Pre-Start Haggling

My neighbour and I were comparing progress notes the other day. He described the pre-start process as one of “contrived extortion”. What a great term. I am beginning to understand what he means.

When we attended the pre-start process, we were all optimistic, enthusiastic and excited to be finally customising our own house. So we loaded up. Imelda Marcos had less shelves than us in her shoe cupboard. Perth Airport had a scruffier helipad than us. You get the idea. We thought that if the builder was so big and established, then we would get trade costs passed down to us, or get things that were not on display in a Bunnings aisle. How wrong we were.

After reviewing our 100K of additional fluff, mostly attributed to the ‘Hamptons’ look, we are now of the opinion that we aren’t going to get any value for money out of the pre-start process. What we have already got though, is the means to research a list of items that we can decide whether to do now or do later. Every variation from ‘Standard, builder’s range’ seems to be costlier than if it was included after handover. Each addition has a secret specification and uplift cost that the builder guards with their trowel, in an attempt to stop us investigating the possibility of doing it ourselves.

Take the cupboard doors for example. Hamptons, of course. 25K for the kitchen alone. 37K if you include the bathrooms, powder and laundry. Just the doors, not the cabinetry. No knobs or handles. These are MDF vinyl-coated doors. The exact sizes are put into a computer, a machine cuts them and another sucks the vinyl onto them. They are white and smooth. They have not been hand inscribed with text from the Rosetta Stone, or individually painted by Michael Angelo.

I asked for a breakdown of the estimator’s quotation. Nope, denied – that would show the uplift a little too clearly. So I got out the plans and listed each door shown. I sized each door to the millimetre and costed each one online at e-Kitchens, a WA company specialising in cabinets, frames, doors, drawers and bench tops. A spreadsheet was created and accumulated along the way, making costings easier to compile. The results were astonishing. After cataloguing and costing 54 individual cupboards, drawers and doors, I could hardly believe that the kitchen came out at a mere 6.5K. The other rooms pushed the quote up to 9.6K. So, over 27K less than the builder’s fantasy novel of a quote. Twenty-seven thousand dollars. I could get a wine cellar for that.

To save 27K, here’s what we would need to do:

1. Choose the builder’s standard cupboards, drawers and doors, in a standard colour and finish (zero additional cost.)
2. Wait for the builder to install everything.
3. Take each item off the hinges.
4. Number and measure each item.
5. Send an order online to the kitchen door company.
6. Receive our shipment, pre-cut, covered and pre-drilled to suit the existing hinges.
7. Screw everything onto the hinges.
8. Throw the builder’s stuff in the skip bin.

Judith wants to sell all the old cupboards, but I’ve been looking on gumtree and second-hand kitchen cabinetry is as cheap as chips. I guess we could have a garage sale from our garage with additional non-standard white painted Hamptons look garage door that we paid an extra $1,118 for.

We intend to visit kitchen ‘specialists’ and talk to ‘consultants’ today. I’ll let you know how we go. If we like what we see, we might try to apply some trimming elsewhere to get that 100K down even more. Cheers!