Million dollar home in Perth

Architect designed home to maximise natural heating and cooling. Insulated outer walls and roof space, Grey water storage , Solar panels, Glazed windows and Eaves designed to minimise heat creep where needed. Really that is all one can do then pay 5000 to get it professionally certified and hope for the best possible rating unless someone is willing to look into alternative material like rammed earth or insulated boards instead of double brick. With the rating, the designer or the builder cannot guarantee a certain rating , as long as minimum requirements are met it is deemed to be a 6 star rated house which may not always be true.

Thanks Antonio most of the builders are providing a CAD walk through and to be honest, taking pictures of an existing house and stitching them would give an accurate 3d walk through but what you are proposing is a close to the real deal which I am guessing is based on the material spec sheet provided to you and pictures from suppliers website. of said materials. Undoubtedly it will help people visualise instead of looking at a small floor tile or paint swab but at this juncture I am not sure I will be needing your services however I will ping you if I change my mind.

Ok so after weeks of research, meetings and more research, we have selected Riverstone as the builders. The key criteria were Reputation, Past client satisfaction index, Build and design quality , Fixed price contracts, Number of homes built in our budget, Value for money. I assigned points to each of these criterias to get a total score against potential builders , a sort of weighted average. All the names discussed here previously were within 1% of each other in the first four criterion. Riverstone were ahead by about 5% in the last two.

While the criterion chosen were impersonal, obviously since I was the one doing the scoring the scores do reflect my personal opinion based on my due diligence. There are two other things which could impact someone's decision One is architect vs draftsman as an in house resource because all of them have outsource architects available if the client needs it but only 3 of them have in house architects and only 1 of them had the architect in the meeting. Second is the cost to the lead up to the signing of the contract varies between 10 to 15% of total build price between builders and since prior to contract signing the banks will not be involved, or in my case they are not, that outlay may be significant. But these two factors did not really matter all that much to me so were not a part of my decision making process.

I hope that helps someone out and feel free to PM me with any questions. Once we are at the contract signing stage I shall post back my experience. The property is rented out till April so demolition will happen in May and construction sometime after that.

Hi

The slab and pool is down, underground plumbing is done and brickworks to commence week after next. So far the experience has been very good. Exactly as promised except for a 60k price rise even though I was told there will be no increase in price quoted verbally which I should have taken in writing. But then Mark, the director came to our place and showed us their costings compared to last year so we decided to continue the build instead of pulling out. I shall update this thread with the final outcome when it is completed

I am not sure what you mean by you didnt have the costings before you started the quoting process. I had no idea what a brick wall costs going into the quote and even after the house finishes I still will only have a vague idea. The quote not only gave individual costings but also suggested things that we can do ourselves toi reduce total costs like flooring, WIR, pool, list, fireplace..all of which we have sourced ourselves. Warranties are given in the contract, build is guaranteed to be completed in one year or the builder pays 1000 dollar a week till completed this is in the contract, after the price increase contract has been amended to state no further price increase for the build under any circumstances. This is not a project build, custom builders rely mostly on ongoing referrals and goodwill is what makes or breaks them. The builder in question takes on no more than 30 builds a year and has zero negative feedback anywhere online. I am sure they would like to keep it that way instead of intentionally screwing up one build which is why I chose them.

I certainly hope your fears are unfounded. I am more a glass half full kind of a person and a doctor to boot . Keep an eye on this post. I shall definitely be posting back if things go sideways and will be posting back if things turn out good. If they go bad you can say I told you so but if they turn out good don't say you just got lucky

Well good news, bricks are on site and brick layers have started a week before schedule. at least I think that is good news.. I am sure you do not, specially now . Well I trusted Riverstone, paid their 60k extra. Like I said , there is a difference between project and custom builders. But if it doesn't go well , I lose a few hundred thousand and they lose their business which is what I was telling you structuralBIMGuy, at this scale of the market, poor build quality and bad work will shut down the company .. well if they make a mess of mine, I will work very hard on making that happen . But I am keeping a very close eye on the build mate just as you suggested and shall report back