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While my grilles have been giving me a headache for last one week, the “borders” of windows, door and exterior wall is bugging me for weeks. They can’t make a straight, clean-cut border. Instead I get lop-sided, uneven and mismatched shapes that makes things look worse.

Then, I have a space for washing machine which may not fit my washing machine. They never allocated space for the piping (outlet) and now I’ll have the outlet jutting out (if ever it can fit there in the first place). May have to sacrifice the wooden door to extend the washing machine space.

Of course it won’t be fair if I say all their work was bad. There are some plus points which will be posted after this. Need to take the pictures, not that there’s many of them.

The contractors says will try to fix some of the problems on Friday, but I doubt they’ll do a proper job.

Killer says:

Poobalan

It is well known trade secret that the contractors make a killing on renovation rather than construction of houses. There is a sort of unholy alliance between developers and renovators. The developers entice buyers by offering cheaper houses but that has vey basic fittings and finishings. Then they drive us into renovators who bleed us dry. The common tactic of renovators is to quote a low price and then hike it up as they go along by showing higher quality and better looking fittings. In almost 90% of the cases the house owner end up spending more than what they planned and budgetted.

Another tactic is to use low skill workers and drag the renovation process by using the same workers for several projects at the same time.

That is why it is always advisable to buy a house that has been occupied and fully renovated. It might not feel good as it is “second-hand” house but that is just a psychological block.

Posted on August 28th, 2008

poobalan says:

well, in my case, the renovation contractor is someone not connected to the developer. in fact my house is the first project he is doing in that area. he is just a small scale contractor who i thought can do a proper job, being recommended by another friend.

Nowadays, many people prefer to buy their own fittings from all kinds of sources and just pay contractor for wet works, electrical, landscaping etc.

i just did some tiling work using indonesian (legal ones of course) workers. i bought the materials – cement. sand, tiles etc myself. Far more cheaper (55% of my original contractor’s quotation).

as i mentioned – its due to greed – want to finish work fast and move on to the next project. but since my renovation got stuck, he is having problem managing his newer projects.

Posted on August 28th, 2008