Initial contact from Metricon - let's get things underway!

Got back from Mt Hotham on the weekend to find a pile of letters - junk mail, bills, and one from Metricon dated July 9. This letter just stated that the deposit had been received, paperwork is underway, and a CSC would contact us "soon" to organise some appointments! Of course, "CSC" = Customer Service Consultant, so let's just hope that the first two words actually mean something! What we need to do is figure out who we liase with to make any further changes to our house... in particular...

Over the last week in Hotham, surrounded by plenty of snow, I did read up a little about water, and how rates/bills etc would pile up as all the water companies increase their charges by up to 60% over the next 2 years! Monopoly, Duopoly, Multi-opoly?

All new homes have to be at least 5 star energy efficient (how this is rated I have no idea) but from what I know, the new house has to have either solar hot water or a water tank. Most project home builders choose to incorporate solar hot water, and M is no exception. They do offer to install a water tank as an upgrade, but even our sales consultant reckons you should do it after handover for a better price. However, I do want to find out how much it will be to "pre-plumb" the house for a water tank - so we can easily add in a water tank later, and importantly have the water usable inside the house, and not just for the garden (eg for toilet flushing). This would require some sort of plumbing from the roof to the tank, and then from the tank to the toilets... and a pump of some kind? Yep, I need to do some more research here - or can any readers please add a comment?

We're also wanting to re-arrange the laundry door as described by a reader of the blog (thanks again!) and also arrange the powder room so that the sink and toilet are in the one small room, rather than having the sink on the outside. I'm on my laptop so I don't have the drawing I did of this variation, but will add it to the next update. Also realising right now how uncomfortable a laptop keyboard is compared to my big ergonomic keyboard on the server!

Anyway, we'll probably arrange another tour of Studio M, mainly to pick up all the samples and try to pin down colour choices, and also drop by Beaumont again in Oakleigh sometime. And of course, the spectre of unknown site costs is still keeping me awake at night, so the sooner we get some firm answers on this, the better!