The Minton: Ideas and Renovation – 49 – Post Mortem: Lessons Learned Part A

Lessons learned during the approximately 7 months we spent in preliminary home renovation discussions to deciding who to go with to key collection and defect rectification and finally to the actual renovation project itself.

Start planning early

As these things go, many homeowners routinely start developing general ideas once they’ve signed to purchase a new home years before the apartment project gets completed. The floor-plan supplied within the new apartment brochures will also help give a sense of scale – and in our case @ The Minton, the floorplans we got years before key collection were reasonably proportionate to actual measurements that I extrapolated from our floorplan. We were thus able to determine approximately correct dimensions of our various rooms well before key collection, and gave us a reasonably accurate floor plan to designers to propose.

Ball park; here are the key periods in our detailed planning:

Time taken to produce first version of detailed project scope and send invitations to quote/propose: 2 days

Time taken to meet/discuss/communicate with approximately 12 designers (one round of discussions): 3 full weekends (6 days)

Time taken in face-to-face first round of discussions: typically between 45 to 60 minutes per designer

Time taken for designers to revert with first drafts of itemized proposals and quotations: between 2 days to 3 weeks

Time taken in face-to-face second round of discussions (detailed with some discussion of materials and also review of first proposal drafts): typically around 2 hrs per designer

All in, a good gauge of how much time you’d take to start detailed planning to deciding on one (or shortlist a few) designers for site visits and measurements is about 2 months at least, with a 3 month period being reasonably comfortable. Anything substantially longer than that might lead to consequences on quotation validity periods. So, working backwards, once you have a sense of when your key collection month or week is scheduled – e.g. in April – then a good time to start detailed planning would be in January.

Expect and be receptive to changes

Our first home @ The Rivervale required very little renovation. All we did was re-painting, replacement of key sanitary appliances in the toilets, installation of grills, refurbishing of parquet floors, and general cleaning. The furniture we had were all purchased off-the-shelf or hand-me-downs from our extended families. Our new home @ The Minton was a much more extensive renovation project in comparison, especially in consideration of the amount of customized furniture our designer had to design and fabricate. While designers are able to work off floorplans, there will be lots of things that will need to be seen, observed and checked in person towards producing an itemized renovation proposal that’s both accurate and complete for you to sign on. And materials sometimes don’t work well or blend with each other. In other cases, what you want can be constrained also by dimensions of appliances you’d like, e.g. of washing machines and dryers. In other words, expect a lot of changes!

Of course, if you’re happy with proposed renovation packages before key collection, signing first and trusting your assigned designer to figure it all out later, then this wouldn’t matter. Interestingly, several of our Minton neighbors went by this route, selecting their ID and signing off their packages before they collected keys. That wasn’t something we were comfortable with. In fact, one of the key decisions we made early on was that we would not sign until our designer had seen the place, done his own measurements, and matched every proposed item against our own actual measurements. Sure, the process was slower and energy-sapping, but it did allow us to sign off on a price that we knew would be less vulnerable to changes because of project scope creep.

Use technology

It’s not just the tools to keep track of our project scopes and general comparisons between quotation packages and also communication tools, but also relying on online resources. While we found our eventual selected ID by chance, the initial invitation to send renovation proposals via Renotalk was really helpful in providing a sense of what the renovation package was going to cost us, ballpark. Though the various renovation portals typically boasted that their designer respondents amounted to a few dozen, we actually had about just six of them revert back to us though.

More in the continuing post.