Well, what a whirlwind week it’s been the last 10 days!
On November 23rd, we had our first full day WoS appointment.
Electrical
Four hours… We had to decide all electrical components in the entire house within 4 hours! For electrical, I already had a plan on what we wanted so it wasn’t too bad. However, there were things that popped up along the way that I didn’t think of that my wife wanted. Here’s a quick price breakdown of things we were quoted during the appointment.
What really annoyed me was the fact that we had to pay $268.99 to bring in the network point into the garage and then $1097 for a basic fibre pack to get NBN into the house. Why can’t they just pull in the coaxial cable straight into the house through the walls? Why does it have to go into the garage and then into the house? Doesn’t quite make sense to me… their answer was just because it had to. It feels like PD is forcing us to pay for the basic fibre pack when really, it shouldn’t be a requirement.
App controlled alarm system cost is a bit under $1600 hard-wired and with 2 additional sensors (2 is provided). We didn’t have much time so I told them to put it in first and we’ll think about it later since we did have a 2 day cooling off period to decide.
Luckily for us we did some pre-planning regarding locations of downlights and powerpoints. To be fair, they already had suggestions where the included downlights and powerpoints should go (for those people that don’t really know where to put them) so the process is faster, but we had to be difficult and change pretty much everything they suggested because we were afraid that the house wouldn’t be bright enough. Especially since it would be a bit more difficult to add them downstairs post handover. Again we decided to get the quote for downlights done throughout the whole house (for now).
Here’s our variation quote:
After some credits back, the total worked out to be $9687
We didn’t have any changes to our heating/cooling plan so there was no extra cost there. Luckily for us refrigerated cooling is included.
Fast forward a week or so from our electrical appointment. We removed a large chunk of downlights from the second storey, to be added post-install. We also removed the alarm system. So the total for electrical should drop by about $6300. I say should because up until now, I still haven’t heard back from them regarding these changes. I’ve advised the BC that it’s not possible to finalise everything within 48 hours if I don’t get timely responses from them. He said that as long as we don’t sit on it, there should be no problem.
Even though that’s the case. I’m still a little nervous waiting… it’s been a week and I still don’t know what I’m getting for electrical. That said though, I think kitchen culture and colours need to be finalised before electrical can be. That would make sense. I’ll cover more on this in Kitchen Culture.
Colours
Now we were completely unprepared for this… There are just so many colours to choose from.
We had to pick cladding colour, brick colour, mortar colour, render colour, roof type and colour, gutter, downpipe and fascia colours, garage door type and colour (for some reason Perisher White costs $364 extra, and we had to pick that colour), etc…
We also had to pick the type of entry doors we wanted, and the laundry door too. The internal doors are all flush, flat doors and for a Hampton style house, we had no choice but to upgrade them to the Balmoral 2 which looks like this:
Each door costs $256 and we have 20 doors in the house to upgrade, there goes $5120.
For door handles, we stuck mostly with the included matte black ones, with the exception of 2 which has the privacy lock on it (in the powder room and guest ensuite). These cost $22 each.
Then we had to pick our skirting and cornices. Because we decided to pay $2500 to remove the quads and have floorboards placed under the skirting, we needed to upgrade the skirting thickness. This is to be priced at contract. Hopefully it’s not going to be too expensive because we don’t really have much choice here unless we want to have those ugly quads around the island.
We also had to pick our kitchen benchtops here, even though it’s really for kitchen culture. Guess they wanted to save some time when meeting up with kitchen culture since that appointment is the most difficult one. So we pretty much picked a bunch of Cat 6 and Cat 4 benchtops (which all cost extra).
Important to note that every benchtop that we added that was not included in the original drawing, eg… extended island, extended benchtop etc… are measured to the cm and priced with Cat 1 benchtop, then upgraded to the Cat 6 benchtop as an additional cost.
We also upgraded all our sinks. We took the largest galley sink they had (768mm) at a cost of $1134 and the cheapest sink mixer they had for $215 because we planned on upgrading to a larger tap that they don’t have post handover. Don’t know what we’re going to do with that sink mixer though. Seems a bit expensive to throw away… I wonder if it is possible to provision the tap there instead so we don’t have to pay that $215.
Laundry trough is the AFA Exact 404 Inset Sink for $479, bathroom sinks all use Kado Neue Oval Semi Inset for a total of $1504 ($188 each). ZIP Hydro water filter is $1388 and the black wall taps worked out to be $3395 ($485 each). Upgraded black shower taps were $139 each while new shower taps cost $234. We also decided on getting a second shower for $808 and upgraded the existing shower to black for $564. The other ensuite’s shower upgrade to black costs $1104 ($276 each). Upgrade to black of the bath tub wall spout is $38. Upgrading our toilets to an enclosed one where you can’t see the plumbing costs $1404 ($234 each) for the Posh Domaine Rimless BTW White.
The sensor version of the gooseneck tap costs $1164 and I think it’s a good idea when doing the dishes. Apparently the sensor turns on water and then automatically turns it off after 10 seconds. Although it will save water while you are scrubbing the dishes and loading the dishwasher, I think it will be many years before the savings are realised.
Render for just the entire front facade (excluding the promotional rendered areas) is $2263. We picked the Indulgence Praline bricks at the appointment, but later decided to go with the Access Ash bricks instead. This would save us a bit over $3000 since we’re now going to the included Cat 2 bricks from Cat 3.
We also decided to remove all carpet from the downstairs area and replace everything with floorboards. Even for the guest bedroom. Figured that we can always add a rug if we wanted carpet but can’t change it to floorboards later if we had kept the floor as carpet. However, when we asked about changing the laundry to floorboards, they would not allow it. They said that all wet areas (laundry included) must have tiled floors.
All up, our selections cost $27899 – probably a little less now that we have cut our bricks cost. Honestly though, I think we should have gone with the included toilets and saved $1404!
Our colours consultant was very responsive… every change that we made, she was onto it really quickly, and we did make a lot of changes. We went back and forth on the toilets, but then eventually my wife put her foot down and said we’re picking these despite my protests to have exposed plumbing so I can fit a bidet in there. So the saying goes, happy wife happy life.
Then just last week, we received an email from her saying that our cooling off period was up and we could no longer make any changes unless we sent the changes direct to our BC. I immediately contacted our BC as we were still waiting for responses from Kitchen Culture, Tiles and Electrical and we may need to change Colours depending on their responses. Our BC said not to worry, that we’ll still have the time we need once we did get responses from them.
Again, that alleviated our concerns for now, although I’m still a little nervous inside since we did change our minds many times and constantly sent emails to our Colours consultant. That said, we did make more changes over the weekend and I have sent that to the BC anyway. I also added a couple of other queries like centering the guest ensuite door (for some reason it’s not centered in the drawing) and increasing the length of the master ensuite recess so that it’s wall to wall.
Kitchen Culture
This really did take a long time. We spent pretty much the entire time designing the cabinetry and it turned out quite complicated with our list of variations spanning 8 pages. I won’t go into detail here, but after we completed our selections and went home, there was some regret over how it was designed.
So we emailed her the next day with some questions and if we could change our minds on how the cabinets were laid out. We didn’t get a response for 5 days. The response wanted us to confirm certain things and provided us with more information on others.
So I replied to that email almost straight away. By the end of the week, we still haven’t received a reply so over the weekend, we sent another email complete with the contents of that last email with the addition of some other changes (cc’d the BC also to hopefully get a quicker response). Originally we had the kitchen sink and dishwasher in the island bench, then we moved it to the front galley, then now we want it back in the island bench but with the butler fireclay sink instead. At Reece, the cost for this sink is $1800, but I’m thinking that it will probably end up $2500. We asked for the dishwasher to be removed from the island, but keep the provision for it so we can get our own dishwasher. Was told that the credit back was about $1200, which I think is quite reasonable.
We were going to get a second dishwasher and a steam oven which would have cost is about $6500 in total. Instead of doing that, we decided to upgrade our kitchen cooktop and oven to a standalone cooker. The quotes came back as follows:
The series 1 Dual OR90SCG1X1 is included, the Series 4 Dual OR90SCG4X1 is $4,916.00 and Series 7 INDUCTION OR90SCI4W1 $5991. All credits for promo items are applied at contract, if you wanted to know the credits prior to contract please speak with your Building Coordinator. Is there a price difference between induction/gas for the Series 7? Yes the induction is more expensive, Series 7 INDUCTION OR90SCI4W1 $5991 whereas the gas FSHPYK DUAL OR90SCG4W1 90CM W is $3,839.00
This is the reply from our Colours Consultant.
Credit back for the promo cooktop and oven is $988.
We decided to get the Series 7 INDUCTION OR90SCI4W1 for $5991 to give the kitchen a more Hampton contemporary look with the induction cooktop. Also curious that the Series 7 gas cooker works out almost a $1000 cheaper than the Series 4 gas cooker. Out of curiosity, I checked the differences and the Series 7 was better in every way.
At this moment, I still haven’t received any emails back from them so all we can do is wait for a reply with pricing and drawings to make sure that the all benches, cabinets and drawers throughout the house are correct. The suspense is killing me!
Tiles
So tiles was the most difficult thing to select as it will set the mood and feel for the house. We had to pick tiles for the kitchen, galley, laundry and all the ensuites. Initially we picked ceramic tiles for the floors and walls to most of the ensuites and the cheaper white tiles laid in herringbone format. We splurged a bit more for the front galley, kitchen splashback and a master ensuite feature wall with marble tiles which cost about $6000 in total. Despite that, we managed to keep the price down to around $10k for tiling in the whole house.
However, after we left, we realised that ceramic tiles actually didn’t give us the feel we were after and made the ensuites look cheap. So we went to National Tiles to see what they had on offer and we eventually settled on a tile. However, the pricing is obviously going to be different to PD’s pricing so we took pictures and sent them to our Tiles consultant for a quote.
Till now, we haven’t heard back from her.
So we decided to just re-do our tiling selection. We visited National Tiles over multiple days, looking for tiles, pairing them with colours, grout and trims and eventually switched out a whole lot of tiles in the ensuite and cut back on marble tiles in the galley. We selected an unpriced tile for all tiled floors in the house and once we were happy, we sent it off to her. Hopefully it doesn’t come back too expensive.
Again, I cc’d our BC.
Now we wait.
Comments