Oh C'mon V Richards...every epoch has its treasures. B4 you make a mad run for it stop a while and consider the period and the reasons for the style...it can be extremely enlightening....unless its not the period you want to escape from but from some of the opinions. I spent many years of my youth outside of Australia living surrounded by old ruins in Europe. I forgot what it was like here. When finally I returned to Australia and found myself living in some of the 60s and 70s places..I found much to admire and wonder about. I may not have fallen in love with much of it but there was a certain mistique and a feel that I can still conjure when talking about certain places. Not saying that it was all romantic and pleasant but it conveyed something of the era and the kind of Aussie from those days.

@Karen Hodge, I hear you!! Sometimes I think the estate agent should carry quite a bit of the blame actually. If they do their job correctly like you see in the adds on TV, they should bring these discrepancies to the attention of the sellers, stand on their morals and say if you can't get it better than this, then you'll have to find someone else to sell your home!! I know you can't make everybody "house proud" but the saying "do unto others" springs to mind. I bet if these same people bought a house not up to scratch, "a current affair" would hear about it but they don't think it wrong to simply walk out on a house that isn't being left nicely for the next family!! I have some friends that recently sold a house in Essendon, Melb and whilst the buyers were back and forth selling their own home, my friends kept watering the plants and even did things like painted out the wardrobes because of the scuff marks made over time!! They cleaned the entire two storey house from top to bottom and finished by mopping the floors as they were exiting. The buyers were so taken by the entire home, they bought it with almost all the furniture that my friends had in it!!

I once picked what I thought was a soft orange red for our bed room. It turned out to be Home Depot orange. As my husband refuses to paint a room more often than every 5 years, we lived with that orange. At least I was mostly there with the lights out, and it did make our north facing bedroom more cheerful. But for some reason we found ourselves at Home Depot much more often then!

Hi everyone, thank you for your feedback. So we took some measurements and it appears that they really have only just left enough space to fit in the original design with no margin for error. Without being millimetre perfect, which I know is impossible to achieve, if I ask them to rip out the current stairs, I suspect I'll be left with a worse situation and a stair in the hallway. Really very upset with this, I expected a custom designed house to be as designed, otherwise we probably should have just gone with a project home which would have cost a lot less! I was very clear with them about the stairs, absolutely no winders, a flat platform and no where in any plans was there a step in the landing! This whole house was designed around the stairs, which is why I'm so annoyed that it's not correct! With respect to the weird wall in the middle, that will be plastered up and capped to rake up with the stairs. The photo's don't show the large window in the stairwell, and once painted white, it should still be very light and bright. I considered glass, very briefly, I'm not keen on cleaning that and thought I would end up with toy's being posted through a balustrade. The tread will remain oak and the riser will be painted white. Going for a modern Australian coastal, hamptons look, classic but not too traditional. I am going to ask them to address the stair frame and step it down in parallel with the step, as opposed to the angle that is currently there on the mid landing, it just looks really bad when looking up the stairs and the handrail as the kids will need something to hold on to now there is a step in the mid landing. I'll also be asking that the stair frame sit's flush with the nib wall as it rounds the corner in the junction of the two flights. It sticks out a bit too far for my liking at the moment. I really hope they don't get too many other things wrong!