Miscellaneous Metricon developments

There's a massive Metricon house going up on Doncaster Rd, between Greythorn Rd & Balwyn Rd - you can hardly miss it as there's a big banner advertising "Metricon Building in your Neighbourhood" across the whole block. Looks like bricking is nearly completed.

From what we can tell, they're using Austral 50mm Hawthorn to the facade and 76mm Hawthorn to the rest of the house (what we were going to do to our Nolan as well). Double plus a single garage (damn I envy a wide block!), timber windows. Not sure what house design this is, but someone with more time than me can check all the facades on the website - I think the three sets of timber doors to the first floor is probably the giveaway. I suspect this will be a Metricon display home for a while, as it's on a good exposure location.

Now, we also had a look at the other Metricon house being started near us in Blackburn the other day - this pic below shows one thing they have, that we don't have (or need) - a temporary power pole. Here's a handy hint for all you other people considering redeveloping your site - organise an underground powerpit yourself, and do it as soon as you can!



The reason you should organise your own powerpit is all about money. If you don't organise it yourself, Metricon will organise it for you (at extra cost) and you'll probably have to get a temporary powerpole anyway (for about $1000) as the powerpit takes quite a few weeks to be done. If you get the powerpit organised and installed well before site start, you'll save a few thousand dollars, which is always nice! We also elected for a three phase powerpit, even though we don't need it now, three phase is only about $100 more than two phase power. Maybe in future we'll all be using electric cars that charge quicker/better on 3 phase, or you might want a massive AC unit that requires 3 phase.


Finally, we saw this sign in front of an old house on Balwyn Rd. The picture is of the Metricon Imperial display home on Belmore road. The idea here, is that a potential purchaser buys the finished product - ie the Imperial or similar design, but only pays stamp duty on the existing house/land value. I was trying to work out in my head how it would go down - I'm thinking one standard contract of sale for house & land - let's say for $650k, with government stamp duty calculated on that amount - plus an additional seperate contract for $x, which would cover the final house. The nice thing about this deal for the developer is that you have a guaranteed buyer at the completion of the house, plus depending on how the deal is structured, financing the build is entirely covered - no interest to the bank, plus a handy profit. Redevelopment project are going on all over this area of Balwyn - the difficulty is finding suitable redevelopment sites at a financially viable price, while funding is a secondary problem (yet not as difficult as finding the site!). Anyway, we'd love to get into development, but I think we'll wait until the house is a little more completed!

Had a big night out with the boys playing poker last night, so today we'll go past our site to see if anything was done yesterday (doubtful). Checking on MyMetricon - our slab commencement date has been postponed again to Feb 3rd; most likely because of the short week due to Australia Day. I checked out the leaked result of JJJ Hottest 100, and the top song sucks!

sloke: thanks for advice re water meter; but I'm not sure why I'd even get my meter taken away? Wouldn't M be using it for the duration of the build?

caroline: the neighbours opposite us built a lovely custom house 2 years ago, as their old house burned to the ground after a kitchen fault! yep, insurance is a must!

T&T