Which house?

The first step in finding the house we will build was to go through as many online plans as possible and decide which features we wanted.  Fortunately, we both ended up liking much the same thing.
House criteria:

• Open plan kitchen/living area looking onto the backyard
• Master bedroom NOT at the front of the house (preferably at the back)
• Internal entrance from garage to house
• Walk in pantry
• Kitchen with lots of storage and bench space
• Walk in robe in master bedroom (not really a requirement, but every plan seemed to have this anyway, and it would be nice)
• 3 bedroom plus study, with the study not too far away from the living areas
• A second separate lounge/living area, preferably at the front of the house, with potential for a good surround sound setup that is difficult in an open plan living areas
• Minimum house length to give us as big a backyard as possible.

We have a preference to build with Simonds, as we have a friend who works for them, and having that extra point of contact would give me a great deal of peace of mind.  However, unless the house design (and price) was right, we would keep our options open.  As it happens, Simonds ended up having the two designs we really liked.
Initially we were only looking for single storey houses due to pricing, and because we didn't know how much we would have to spend on purchasing land.  Early on in the search we found the Como and went to look at the display home.  I loved the space and the flow of the house design, and the kitchen was great (this was when we added the walk in pantry to our list of must-haves).  The only concern was how open the master bedroom was to the main living space.

Como display home (they built their office in the garage on the left)

Como kitchen...

... and pantry

Once we had found our land, and had some confidence that we might be successful at the auction, we started looking into two storey possibilities and found the Elwood.  We visited the Elwood display home at Point Cook last weekend, and are quite happy with the house layout, but found the kitchen a bit ... disappointing.  It's a little bit small, and the pantry wasn't really a walk in.  However there is another layout option they have available (not online, but it is in their house guide booklet).  This layout potentially solves our problem, but without a display home we'll need to try to imagine how the space will be.

Elwood display home

Anyway that's where we are at at the moment.  Como has a better kitchen, and is 50k cheaper, but the master bedroom is an issue.  The Elwood is probably our favourite if we can solve the kitchen problem, but will be pushing close to the limits of our budget.  It also has the advantage of being about 2 metres shorter and narrower, giving us more garden space.