The Minton: Ideas and Renovation – 50 – Post Mortem: Lessons Learned Part B

Continuing from the last post.

Be firm yet polite

There’s a poster at the NTUC Fairprice supermarket check-out counters that remind us that even as store customers, we should try to be polite to the checkout cashiers and that they reserve the right not to serve us if we are abusive. They are, after all, only trying to do their jobs.

While our unit as far as we could tell was in a reasonably good state already upon handover and our defect identification and rectification was handled both by a (very!) responsible customer service officer (CSO) and also defect team lead, we observed many neighbors who weren’t quite so blessed. That, alongside the very long key issuing process and the overly optimistic key release projections that were circulating around last year has meant lots of homeowners have had to keep postponing their own plans, or at least keep it nimble as their key collection dates were changed or pushed back. Unhappy residents either way as a result, and that’s in turn seem to lead to heated disputes. A couple of residents have also talked about getting their lawyers to send notices to rectify without further delay to the developer.

On one occasion, we witnessed a heated exchange between a resident and the Managing Agent officer. While we don’t know what the argument was about, observing that exchange did made me reflect that while situations might not be ideal and we might be at the end of our tether, whether unloading on a poor customer service officer is going to make one feel better.

I found that I had more luck being nice to people all round who were also stakeholders in our new home project. Whether it was the CSO – and I had a lot of emails and phone-calls with her reminding of outstanding defects that had yet to be rectified – or the normally jovial defect team lead, whom I also had to persuade that certain defects should be made good – or the Managing Agent officers, when I persuaded them to expedite some request or another. And my being nice to these various persons have also meant (so far!) that they are equally nice to me.

Enlist help in defect checking

I think there are at least three levels of rigor in defect checking. First up is us as the homeowners. Ling was certainly a lot more eagle-eyed than I was in this. Next are your interior designers and contractors. During the onsite measurements and visits in January, both our shortlisted designers also helped us spot things that would have never occurred to us – e.g. uneven grouting between floor tiles. The professional defect identification companies will of course do the best job at this. It’s their primary line of business, but it would have cost us about a thousand moola for their services. And lastly, there are also online resources and checklists on common defects and things to check for in new homes in Singapore.

Checking progress diligently

We were lucky in that our designer went out of his way to impress us in our home renovation project. He was easily reachable by phone throughout, kept us posted, and his workers seemed to have a healthy degree of respect for his working and communication style (i.e. we required, he conveyed, they obliged without complaint or argument). Even then, we made frequent checks on the state of work done for both the defect rectification phase, and also main renovation project that followed. Part of it has to do of course with my wanting to record through imagery and notes as much as possible this big milestone event of 2014 (our preparing and moving into our new home). The other part of it came from that this was our first ‘real’ and intensive home renovation project, and we were also a little paranoid, after reading all the horror stories on renovation portals and the like. The both of us took turns to make almost bi-daily trips down to the Minton – we were averaging around 4 trips each week – to make notes, spot more defects, try to catch our defect CSO and lead for verbal follow-ups, check on the work done during the main renovation, and to review suggestions made by our designer during which too.

Be circumspect

As tough as this will sound – a good portion (not all) of the defects homeowners get anxious about won’t get noticed once the apartment gets lived in. From my point of view:

Scratches and light dents on the parquet flooring: once our furniture went in, we didn’t have nearly as much bare parquet flooring left to look at. A lot of it was covered up by bedframes, storage, shelving etc.

Light stains on walls/floor/guard railings/windows: can be easily cleaned during defect rectification, but will likely get dirtied again during the main renovation.

Dirty shelving in cabinets/wardrobes: will get dusty and dirtied again during main renovation

As another neighbor pointed out; one could bang the table and demand that the defect team made good scratches and stains on parquet flooring by getting them to resand/revarnish. But it’ll could get undone by main renovation. And if you get the main renovation to resand/revarnish another time, there’s no guarantee that your Movers won’t damage it. And even if you get ‘perfect’ Movers, your kids might do what kids do to flooring at homes – i.e. damage it very quickly.

There are defects though that should definitely be sorted out though, and these would include grouting issues on flooring (these will be very tough and expensive to fix later once the unit is lived in), ponding in toilets (since the tiles might need to be removed and adjusted) and planter boxes, those deep chemical stains that were found on some toilet seats (since these can’t be easily scrubbed off), cracklines, chipping, and appliance (e.g. kitchen) issues.

That’s it for our post-mortem series of reflections for the moment. Once we’ve lived in our unit for a good while longer, we’ll probably return to this thread and share more of our experiences living @ Minton.:)