Set in Concrete

Building a custom home gives you the freedom to create a design around the way you want to live. But as construction progresses, there are certain stages where decisions move from being flexible on paper to quite literally being set in concrete.

Before a ground floor slab is poured, the plumbing locations need to be carefully planned and confirmed. Pipes for toilets, showers, baths, sinks and other fixtures are positioned within or beneath the slab based on the final floorplan.

Once the concrete is poured, moving these locations is no longer a simple change. Relocating plumbing can mean cutting into the slab, altering pipework and creating additional work that could have been avoided with the right planning upfront.

This is why getting your floorplan and wet areas right early in the design process is so important. Something which seems like a small change such as moving a toilet, shifting a vanity or repositioning a kitchen sink, becomes much more complicated, and expensive, once the slab is down.

For double-storey homes with a concrete suspended slab, there’s another important element to lock in early: electrical and lighting locations.

Before the suspended slab is poured, electrical conduits and provisions for lighting need to be positioned within the slab. This means decisions around downlight locations and other electrical requirements need to be carefully considered and confirmed beforehand.

Once the concrete is poured, those locations are essentially locked in. Moving or adding lighting afterwards isn’t as straightforward as simply changing a mark on a plan, which is why it pays to think about how each space will actually be used.

Think about furniture placement, where your dining table will sit, how you’ll use your kitchen and where you want lighting to fall. These decisions can influence where plumbing and electrical points need to be positioned.

It’s one of the reasons we put so much importance on the design and pre-construction stages of a custom home. Taking the time to work through these details before construction reaches each milestone gives you the best opportunity to get them right.

Because when it comes to concrete slabs, some decisions really are set in concrete.