If you can’t have a laugh, it’s just going to drive you crazy. This is normal right? How is it that we are still continuing to find things to change in this tender. It has to be some kind of sickness that one develops when building a house. To be fair, this is going to be our “forever home” any structural changes we make to it that cannot be undone needs to be strongly considered.
The process of making changes to the tender is the most excruciatingly slow part of the journey so far. Almost every change that we have made so far has taken at least a week sometimes two weeks to be applied to our tender. So now here we are in Revision 5 which will hopefully be the final tender BUT there is one thing that we have overlooked and it’s quite a big oversight. We decided to extend the kid’s bedrooms out by 500mm also taking the first floor living room out by 500mm width and extra 500mm length. Looking at the floor plans issued by Masterton I noticed that there is note on the Elevation B & C which has “TIMBER BATTENS ON FC SHEETING” and we were horrified that had missed during the initial discussion. We do recall that it was mentioned and we were given assurance that the FC sheeting have come along way in terms of thermal benefits yada yada… I quickly Googled what timber battens on fc sheeting is and all I can say is that we were not a fan. So we had to decide whether we will look at the upgrade to all bricks and whether we had the funds to cover to cover the upgrade. Doing a very rough calculation on the number of bricks required on 50sqm walls, it was coming out at around $6000 not including the extra support beams to bear the load of the extra bricks above the living areas. ***Sigh***
I could not believe that we missed this especially when we thought we had considered all the structural changes earlier in the process. I’m not suggesting that fibre cement sheeting is inferior to bricks, for us it just didn’t feel like it was aesthetically pleasing and both walls with cladding are the girl’s bedrooms. Elevations C & B are north & east facing so we thought that this would impact them in the summer. In the end, we chose to upgrade to all bricks on the first floor and had to make sure the funds will be available to cover this. A rookie mistake which cost us a little under $10k to amend. The garage and bedroom extensions as well as this brick upgrade has cost us approximately $18,500 which is an amount that we didn’t have in our budget but we had to find it because we believed that it was something that cannot be done post handover. Prioritise the changes that can only be done during the build especially when working on a tight budget. This may result in sacrifices to your upgrades but you really have to consider what is most important to you to justify the costs.
For us the extensions to the garage and bedrooms were a no brainer and is something that we should have done in the very first revision of the tender. Our kids aren’t going to be kids forever and will demand a bigger space as well as privacy, it’s important that we look beyond the next ten years and what that will look like for us.