Home Options: A review

Now that we have almost completed speccing our Sandringham,  it is a good time to review Eden Brae's process.

Day 1
1. Home Options – external and internal colour selection including brick and tile selection, front door, garage door, door furniture, cornice and skirting
3. Kitchen Culture – kitchen, laundry and bathroom cabinetry
4. Cook's Plumbing – toilets, basins, bath, tap ware, kitchen appliances
5. Actron Air – Airconditioning

Day 2
6. Home Smart Innovations – electrical
7. General Stairs – staircase
8. DiLorenzo – tiles, carpet and other flooring options

In our view the DiLorenzo appointment should be earlier in the process. It makes more sense to design the interior from the floor up and if you are looking at hardwood strip flooring, a 40mm allowance is required which will change the height of the kitchen cabinets due to Eden Brae's practice of installing the kitchen first – on the slab. Eden Brae do recommended a visit to PGH (to select bricks and roof tiles) and DiLorenzo before the Day 1 appointment.

We also took along our good friend Robyn Cote from Inspired Interiors. Robyn has a great eye and we really value her advice. Robyn is a colour consultant, kitchen and bathroom designer and interior decorator who has also project managed large renovations which has given her a very sound understanding of the construction process.

Home Options
Our first meeting was with Sarah at Home Options. Sarah was friendly, knowledgable, fun and a pleasure to deal with. Sarah understood very quickly the design style that we wanted to achieve and was able to add value to the selection process. We have also found Sarah to be very responsive post our meetings in providing advice and answering questions.

Kitchen Culture
At Kitchen Culture we met Mary Anne who worked with us to design our kitchen and bathroom cabinetry. We went into the meeting with mood boards from desktop research and some draft elevations i.e. we had some clear thoughts on a design direction. We are still in the process of finalising the design as we had to wait on our choice of flooring to confirm the height of the bench tops. Following our initial meeting, we have also asked Kitchen Culture to cost laundry cabinetry which we are thinking of doing ourselves depending on the cost.

Cook's Plumbing
Next up was Peta at Cook's plumbing who explained to us our standard inclusions and took us through upgrade options for toilet suites, vanities, tap ware in the bathrooms, plus kitchen appliances. We did not have an allowance for any upgrades but we did make a small number of changes. Nothing was too much trouble for Peta and we found her to be extremely helpful especially in researching some options for the powder room.

Home Air
By the time we got to Home Air, we were running late! I think Glenn was a little frustrated at first due to our lateness (fair enough) but once he realised that we knew a bit about Actron's AC systems, as we have one in our current home, he was more relaxed.

Home Smart Innovations
Craig took as through our electrical plan using an excellent online tool by Clipsal, that mapped lights, switches etc on our plans. The plan was linked to a costing model that quoted the electrical plan in real time as elements were added. Very impressive workflow and made the whole process very simple. Costings came in just under our allowance. Craig is great bloke and loves a chat.

General Stairs
The stairwell in the Sandringham is immediately visible on entering through the front door, so we wanted to make it a feature. We had an allowance in our tender price to upgrade the stairs, so we were keen to see if the allowance was sufficient. The General Stairs website was very useful in understanding the key terms used in specifying stairs (e.g. closed, cut and mono string, closed v open rise etc) and has a helpful gallery. At the Home Options gallery, General Stairs had a useful display to further explain options for the purpose of costing the staircase.

DiLorenzo
If you are planning a visit to DiLorenzo on a weekend to do some initial research, be prepared for a bit of chaos! It's a mad house with people like us asking the same questions e.g. What tiles/carpet are standard inclusions for (insert builders name)? What is our allowance for tiles? How much is that? How much is this one? What about this one?…total mayhem! If you can take some time off work and make a mid-week visit it is definitely worth it. We took Robyn along and by the time our scheduled appointment came around we had a clear idea on our direction and only had the ensuite floor tile and powder room tiling to finalise.

At our Day 2 appointment with Isabelle we had the pleasure of meeting Jack and Sally DiLorenzo and had a great chat with Jack about family, the early days of DiLorenzo and enjoying every day. Jack is an absolute gentleman and Sally was spritely and engaging.

Isabelle was a huge help in helping us finalise the ensuite and powder room. Isabelle's knowledge and passion for tiles was evident and to her credit, she admitted that her knowledge on timber flooring was limited. We had an allowance in our tender price for timber flooring but we quickly discovered that it was not enough. In addition we did not include an allowance in our tender price for tile or carpet upgrades which in hindsight was an oversight.

DiLorenzo's hardwood floor costing was in our opinion overpriced. A quick call to Amy who is our Eden Brae CSO confirmed that Eden Brae will handover the project without the timber floor so we are able to investigate using our own suppliers.

DiLorenzo's initial tiling quote lacked detail, showing a breakdown by room only. On request a more detailed breakdown was supplied.