Following our estimate and the completion of our engineering works, we continued to work closely with our Sales Manager during Metricon’s Preliminary Contract phase. This is where we would start to lock in structural and layout details. You can read more about the key decisions in the blog “Planning the Layout of our Home”.
We cannot stress enough how important it is to get this stage right. If you leave any structural changes until later in the build process, the preliminary contract you sign describes various monetary penalties for doing so. This is understandable, as depending on the scope of changes and the time at which you change them, may require drawing updates, engineering changes, procurement changes and/or resubmission to council and these all require significant time and effort.
We looked at these changes as items that formed not only the layout or structure, but also items that would be difficult to implement post-build. These are items like insulation, ducted air conditioning in a 2 storey build etc.
It is at this stage where we were glad we were observant enough to make the following changes:
- Eaves – addition of eaves to sides and rear of house
- Rear Windows and Doors – updated layout , size and style to reflect how we planned on using the space
- External and Internal Door Heights – these were not automatically increased with the ceiling heights and would have looked out of place
- Inclusion of solar panels – roof structure needs to be designed to facilitate installation of solar panels
- Staircase – we wanted an open staircase, reversed in direction, but somehow these changes kept getting missed in our drawing revisions. We also wanted the voids in the living room and entrance to be appropriately reflected as part of the change
- Bathrooms – upstairs bathroom and ensuite designs refined
- Windows and Doors – check the sizes and opening style of every window and door. Check that elevations and sizes are even with respect to other windows/doors
In our opinion, the process of preparing our preliminary estimated was the only area that Metricon really dropped the ball. Whilst we had a really positive experience with our Sales Representative, we felt that the handling of our iterations and review notes was poor.
We appreciate that we had significant deviation from the original design, however we felt that if we hadn’t picked up the above these issues early, the resulting design and layout would not have been in keeping with Metricon’s superb initial presentation. We both have a strong attention to detail, but we felt that it should have been Metricon’s responsibility to maintain their style/theme quality, even in the event that there are changes to the original design.
The result of this was what felt like an unnecessarily long, drawn our process to get to a stage where we were happy with our preliminary plans and estimate.
Whilst the finalisation of preliminary estimate and drawings were a large part of this stage, Metricon also required that a Preliminary Estimate Checklist be completed and signed prior to proceeding further. The key items which we needed to address in parallel were demolition and finance. But that’s another chapter!