Is Your New Home Design Up To Spec?
Working on your new home design involves more than creating a floor plan and elevation . It also includes your specification or list of inclusions. Your building specification outlines all of the inclusions in your contract. Some of this is made up of the more technical items such as siteworks, termite treatments and roof timber. The rest is all about the finishing materials and colour selections.
So how do you know that your new home design is going to be up to spec? That the finished product is going to meet your expectations? The first step is working with your builder to clearly articulate what are your ‘must have’ items and ‘would be nice to have’ items. Creating an ideas board (whether online or from hard samples) of everything that catches your eye is a great way to begin creating the “look” that you are after. It’s a tough and often mind-boggling task. There are many products out there and with the all of the images of beautiful homes we see on places like Instagram, the whole process can get a bit overwhelming. We would like to emphasise the term “look”. Often, we find that we are asked to price specific, custom made items for our clients; only for them to find out that the item is well out of their budget or not even available in Australia. However, if you come to your builder with an idea of the “look” or style that you are trying to achieve, we can often find a similar product within your budget.
When it comes to material selections, we work with you up front to make sure that, as far as possible, all selections are priced into the contract to begin with. To make the process easier, we start with our Premium Specification which includes items such as stone benchtops, porcelain tiling and window treatments. We then work with you to adjust individual items through a comprehensive pricing option system. This allows you to know the overall cost of their property and avoids potentially costly variations after contract signing. However, if you do change your mind during construction, we work with you to make the variation happen whenever possible.
It’s important that, when getting quotes from multiple builders that you compare specifications carefully. What are the inclusions and exclusions? Are you comparing apples to apples?
