2. Colours

The 'Colours' Appointment

Doing the colours always seems a pivotal moment for new home builders. This is generally the first time visiting the builders HO and first real contact with the pre-start consultant, who holds your hand all the way through every process until building starts. It's also decision time - you have to make most of the decisions to determine the look & feel of your home. 

This would be a different experience with a volume builder than if you had an architect, where you can pick & choose from any source. In my case, like so many others, you're limited to the materials, brands & colours that the builder has on offer. It is possible to source from a 3rd party but from what I've seen, it's quite a pain - certainly not something the builder wants to encourage. They do this as much for containing risk as anything else. Putting in a 3rd party dependency which the builder doesn't directly control adds schedule risk, cost risk, quality risk not to mention the legal liability issues. I don't much like it, but I can see why they do it.

Colour Selection Process

I've been very lucky so far with my contacts at Boutique. My sales & pre-sales people, Dale & Rolinka have been terrific. With bigger companies, it's luck of the draw if you get good people allocated to your job or not, so touch wood for the next phases. 

Let me start by saying I'm just not really into the light & bright obsession that seems to dominate magazines & a lot of design drivers. Perhaps it because I'm prone to migranes from bright light or maybe I just like it dark & cozy. I might sacrifice some sense of space but the rooms all seem plenty big enough for me as is.

For those not familiar with the process, you get one appointment, morning selectinmg the colours and after lunch selecting electricals (socket & switch placement, lighting, etc). Boutique have a pretty good set of options with some notable exceptions (more later on this).

It's all a bit helter-skelter. There are others in there at the same time & it's quite a rush to get through all of the selection topics within the time constraint. There are also constraints placed on the development by the developer, eg I have to have low profile roof tiles & you there can't be more than two(?) houses in the same street with the same facade & design. How you're supposed to do that without seeing everyone else's plans ahead of time, I don't know. Guidelines for fencing & minimum trees etc in the front yard are very specific & extensive, at least where I'm building. eg a double-garage is mandatory, regardless of size of block or actual need.

Exterior Choices

Options for things like bricks, renders, garage doors etc were very standard new-devlopment fare. 

Exterior Selections

Flooring

I'm quite allergic to dust mites so no carpet at all for me. I went in set on selecting a bamboo floor - solid wood was a bit beyond the budget I had set myself. I was dissapointed at the poor choice of bamboo floors available, only two & I didn't like either. Surprised that Boutique said they get very little demand for bamboo. I reluctantly settled on a laminate floor throughout, but quite like the colour & texture. 

Kitchen Materials

Paints

Boutique use Solver paints, so that's the choice. Solver have no merged with Wattyl but for some reason, you can't choose Wattyl.

I went with a dark grey-blue for most walls in the house. Ceiling & skirting birds will be white. Boutique don't do feature walls, so I might paint an odd wall here & there myself later on for a bit of variety. I selected a light colour for bed 2 & bed 3, and a darkish grey for the music room walls.

A couple of months later I found a Solver dealer & got some sample pots to paint up some larger cards. Happy with the colours except for the music room grey, which turned out to be a paper-bag brown colour, not grey at all. I was able to select a different colour, test it & got it changed in the contract in time to avoid the variation fee.

I'll take some pics of the sample cards & insert them here.

Bathroom Finishes

The feature strip is a bit misleading in this pic, it's only two of those mini-tiles wide & runs the full height of the shower tiling (floor to ceiling), all the rest of the tiling will be the black (there I go again!).