Emilia and Shaz’s Story: Finding the Right Builder Starts with Finding the Right Home
This is the first of four episodes following Emilia and Shaz’s building journey with Dale Alcock Homes.
From choosing the right builder and designing their home, through to the building experience and life one year on.
We’re starting at the beginning: how a quiet Sunday afternoon sparked the journey to their new home.
A Feeling They Couldn't Shake
For Emilia and Shaz, the journey to building their home began long before they were ready to put pen to paper.
Emilia had quietly made a habit of browsing Home Designs in her spare time, imagining what life might look like in different spaces and designs. “I’d be looking at house plans all the time,” she says.
Then one particular home caught her attention, it was more than a floorplan she liked, it was somewhere she could genuinely picture herself living. “I thought, oh yeah, I could really imagine myself living there,” Emilia says. “It was that sense that we really felt like it would work for us. The design, the flow.”
“Our lifestyle,” Shaz adds, “It really spoke to us.”
So one Sunday, with nothing else planned, Shaz suggested they go and take a look at the display home in person.
A Home That Came to Life
What they found was a display home that brought the design to life in a way no house plan ever could. Walking through the spaces gave them a sense of scale, flow and possibility that simply couldn’t be captured on a page. Shaz remembers the impression it left clearly:
“It was absolutely immaculate.”
They could begin to imagine their own routines unfolding within the home, the lifestyle they wanted to create together, taking shape in front of them, room by room. It was one thing to imagine a home from a page, and another entirely to stand inside it and feel it fit.
For Emilia and Shaz, finding a home that felt right was the first step. The next was finding a builder they could trust to bring that vision to life, and to guide them through everything still to come.
Finding Confidence in the Right Builder
It just so happened that the display home they fell in love with, was one of our very own. With a clear idea of the kind of home they wanted, choosing the right building became just as important as choosing the design.
Quality was high on their list. They wanted to create something special, a home that felt considered, suited their lifestyle, and would continue to feel like the right choice for years to come. Emilia and Shaz were aware of Dale Alcock Homes, with Emilia saying, “Definitely the building company has a reputation of high quality. I really wanted to have something special.” That reputation gave them the confidence to take the next step.
It wasn’t simply about building a house; it was about finding a team who understood what mattered to them, and who could help turn the home they’d imagined into something real. From those first conversations, Emilia and Shaz could sense they were in good hands.
Their first visit to a display home had transformed an idea into a possibility.
From there, their building journey began, with a design that felt like them and a builder they felt confident could bring it to life.
Today, one year after moving in, it’s clear that feeling was right from the beginning. “We love it,” Emilia says.
“It’s the best decision we ever made.”
For Emilia and Shaz, finding the right builder started with finding a home that felt right for the life they wanted to live, for all the days they’d call it home.
This is just the beginning of Emilia and Shaz’s story.
In Episode 2, we sit down with the couple to see how they shaped a design around the way they actually live, from the spaces that mattered most to the moments they hoped it would hold.