When you start working on a renovation or building project, you realise fairly quickly that a builder sometimes seem to speak their own private language. It can be a bit intimidating to stop them mid flow to ask what they’re talking about so, I thought I’d provide a handy guide to some commonly used building phrases. Rosetta Stone isn’t offering a course yet, but I think they should!
If you’re anything like me you’ve got a long list of things you’d like to do to your house one day. These could be anything from replacing the carpet (I didn’t get the right underlay and it irritates me every day) to renovating the kitchen to adding a second storey. These are all great changes, but they can get pretty exxy and sometimes those big changes just have to stay in the “one day” pile for now. However, there are definitely some simple things you can do this weekend to help you love your home in the present, which after all, is where you’re living.
JD recently received an email from a customer who was not happy that there had been a “massive cost blowout” on their project. While the cost of the project was now larger than originally anticipated, this was because there had actually been a “massive scope of works blowout”. That is, as the job had gone one, they’d asked for more work to be done.
Warning: please be aware that this post discusses depression and suicide
I wasn’t expecting this. Sitting up in bed last Saturday morning with a cup of tea and a freshly buttered hot cross bun, I was flicking through the paper when I came across the lead story in Good Weekend (the magazine insert). It was about the tragically high suicide rate among tradesmen in Australia. Every second day, a Australian tradie commits suicide and they are six times more likely to die by their own hand than through a workplace accident. I turned to my own tradie – enjoying his morning coffee – and gave him a big hug.
Let me tell you a story. It’s a cautionary tale and one you should pay attention to if you’re thinking about a renovation. Especially a big renovation.
Once upon a time, we were watching Grand Designs (well, just the other night) when we suddenly realised the featured house was currently for sale, in fact, my sister had pointed it out to me a couple of months ago. You see, in addition to cooking, sewing and reading my other hobby is looking at real estate – usually in Hobart, where we have vague dreams of retiring one day. One of my sisters lives down there and she occasionally flicks me houses I might be interested in. This one was listed at $5million plus, putting it not only in “total fantasy” territory for us but also at the top of the range for Tasmanian real estate in general.
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?
How’s your week been? I was lucky enough to have a couple of fabulous meals out and am currently visiting family in Tasmania – so much fresh air and good food. Not to mention the joy of staying at Coast House.
Here’s what I’m loving this week.
Wallpaper and fabric heaven. Make sure you look at everything!
Pulled pork in the oven. I’ll be skipping the liquid smoke though.
Has the architect blown your budget? Read this.
Gorgeous pre-fab house in fabulous Palm Springs. Want.
“How much does a kitchen renovation cost?” is a question that JD hears pretty frequently. And the answer, as with many things in building is, “it depends.” It depends on how much you want to spend – do you want a flat pack kitchen or custom joinery? Do you want a laminate benchtop or natural stone? Do you want European appliances or are you happy with cheaper, Chinese-made varieties? And these days, there’s really no end of things to spend your money on in kitchens – steam ovens, warming drawers, built-in coffee machines and very, very expensive fridges.
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.
When I was growing up, kitchen benchtops came in one variety – Laminex. If you were fancy you had bull-nosed edges (we didn’t) and if your house was from the 50s it probably had a groovy metal edge to it. Oh, those were simple times! These days there are a ton of kitchen bench materials to choose from across every price point and application. Here are seven to consider.