Exterior Colour Selections

For weeks now, I have been driving my children demented. I could not settle on the brick/exterior colours for our new home. We have driven to heaps of display houses and done drive bys of numerous houses and it just was not working! Today I was told that "we are fed up with looking at bricks!!!" in no uncertain terms and basically that was it.

So S and I left the children with Nanma and went on another quest looking for bricks and an external colour scheme. I liked Austral's Newport but there is another PD house just around the corner from our block. I knew I wanted white or off white windows, as I want a clean crisp look to the house both inside and out, so that too affected the brick choice. I liked La Trobe but we have seen so many variations of colour with this brick, it appears it has really changed since they moved factories. Homestead Tan looks good, but there appear to be a lot of brown brick houses around us. I liked canterbury, but we have it on our current home, so I did not really want to take it with us to the new house.

Today's trip took us to Cranbourne North and we saw a display house with "Nougat" bricks and flush off-white mortar. We both really liked it but we were sure that it would be "another upgrade". We had already upgraded to cat 4 bricks ($2.3k) when we thought we would have the Newport. So off we went to Hopetoun to find out how much more this was going to cost. Whoo Hooo!!!!! They are a cat 1 brick, so just saved $2.3K. However, we decided that the Tudor roof tile would look best, so we need to upgrade to cat 2 roof tiles. Bet that wipes out any saving on the bricks.

So the exterior colours are: (drumroll please)

Bricks: Austral Nougat - cat 1

Roof: Monier Barramundi in Tudor profile - cat 2

Gutters and Fascia: Colorbond Ironstone - Upgrade to colorbond from Zincalume (still think that on a Prestige house, you should get this standard!)

Downpipes: Colorbond Ironstone (upgrade)

Garage Door: Colorbond Ironstone

Windows: SouthernStar Birch White

We are having the Traditional Facade with no render anywhere and no portholes (if you see the sketch you'll understand) all in all the house will be a house, clean lines in crisp colour.

Tender on Wednesday, fingers crossed all goes well and we get a November 2008 start.

Now, if I could just decide on colours for the kitchen.....

Colours, Tiles and Cash

Today I went to National Tiles for our tile appointment. If you have read earlier posts, you will know I was not happy that I could not choose any tile I wanted if I was prepared to pay for it. This was because they had brown, tan, beige,cream, with colours of black, white and red. So NOT me. Neutral is something for a gear stick, not for a house.

What a fabulous surprise it was to meet "N" who was simply sensational. I had chosen some ideas for laminex colours for the wet areas and I needed to pull these together with the tiles. No problems. She looked and found exactly what was needed.

For the bathroom, I was able to choose a feature glass tile which is 5 different shades of blue/green which matched the laminex I wanted for the cabinet and a white marbled tile for the wall/floor which matched the laminex for the bench top. If you look at the picture you can see them all together. The feature tile will be the background for the niche in the shower and two rows will be used along the top of the bath. It seems that mirrors now come down to the benchtops, so I asked to get a row of tiles above the vanity (can't stand water marks on mirrors from hand washing). I also chose a "capping tile" in the deeper green to go around the mirror, to "frame it".

The powder room is going to have the same floor/wall tile on the floor and as a row above the vanity. I am thinking I may have the same laminex for the cabinet and benchtop, but I am not sure yet. I use black as the cabinet and stay with the "carrara" for the benchtop.

The laundry is going to be black and white, here is the floor tile. It is a black marbled effect with the lighter colours swirled through it being a purplish/grey colour. I actually chose a white rippled tile but you don't get samples of those because everyone knows what a white tile looks like. I am thinking of laminex "burnished plum" cabinets with a white benchtop otherwise it will be black cabinets.

And finally, my favourite, the ensuite tiles. I chose a cream marbled tile for the main tile in here, for the spa, the shower and above the vanity. I also chose glass pencil tiles in aubergine and lavender as a feature to being out the purples and aubergines in the marble effect. Lovely!

The picture shows the marbled tile at the top, the black tulip laminate for the cabinets, burnished plum for the bench top and an unusual coloured tile for the floor. It is almost a plum/brown toned tile, that seems to take on the colour of what it is near. Putting the plum/purples of the laminate near it makes it a plum based colour. Unfortunately, this picture does not really show the depth in the marbled tile.

I also chose an aubergine "capping tile" for the mirror surround as well. Although "N" had to go find if they had these anymore, but she found them! And the best bit, apart from the capping tiles, pencil features and glass features for the bathroom, the lot were standard tiles. How good is that! Just have to wait on the final pricing now but I am sure that I am within budget.

Off to hopetoun for a bit of investigation over the weekend. Toodle pip!

Contact at last...

Time to give you an update. S has "done" his knee (last Friday) so things have been a bit of a write off since then. Yesterday, we had a call from N at PD who introduced herself as our Customer Service person (CSC). She was great, I sat on the phone for about an hour with her as I was pretty PO'd that we had had no contact in the nearly three weeks since we signed.
Apparently, as we added 1.5 mtrs to the length of the house, it needs to go through some approval process where they decide if they will actually accept our request to build it.
Well, it seems that they have because N, now has the file. I told her that we were going to pull out because of the no contact issues etc, reasoning that if this was the service level before we signed, what would it be like after???
But now have had a rethink and looked at this dispassionately, we want this house, they build this house, at a price we are willing to pay at the moment. so, we will take it through to tender and see how we go. It maybe too rich for our blood, but if we don't investigate we will not find out. We made appointments for tender and contract on the basis that we will go ahead.
We have made the tile appointment so then we will know what we are up for as far as tiles goes. Hopetoun is supposed to ring later this week so we can tee that up too. We may go down there this weekend and get a feel for how many upgrades we'll see there too.
All in all feeling much more positive now we know what is going on. N certainly has gone out of her way to make us feel better about the whole process.
But just to make sure, we will investigate the custom builder price as well and go with what feels best at the time. That should be some time next week.

Feeling a bit uncomfortable

The title says it all really. We went back to the display over the weekend to check out some areas of the house and to check room sizes, as I am concerned at the really small bedrooms. S and I spoke about it and we are feeling a bit uncomfortable with the "PD experience" at the moment. The tiles thing is really worrying me, basically we can only choose from what they say we can have regardless that NT have others available in their showroom. We have a lot of provisions in our sales quote and the provision for site costs has jumped from 15k initially to 20k and it is still unconfirmed until tender.
From reading the forum at HomeOne (http://forum.homeone.com.au/) PD seem to be very bad at the communication bit and very good at saying "no", even when they have said "yes" to the same thing on other builds. That is our experience at the moment for sure. It also looks like quite a few upgrades are the opportunity to bite a bit harder. But that is the price for a volume builder. We are questioning if that price is too high for us.
We have decided to keep our options open and keep looking at other houses, the Metricon Bel-Air 37 looks a possibility or the 33 with some changes. We have also given a sketch plan of the best bits of all the houses we have seen to the guy we bought our land from, as they work with a builder and we will see what they come up with. We'll get to tender with PD and then assess it at that point.
We are not committed until we sign on the contract and PD would do well to remember that fact, and a bit of service (or a returned phone call) would go along way.