Porter Davis homes

Hi, just wondering about how long is the wait from paying the reservation fee to tender, and then tender to colours/electrical appointments?

Thanks in advance

I think for us it was about 10 weeks from paying the $2k fee to colours and electrical, then 3 weeks scheduled to tender, then 3 weeks to contract. Ours was a bit longer than what their brochure says it would be, this could be due to it being over Christmas and that our land doesn't title till May so they've got a fair bit of time up their sleeve.

The timeline can vary with each client but you can see ours here: https://waldorfgrangebuild.wordpress.co ... /timeline/

Also I think they have switched the order of things since last year. We did colour selections and then tender.

WoS
So we had our appointment at WoS last week, it all went reasonably smoothly. We’d been up there a couple of times previously so we had most of our colours etc picked out in advance which made things a bit easier, but there were still plenty of other things we had to make a decision on. I think they could really do a better job of communicating what you should be thinking about in advance, and what stuff you ask at WoS vs your BC vs at Tender.

Tiles
The colours part of this was pretty easy as we’d already been up to pick out the colours, it was just a matter of figuring out where we wanted to have them. We ended up adding them to behind the rangehood and tiling across a bit more of the bathroom. We will also be adding some in the laundry, happily it was all reasonably inexpensive as we are going with the included tiles so it's just a few extra areas which will need tiling.

Blinds
We really just went to this to see what prices are like, chances are we won’t be getting our blinds done through PD although we may get the shutters done just so they are in place when the house is built.

Interior/exterior design
This was a pretty big session and probably the first one where the WoS/BC/Tender issue came up for us. We’d already picked out all the colours but we added on an upgraded shower head, removed sink, moved the ensuite vanity and a whole bunch of other stuff. We also wanted to add on a niche in one of the showers, but apparently this is something that you ask the BC rather than do at WoS for some reason? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me? We are probably going to upgrade the carpet but annoyingly they didn’t know how much credit we had for the carpet we already had included in one of our promotions, so we got a total figure but then some other figure has to be subtracted from that to give us the extra amount. Surely it isn’t that difficult to know in advance how much the existing carpet is worth?

WiR
I was thinking this was going to be pretty expensive but actually it worked out cheaper than Ikea (who we would have done it through otherwise) and it’s already installed. Admittedly we are going with a pretty basic package in white which keeps the costs down, but I was really quite pleasantly surprised.

Kitchen/Cabinetry
We’d sorted out all the colours, door handles etc in advance so at least we didn’t have to make too many choices there. There was a bit of work to be done with sorting out the location of pot drawers, deciding on the width of these, moving other drawers and cupboards around etc. And then when it came to the laundry we were fairly horrified at the cost of adding on cupboards, benches, shelves etc, amazing how much gets charged for that sort of stuff! We’ll probably go with having some of it installed in advance and then see how it works and potentially add on other stuff later. It’s all going to be in Laminex anyway so not as though someone else won’t be able to get that exact shade or whatever. And because we weren’t sure about what we wanted to do with the laundry we have to think about what that will mean in terms of whether/how much we want to do tiling there.

Electrical
Extra powerpoints!!! I think we now have about 40 powerpoints all up which will hopefully be plenty, all the rooms have at least 2 and often 3 or even 4. We also added in a bunch of TV and data points all over the place, and have plenty of downlights in communal areas of the house, we just went with standard lighting for most of the rest of it. Exhaust fans and IXL heatlamps in the bathrooms, I don’t know why exhaust fans aren’t standard? We’re thinking about pre wiring for surround sound, it seems quite expensive for what it is? Anyone had pre wiring done for this, thoughts on the cost now vs getting it done later?

There are a few things I would have liked to discuss at WoS but are for the BS/Tender apparently like insulation, extra noggins in the house for TV mounting, towel racks, clothes dryers etc, shower alcoves

All up it was a pretty productive day but quite full on, I don’t know how anyone who hadn’t done any visits for it beforehand would go trying to cram it all into one day!

Hello sencillez,

Please see "procedure of purchase" document below that came with our final sales quotation. Everything is the same as before except that the tender and wos stages have been swapped. This came into effect from Feb 2017 and we are following this newly swapped process.

The left-hand side is what PD is supposed to deliver and the right-hand side is what we are supposed to deliver, roughly. If any one of introduces a delay in any of these tasks, then I think there will be a delay. The time it took from the time we paid a deposit till the time we got the hello call was about 3 weeks.

Hurrow's wos experience last week was very useful for me - thank-you. I think most mummies' and daddies' thinking, concerns and worries are similar in this forum. I also think that the builders, especially bigger ones like Metricon and Porter Davis have to continuously gather feedback from their customers and fix the holes in their processes proactively. Too many of their customers are having too many of the same issues...

BTW, best wishes for both of sencillez and Hurrow !

Hurrow we had never been to WOS and did our prestige build selections the day we where there!
Luckily we aren't very adventurous and agree on almost everything (our sales assistant was pleasantly surprised as she almost fell over when we said we hadn't visited before!) and also took a lot of her advice.

I wish we had been before as we've had issues with our kitchen design since and we should have put more thought into it and asked other people. But apart from that we are happy. Also we live in Sydney (moving once house is done) so wasn't practical to visit before

And totally agree about wardrobes, if we hadn't been advised on this forum about pricing I never would have believed it would be comparable to IKEA but fitted. As long as you chose white & not the lovely wood

We didn't even go to blinds as had been told so much of a markup. We will go through places recommended on here.

I'm glad the writeup was useful for you Obi.Wan, I definitely benefited from the writeups that other people have done previously! Looking at the documentation that gets sent out to you previously I really think that building companies need to do a better job of explaining exactly what you discuss with which person and at what time. There should be a written document saying if you want to talk about insulation it's at tender, if you want to talk about extra power points it's at WoS, if you want to talk about reducing the size of a window it's with your BC etc. It would make the process a whole lot less confusing, and whilst it probably couldn't cover every possible scenario it could at least cover most of them and make it a lot easier on us as customers.

Wow you did really well to get it all done in one day then! We're not very adventurous either but there's still the decision of which of the 50 shades of white you want to pick from for your walls etc that you have to agree on!

I'm hopeful we have our kitchen right, we've got two sets of pot drawers and plenty of cupboards plus a pantry so hopefully we won't be running out of storage room!

Is there a reason why people go with custom blinds over the stuff you can get at Bunnings? I would assume it's actually reasonably easy to install blinds yourself, and they look a lot cheaper at Bunnings than what was quoted at WoS, although obviously you then need to have standard size windows. I noticed on our plans a couple of our bedroom windows are 2.41m wide as opposed to 2.4m wide which is the standard size for blinds apparently, any idea why that would be?

I have also wondered the same thing Hurrow, after our shocking quote from Birk.

It's something I will definitely be looking into a bit later once our build starts. I'm happy to spend some money on our bedroom and things that will be seen but spending a couple of thousand on basic blinds for the guest rooms is an expense I don't think in necessary.

I'm guessing that Birk are more expensive than most places anyway, but having non standard window sizes like 2.41m instead of 2.4m probably makes it more expensive again, as well as making it harder to install something yourself.

I wonder if they make them an odd size on purpose. I haven't actually looked at our window measurements to see what's standard and what's not.

It is apparently popular now to have floor to ceiling curtains making the window size irrelevant. Is anyone planning on doing this? I'm considering it for selected rooms.

It is apparently popular now to have floor to ceiling curtains making the window size irrelevant. Is anyone planning on doing this? I'm considering it for selected rooms.






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We are doing this in our master bedroom, Theatre and those huge windows at the back...

The front of the house is getting tint and blinds to allow for better privacy during the day and romans to provide privacy at night.

Guys - It's been a long time between visits (my Porter Davis Rochford was finished a couple of years ago) but thought it would be worth recommending the company i went through for plantation shutters and rollerblinds - check out iseekblinds.com.au. It made the Birk blinds quote seem nuts.

They build to your window sizes, and the quote and ordering is online. If i did it all again I would measure up a couple of months prior to handover so they're ready when i need them.

No affiliation with the company, just a happy customer - a year after with some getting direct sunlight, they look as good as new.

We plan to use iseekblinds. We got a quote from Birk when we did WoS- what a joke! We said no. Fast forward 12 months later and Birk contacted us directly to offer us blinds again, this time at a discount on the first quote. Cheeky! We said no.

We didn't get a quote for wardrobe fittings as we assumed it would be overpriced (like the blinds). I wish we had now.

Hi. Looked at the website, it seems well priced but I'm kind of scared from the diy part of it. Was it difficult to assemble yourself or it's fairly easy?

We passed on the wardrobes. Was quoted $1700 for each of the spare rooms and about $3800 for the master bedroom.

Each wardrobe comes with a shelf and hanging rail anyway.

Wow, we got quoted less than $1,700 for doing the whole WiR! That's with a bunch of hanging racks, some drawers and shelving.