Things you forget - summary page 32

When upgrading ceiling on ground floor, don't forget to lift the exterior wall light height. I have seen a few homes forget this and it looks really low from the outside of home. Often missed in electrical review.

Not sure if this had been mentioned, but try out the bath. I don't bath so don't know about such things, but my wife loves to lie in the bath and says that the shape of the new bath is really uncomfortable for her.
So actually get into it and try it out before you order!

To get my windows coloured!

We upgraded to special acoustic and thermal laminate glass upstairs to prevent extra heat and noise in a 2 storey house HOWEVER, due to the construction you cannot tint these. So now we have very clear glass straight into our bedrooms.

Not a show stopper but annoying and the first major mistake we have made. We should have had those upgraded comforthush windows dark coloured rather than clear.

steel would you mind sharing why your windows can't be tinted please? We have ordered double glazing with (seemingly) the same specs as you for our 2 storey and they've not provided frosted glass to the bathrooms, the answer from the builder was to tint these!!

Double Glazing is different to Laminate in that Double Glazed refers to a vacuum between two panes whereas laminated glass is two panes of glass with an intermediary product between the two. Its not recommended to tint laminate in general as far as I can tell for Laminate because it can create hot spots.

On top of this, the ComfortHush has a low E coating applied to the interior of the windows so that would be damaged.
My only option is external tinting which is reflective only and far more expensive to achieve.

I would speak with a glazier but I would suspect you can get double glazed windows tinted after the fact with less issues. Assuming its standard glass.

We are just about to start our 2nd build and are still referring back to this page, it's a goldmine!

One little thing that is a big deal to me is the grout in the tiles. I am not sure if it's just me but I definitely prefer smaller grout lines, and as usual, if it's not mentioned and in the contract its very difficult to change!

That sounds great. keep it up...

tile gap is more closer when u go for rectified tiles as my understanding goes. 600 x600 rect tiles will have smaller as rectified tiles will have fine edges and they are able to lay them close and grout lines will be smaller...

One thing that we forgot and one thing we regret not getting.

Dusted vacuum thought the house and hebel power floors.

Very situational on Ducted Vacuum. I personally dont rate it and wouldnt get one. We have one in our current house.

It definitely wouldn't replace the main vacumn in the house but it will make the quick clean up easier.

I know five people that have them in their homes and they all say that a ducted vacuum is the best thing ever. Four of them have two storey houses and they keep a hose on each level.
We're installing one in our upcoming build as well.

Stewie

or instead save tons of money and get yourself a couple of vac robots instead. They are very good those days.

Ducted vacuums will be gone really soon, same as TV antenna, same as phone lines - those are good things to NOT put into a new build.

Give some second thinking re NBN too as with 5G Mobile Internet it will lose competition quickly too.

Hi, we have used laminated glass in most of our windows, as part of the double glazing system. So for example our main living area windows/door are 6.38mm clear lam with a 14mm air (argon) gap and then a 4-5mm toughened glass pane on the inside.

We wanted the clear laminate to provide a bit more noise suppression and also block most of the UV light coming in. We have used grey tinted laminate on two East side bedrooms plus our main south facing bedorom, and although I agree it could be problematic (with hot spots) we hope that no issues appear on these partiuclar windows.

Where we have tinted on the west side we just went with standard toughened grey tint within the double glazing unit.

One thing we recently discovered was the shelving height in the robes for our boys bedrooms was set @1660mm. We didn't realise this was the builder's standard height, and when I raised the robe door heights to be 2340mm (instead of standard 2040mm door height) I imagined the shelving to be up around 1800-1900mm.

Anyhow this was an oversight, in that if you raise the robe door heights make sure you let the builder know what height you want the top shelf in your robes to be set at.

Don't rub it in.

Surely it can’t beat the new Cordless Dyson on each floor.

Good point. Worth also mentioning to add an extra high shelve in the WIL and pantry etc.

Another point is if you habe WIR in each of the bedrooms and you have draws, make sure they are not impact when the doors on the WIR is open.

We've got a Dyson V10 downstairs and a Xiaomi Roborock S50 upstairs.... Great combination

Because we have the wool blended carpet, a few push of the vacumn and it's full.

Question for everyone, how is the robotic cleaner in solid floorboards? As we have French oak timber it's soft and I am concern that it will scratch the floors.