builders quotes
By alix@thebuilderette.com Building and renovating • Site stories • • • • • • • 10 Comments

What's the story with builders' quotes?

Congratulations – you’ve decided to renovate! If it’s a decent-size job you’ll have plans drawn up, your DA approved and you’ll probably be getting a couple of builders quotes. Ideally, these will be builders that friends or colleagues or maybe your designer has recommended. As you’re navigating your way through this strange new world you’ll be coming across lots of new words and phrases that you may not of used before. Two that you’ll definitely be hearing are “fixed price” and “cost plus” and they’re to do with how the builder charges for his work.

 

So, what’s the difference?

What's the story with builders' quotes? full post

(636 words, estimated 2:33 mins reading time)

choose the builder
By alix@thebuilderette.com Building and renovating • • • • 5 Comments

How to choose the builder that's right for you

A building project or renovation is no small undertaking – there’s money, time and stress to consider. So you want to make sure you’ve got people around you who are going to get the job for the right price, in a reasonable time frame and to a good standard. So, here are five tips to help you choose the builder that’s right for you.

 

Phone a friend

If a friend or colleague has recently done a renovation, ask them what they thought of their builder and the process. If they had a positive experience, that’s a great place to start.

How to choose the builder that's right for you full post

(632 words, estimated 2:32 mins reading time)

By alix@thebuilderette.com Building and renovating • Site stories • • • • • 14 Comments

The reverse curve of happiness

I stumbled across this blog post while trawling the interweb recently and it made me smile (in a pained kind of way). You see, it’s the customer’s version of what JD likes to call The Reverse Curve of Happiness (henceforth known as TRCH).

 

TRCH is easily represented on an XY axis where X represents time and Y represents happiness and the cosin is oh, never mind, I was hopeless at calculus at school and TRCH is really simple to understand without any maths at all. Think of an upside-down bell curve.

 

The reverse curve of happiness full post

(504 words, estimated 2:01 mins reading time)

building defects
By alix@thebuilderette.com Building and renovating • • • • 7 Comments

How to deal with building defects

Yippee! Your renovation or building project is finished and you are ready to start enjoying your new bi-fold doors/bathroom/open-plan kitchen and family room/insert dream project here! Hopefully everything went well and you and the builder are still on good terms (we enjoyed an Australia Day party at a customer-turned-friend’s place this year).

 

Time for some #realtalk. Building doesn’t always go to plan and sometimes, once the job’s finished there are some defects that need to be rectified. Yeah, that’s a bummer but hey, life isn’t all unicorn meat with sparkle gravy so let’s talk about the best way to deal with building defects and how to get them fixed.

How to deal with building defects full post

(810 words, estimated 3:14 mins reading time)