homes, this has not been an issue for us.
“Happy Wednesday Michael,
It has been our pleasure from meeting with Greg the first time we walked into your awesome display home at Altitude Aspire. Greg was attentive and picked up on our questions that he knew could be answered better. He made sure we would be followed up and invited back to meet with yourself. Again, you were great in listening to our vision and ideas for our steep sloping block, and thought of an architect that actually lives on a steep sloping block himself could best with understand our own ideas and plans. Organising a meeting with David Gallez was another step closer to our goals and dream house. Greg’s, yours and David’s ideas to have our design turn into reality as close to our budget as possible was comforting.
Seabreeze Homes communication about what we can achieve and how to achieve it has been nothing short of outstanding, as several other builders we had engaged with virtually said it was impossible to build a pole house with our design close to our budget. Since signing the contract, Seabreeze Homes have kept up the quality of communication and commitment they gave us since our first meeting.
We have shown friends and family your Co-Construct app which has literally blown them away. Even our mortgage broker is looking at finding a similar app for there communications with clients on how their applications are progressing. In short, we had bought a steep sloping block with amazing north west views. Your ability to problem solve and drawn on experience to ensure our design would work and add further ideas to make it better is worth making some changes recommended by the team at Seabreeze Homes.
We are extremely happy so far and both Lexi and I are more than happy to endorse Seabreeze Homes to anyone wanting their dream house built by professionals with as much pride in their work as if it were their own display house.
Warm regards,
Crispin & Lexi“
