Sunday 5 January 2014

1.5 Months In......

Yes it has been a while since my last post.

As you can imagine getting the keys to a new house is pretty daunting.  So much to organise.  Insurance, change of address, moving, and buying new furniture!  Put in Christmas and New Year and here we are!

We are beginning to settle in to our new house.  The kids are loving the space and having their own rooms.  Finally we have an ensuite.  It was worth the 10 year wait!

There have been a few hiccups since we moved in.  Luckily we have our Site Supervisor who still looks after us one month in.  He was great.  Very accommodating and made sure all the tradies who came to the house after we moved in fitted into my schedule not theirs!

With Christmas and New Year so close to our move there have a been a couple of issues with tradies.  Obviously everything closes up for the holidays so we are still waiting on some urgent things to be fixed.  This I can tell you is very frustrating! I am hoping in the coming days we will get some responses back from Metricon and the tradesman in question. 

In saying that any small issues/defects we find in the house we need to note them down and then in 3 months (since receiving the keys), Metricon will do a walk through to note down any issues.  Let me tell you that the list is long! 

That's not to say we are not happy with the end result.  In fact the overall building process with Metricon has been good.  Bar a few small hiccups here and there our Site Supervisor and Service Coordinator were fantastic.  Always there to help.

Now that we are in the house we have started to focus our attention on landscaping.  After much searching we settled on Ben from Daviscapes.  You may have seen his work or heard of his name as there are a few blogs out there that are or have used him.

We found him to be very approachable, honest and helpful.  In saying that he is also very busy so we are waiting patiently for the job to begin.  My fingers are crossed that he starts our decking next week.  We would love to have our daughter's birthday in Feb here at the house so I can only hope that it all comes together by then.

I promise to keep up with my posts.  Especially the landscaping as I have noticed not many build blogs go passed the "Got the Keys" post!  I think it is important to show the full story...so watch this space!

8 comments:

  1. Hi there,
    I have enjoyed reading your blog these past few months and have gathered a few useful tips. I am also building a Metricon house in Melbourne and we are approaching PCI soon.
    Can you tell me approx how much it was to stain your staircase? We have a wooden staircase that looks similar and I need to budget for it but have no idea how much it should cost.

    Thanks!
    Vivian

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  2. Hi Vivian,

    Thanks so much for reading my blog. So glad you have enjoyed reading it.

    The painter who painted our house ended up staining our stairs and doors. The stairs cost us about $1800 to do. Happy to pass on the number for the painter although you may want to ask Metricon if your painter can do the job. It was much easier as he did the job for us just before handover. Good luck with your PCI. So exciting.

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  3. Thanks very much for the information. I'll try and get in touch with the guys that painted our house and see how we go.
    I hope you and the family are settling in well! I'm really hoping we can be in our house by end of feb. Fingers crossed.

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  4. Hi, we're looking at going with metricon and wondered if you would recommend them? If you had to do it all again would you go with them? Quality and build good? Seems like a lot of blogs took about how many defects there are. Just wondering if this is normal for all builds. Thanks

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    1. Hi, thanks for your question. It's funny you should ask me about Metricon...it's the No.1 question I get asked all the time. Would I do it again with Metricon? Probably yes, simply because we love the house design. We had a fairly good experience with Metricon. Not going to lie we had a lot of problems...but I think that would be with any builder. It's a big project and lots of people are working on your house so you can't expect everything to go right. It's how Metricon deal with the problems that is probably the better question. They have been good at responding to many of our issues - especially at the 3 month inspection (once you move in). It's pretty obvious that most blogs that complain about their build is more out of frustration but they eventually get fixed. I think the best advice I can give you is to make sure you know everything there is to know about what's in the contract and what you are paying for. This comes down to the finer details like what type of materials are being used etc...If you know what you're getting then there should be no surprises when they start to build. One more thing, when we were looking for builders I actually tried to find blogs/reviews on good stories rather than negative ones. You actually can get a better picture of the company. Most negative reviews and blogs are just an avenue for venting and they never really discuss how the issues were solved. If you do go with Metricon just be on top of everything. Make contact with the builder/customer service rep and a regular basis and check, double check even triple check your contract etc. So all in all yes I would recommend Metricon but looking back I would have been on their backs a lot more. I think this advice would be useful for any builder - even a private one. Good luck. Let me know how you go!

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    2. One more thing. You asked me about quality build? - We upgraded everything and even got cabinetry as well. So for us quality was pretty high on the agenda. Let's say we are happy with the outcome - even though we had a few issues (will talk about this soon in my blog). Just remember you get what you pay for!

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  5. Thanks heaps. That really heaps. Was getting a bit worried on all the negatives you hear on blogs out there. Issues after 1 year that are not resolved. Will let you know if we end up going with them. Were your cabinetry additional items via them or using your own carpenter? We're want quality too and know you get what you pay for. I'm assuming you'll need to double their base price to get something decent. Is that correct? Thanks again

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    1. Our cabinetry was done by Metricon. If I have to be honest this was the biggest trouble we had. Six months in to living in the house and we have finally resolved our issues with the cabinetry makers (Metricon were great in helping us resolve this). Our biggest issue was with Kitchen Innovations. The company which did the work on our house. If you're building in Melbourne make sure you tell Metricon you don't want them working on your house. I think I might have written a post about the cabinetry work we got Metricon to do. All in all I was really happy we got them to do it as it as the house looks complete - we got a buffet unit put in and also a TV unit area done as well (upstairs and downstairs). If you are thinking of getting a study I would get that done as well. Just make sure you know what materials are being used. Go and see some Metricon displays to make sure you are getting the best quality. Oh yes doubling the base price is a good indication of what budget you will need. Then depending on your land size I would add another $50-$100K for landscaping. If you are looking to save money then probably sourcing a cabinet maker after handover would be better - but for us it was just more about convenience than saving money. In the bigger scheme of things it was worth it for us.....p.s I will be writing another post shortly on the cabinetry issues we had.

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