Big M / Metr!con Homes: - Studio M & Upgrade Prices!

Hi,
we are looking at Latrobe (Austral) ,Labassa (not the 50mm)which is Boral,
Hawthorn but could settle for Musket Haze if I had too....Just wondering the difference in price from the standards range to the higer categorys.....Thanks so much..

Hi emilygirl

I only have NSW info and couldn't find the Latrobe - Austral is the only supplier here. Am guessing you are not in NSW so it probably wouldn't be me much use me giving you upgrade prices for here. In any case you'd need to let us know what house you're building as the price depends upon that.

Hope someone out there in your area can help you out. Sorry.

Hi Aussie_Chik,

would you mind posting Austral bricks per Categories up to category 4 please (for NSW), as anything higher would probably be too expensive. I tried to obtain product book from M display home, but they wouldn't give this, however I can't recall if this was on Saturday. Will try my luck tomorrow if I find the time.

Thanks heaps,

taki

Hi Taki

No probs but i'd need to know for what house, as the prices vary for each one.

Hi,

I hope to build modified Milano 30, just want to add study at the front between entry and garage, so it will end up slightly bigger.

And any recommendations on sales consultant would be welcome, building in Sydney, one I've encountered twice wasn't really listening to what I want, didn't help that I went there without my husband.
Thanks

Hi Taki

Milano 30 upgrade categories as follows:

Cat 1 & 2 - included
Cat 3 - $3,700
Cat 4 - POA

Will send PM about Sales Consultant

Has anyone upgrade their kitchen with M? What did you upgrade to and how much does it costs? I am looking to upgrade the laminate to colorform. Want to get some idea on prices ...

Does anyone know the cost for adding a step to the spa bath for the ensuite?

TIA

We're upgrading our kitchen. If by colourform you mean colourtech (2-pac, etc) then it's around $250 per door. Watch how they price it as often the price quoted is for the entire kitchen. If you're only having overhead OR underbench cupboards in colourtech and the rest in laminate, then count how many doors will be in colourtech, multiply by $250 and that should be roughly what they should be quoting! We wanted colourtech to overhead cupboards in kitchen and butler's pantry ONLY (about 10 cupboards), and the PC amount was $6,500+. When we queried it, that price was for the whole kitchen.

Thanks mate, really appreciated your post. We are booked in for next week at Studio M and I must say I am just as nervous as I am excited.

Question for you: did you do any data cabling with M or did you do that after the build? I am trying to research what Lifestyle National have on offer. I have cabled two houses myself and I know what I want and how to do it. I just don't know whether the LN offerings are worth it.

Your thoughts?
KW

We did data cabling with M, mainly because it's a 2 storey house we built and getting in after would be just about impossible. About $100+ per cat6 point I think it was, maybe a little more.

We just put in ADSL with a wireless G router (Billion), and getting a very strong signal all through the house on wireless.

T&T

Hola people,

Have a very quick question, yes or no answer really , but may lead to another question

the question: are we allowed by M to have electrician to come to the house (once it's nearly built but before the handover), just to install lights on those battens?

It's just that i have just been made realize that M does not do lights installation (downlights they do, but for some OH&S reason, they are not allowed to install the other lights such as Oyster Light etc).

I look forward hearing from y'all. Thank U

Not sure if there is a more appropriate thread running, so my appologies if this is in the wrong place...

I am looking at building with metricon, and our prices are already soaring through the roof! Does anyone know if we can supply our OWN bathroom fittings (toilets, baths, shower screens) + taps, door handles throughout the house -- and if so, does anyone have any idea on the rebate? is it worth it? does this void a lot of your warranty??

A friend of the family used to work for Gainsborough & Corona - so potential connections for cheaper fittings... but is it worth it??

For those sort of things, not worth it. The builder may only give you back their cost, you still have to find them cheaper AND get someone to fit. Hwever, it is VERY unlikely they will allow you to do these because:

1. It has the potential to hold up the build, ie, waiting for you to do your bit, and they may invoke penalties.
2. Any materials you supply are not covered by the builders insurance, nor is any workmanship for owner suppplied materials/labour.

The main savings you can make are things such as floor coverings, light-fittings, additional light and power points, driveways, internal painting.

With light fittings, when building double-storey, make sure you put in enough light points on the ground floor as it is very hard to add more later. On the second floor, leave the minimum provided by the builder as you can get an electrician to add more later as there is access via the ceiling. With additional power points, when the wall in one room has a power point, you can often put another power point on the wall of the adjoining room and run it off the same lead. This has the potential to save money too. All this of course should be done by a licenced electrician.

You can add AC later and probably cheaper if you want evap. If you want ducted reverse cycle, this can only be done buring the build as the ducting to ground floor has to be done during construction. (Unless the builder is prepared to do this for you) Big M do not put ducting to ground floor for evap cooling (ONLY heating), so you could do evap cooling later; and add split systems to the ground floor.

Depending on your site supervisor, he may let you in during the build to add wall insulation to internal walls for sound proofing and add network cabling - as long as it does not interfere with the works. You can ask, but don't assume you will be allowed!

Good luck!

Friends of ours built with M too & elected not to have their kitchen/bathroom/ensuite/laundry installed (no cabinets or basins etc), and they saved $2000 (apparently). 5 months after their handover they still don't have a working kitchen!! (I personally didn't think this was worth it!!) I couldn't go through the hassle to save so little....
Our SS has been really good (and 'apparently' he is one of the best in Vic), he let our home theatre people come & rough in cables for our system, he would have let us install soundproof insulation (on the 'off chance' we got M to quote it & it was cheaper than buying it & diy) so never had to do that. We are doing our Evap cooling after handover, quotes have been of similar price but bigger / better unit.
I think a lot depends on the luck of the draw with your SS & your relationship with them...
Good luck!

Hope this thread has not died!!

We've just put the $1k down with BigM as we want to build a Duxton 35 (with an extra dining/alfresco extension out the back, and some other more minor modifications).
With 2 young kids (4 & 1.5) it looks a great design for what we want.
We're getting our existing house in Blackburn North removed in the next 1-2 months, then BigM will do their site & survey, and come back with a full quote.
We're already technically at tender with another volume builder, but given their prices went way up from their original quote, and they won't negotiate on some ridiculous costs, we're prepared to shop around.
Thankfully we're not in a mad rush - we have somewhere to move in to during build.

We've had the usual prelim quote with some of our changes, and really the only big unknowns at this point are the site costs and the electrical.
I am personally interested in what things people have got done afterwards for cheaper, so that we can consider holding back some components to save some money.
We're getting flooring (fake wood stuff) as part of a current deal, so will put that in for now, and perhaps replace with hardwood in a few years when the kids have probably destroyed it!!

- Have read a few people have just done the prep work for evap cooling and installed after themselves, which sounds like a good option.
- Someone else managed to get their own electrician in to run some cabling - is that allowed?
I've run a lot of data cabling before, and so I know how simple & cheap it is, and I'm almost scared to ask how much M will charge us, but was told we find that out only at the electrical appointment
Running 4x cat6 cables from point A to point B will likely cost me 4 x a single cat6 cable cost with them I assume. And I've seen their Hills distribution systems and personally don't rate them at all.
- will M rough in cables? or just do conduits & blank wall plates? Internal walls I'm planning for cables down extend from the roof, so ideally I want access from roof space straight down to ground floor if possible. Holes & pull line or conduits.
- what about speaker wiring? no issues with a license for that, so can you do your own?
I assume most of these may be at the discretion of the SS, but I'd like to have a plan A (if they're helpful) and a contingency if they're not.
- with lighting, are people getting the down stairs done fully by M, and leaving the top floor for post handover? Or just getting basic batten lights in and upgrading to LED down lights later? I'm not 100% sure on compatibility to be able to do this...
- can you whack in your own internal insulation/sound proofing?
- any issues running your own intercom cabling? DIY system, just needs cable runs. Not sure how much M would appreciate holes in wall frames, but I don't know what's in the space between floors?

Would love to hear from anyone that's done some recent M building, especially with double story, and some rough pricing.

Hi Wimma.

We built with M and have been in about six months now. We went thru the same questions as you, mainly to try and save a bit of money and also why pay someone if you can do yoursleves.

We left the cabling up to M, even though my brother could have done it (an electrician) however we were uncertain of how much access we would have during the build.

With light points, we added to the standard light points downstairs for all the positions for future downlights, and then when we moved in, replaced these with LED's my sparkie brother got for us wholesale. Upstairs we left as standard, because we have access to adding additional light points through the ceiling. Again we're replacing these with LED's and adding additional light points.

With power points, our package was fairly generous at the time (even bedrooms had at least two double power points) so we added a few over the standard ones. I belive since then, they've cut this back to a bear minimum. We put double power points inside all the vanities for things such as tooth brushes, hair dryers, etc. This keeps vanities cleared for the decorative stuff the wives love!

One of the things we really wanted was sound insulation not only between floors, but also between internal walls. Previously we lived in Perth where houses are double brick and internal walls are single brick, so very good for sound isolation between rooms. We included sound batts above family room, theatre and study because there were bedrooms above, but couldn't really justify the expense for the whole area. We thought we'd approach our supervisor about putting in our own sound batts in internal walls at pre-plaster stage and see how we go.

Anyway, we had a really good supervisor and he was OK with us installing our own sound batts at pre-plaster. We bought the tontine polyester sound batts and use a staple gun to fix them inside the studs and noggins. I think we spent about $1500 on these but it did the whole house, ground floor and first floor internal walls. Also, the guys installing the builders sound batts had about 12 bags left over. (They were installing these in the groundfloor ceiling the same weekend I turned up to put the tontine batts in.) Anyways, they said use them so I put these in the other parts of the ground floor celing and even had enough of the tontine batts left to do the rest.

Look, your building contract has a clause that says you're not supposed to be onsite, etc blah-blah, but we all know what happens in reality. In the end it all depends on the relationship with your supervisor. So apart from the sound batts, my brother also ran speaker wires for the home theatre, a HDMI cable for the ceiling mounted projector and also some adiditional cat6 data cables throughout the house, basically following the ones the builder out in. We kept these out of the way of the builders data cabling as well.

Thanks OurLindrum52, appreciate the feedback.
Lights sound like the general way to do things, especially getting the layout right on the ground floor.
Curious as to how they ran the cabling in - did they drill decent sized holes? (20mm? 30mm?) so you could just use that cable to pull through a few more? Did you have any through internal walls between floors? Wondering how they do the tv points also, especially on internal walls, as they say they run the cable to the roof.
Did you have to drill any holes for your wiring/cabling? If so, any issues? I would like to put some surround sound wiring in also, but wasn't sure how to without drilling some holes somewhere.
Realise it will be up to how accommodating the SS is, but makes it difficult to plan what to do if I don't know early on what's possible
Will have to investigate sound proofing/internal insulation a bit more I think.
Where abouts did you build?
Thanks again.

Hi Wimma

I've just gotten back from a long day out at the metr!con office doing my internal and electrical selections. From my experience I would say there is very little that they will let you do/supply yourself (this may change once you're building if you have a good SS, but some things can't be left till then!).

I was hoping to supply my own frameless shower screen (M quoted $1850 for one), tapware and get conduits put in so in the future we can run cables if we decided we wanted to have a smart home.

Shower screens and tapware was a firm no. Apparently if you don't have a shower screen installed its a waterproofing issue and the inspector won't sign off on it - I wan't to look into this a bit further because I don't know if I believe this completely. Same thing with the taps, they said they couldn't just put the plumbing in and cap it because it could lead to issues which would then void their warranty on any of the surrounding areas.

The conduits was probably the most frustrating thing. Whilst they will do conduits they'll charge you an arm and a leg so you may as well just get the data cabling done by then. For each cat6 data cable you get it will cost $115, and the conduit around 110. It seems the more popular/useful the conduit would be the more they charge for it. It get a conduit running from a projector to a TV was quoted at something like $260, and for a wall mounted TV down to the foxtel box/dvd was around $120.

We ended up getting some basic data cabling done by M and will have our hub in the upstairs linen closet so we can do all the upstairs post build. Its not ideal, but better than spending a whole heap on something we don't even know if we want yet.

Lighting we've just fitted out the ground floor and will do upstairs later. We got 20 downlights included in our promotion so used them in the living/kitchen/dining area and will get battens installed in the other downstairs areas and change them over later.

Some quick prices for you are:
Halogen downlight - $105
Led downlight - $200
Ceiling batten - $40
Island bench double powerpoint - $110
double powerpoint - $45
Pay TV - 90
Phone socket - 80


Let me know if there are any other things you're looking to upgrade as we seem to have upgraded almost everything so I should be able to give you a pretty good idea of what some things will cost with M.

Hi jessime, thanks for the info, very helpful!
I'm beginning to see this as the common theme, and I can understand they'd like to bend you over for as much as possible, but doesn't look like there's many options for us other than praying for a reasonable SS.
We got told you may be able to get your own trade person in, but they would have to do as per the plans and M pricing anyway.


So with conduits, did they explain where they put them exactly, and how big (diameter)? Do they run them from top floor all through to bottom? If they did, this would be worth it for me, as I want multiple cat6 runs per room if I can. Or even if they just drill holes.
(actually, would anyone complain if I drilled holes just in noggins? From roof space down to ground floor? That'd be handy too!!)
Else perhaps I get them to do a single cat6 run to all rooms I want networked, and hope like hell I have a reasonable SS, so I can go in just before plaster and run multiple cables through the same holes they drill (again depends on hole size - wonder if they're flexible here...), basically in parallel with theirs. Surely they wouldn't rip them out?? I can see benefits in having 2 or 4 actual cables run to many rooms with AV equipment, but I can't afford to pay 4x$115 for each one
Did you ask if they'd put a pull wire through? Or how much for a dual or quad cat6 run perchance?
Thinking if I can get multiple cat6 runs, I could prob avoid multiple paytv points. But on Pay tv, was that a single cable? I know at least some sat boxes require 2xRG6 lines. $90 doesn't sound that bad. Do they leave it in the roof space to cable up later? Same as regular TV point?
Still undecided on wall mounting TVs. Have in our current home, but that's really because we had a fireplace. Hoping we'll have enough room (going from ~13sq to ~38sq I hope so!!) to sit TVs on a little cabinet that houses the AV gear anyway. Still to be worked out


Interesting - how will you do this? I thought it would be difficult to even drill down through the noggins on the top floor, assuming you'd want cat6 points near the floor? Would love to hear more on this - I would like to put in a bucket load of cat6 up stairs too, and was going to put a run up into the roof anyway.


This is sounding quite common now, and I can see why from the prices you listed!!
$40 batten sounds good. I assume they only have these in the plaster, and not actual ceiling battens/beams? Not sure what that means for hanging a heavy pendant light later??
What was the promotion you're referring to? I'll have to check ours. Don't recall any free D/Ls unfortunately


Thanks! Awesome to see current pricing.


Haha, lots
Still want to put in speaker cabling myself too, but again may just chance it with the SS to do myself, and worst case just do the top floor rumpus myself after. Would be great to do the downstairs rooms also though, just in case I want to use later. And maybe prep for a projector
Thanks again, much appreciated!

It seems as though the last post to this thread was some time ago. I hope that's not a sign that not many people are building with M3tric0n these days!!

I was wondering if there was anyone out there in Sydney who has recent information on upgrade prices for M3tric0n? In particular i'm interested in upgrading the standard 20mm ceasarst0ne benchtop to the 40mm and 2-pac cupboards to the kitchen. My husband and I have fallen in love with the Soho and are starting to put together numbers now that we have sold our house and these two upgrades are on my 'essential' list.

TIA