Experience With Some Ids And Ongoing Renovation

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Hi Bros and Sis,

I have benefitted so much from this forum that it is high time I contributed something back.

From my first unit till now, I’ve used 3 different IDs and I hope to share my experience on them with everyone here.

I renovated my first house in 2001, later our office in 2006, and I am currently renovating my unit which I just received the keys to. I used to rely entirely on the ids, but I realize that with some research and legwork, I can save quite a bit of money if I get some direct contractors for some of the works. Some of the ids I’ve used are reviewed below. Please excuse me if I forgot some details with my older experiences.

Gplan

The person who serviced us is Gordon and he was formally from another company. I think he has since came out to form Gplan.

We first used his services in 2001. That was our first time renovating our home, and we relied quite heavily on him. While his quotation is not the cheapest, we feel most comfortable with him as he was able to point out some things that we did not notice or didn’t know we can do. In the process he was able to help us to save some costs as well. Overall we were very satisfied with his services. What we didn’t like are the folding doors he supplied. We wanted straight edged panels but he supplied those with beveled edge. When he installed it, he say that we cant change since we did not specify it in the beginning. This was the one thing that we feel very sore about through the years. Hence I’ve learnt to be very very specific when dealing with the contractors since then. Every single thing have to be detailed and documented and if there is a drawing, even a rough sketch is better than nothing.

Other than that, we found him to be reliable and experienced. Downside is that his quotes are initially expensive, but he allow us to negotiate on the prices. One of my relative used his services again about 6 months ago and they are quite happy with the results as well. But be prepared to bargain hard.

East Pine

In 2006, we had to move office and my boss found a unit that is bare. We needed to build everything from scratch, the partitions, pantry, everything. George from East Pine came highly recommended and after comparing 3 quotes we decided to give him a try. Before we sign on the dotted line however, we told him the condition is that he had to get the place up and ready in exactly 1 month. We need to move into the new premise by then. George did work fast. In about 3 days, almost all the partitions were up. Next were the trunkings and lighting points. We had a bad experience with his electrician though. He was such a pain in the a**. His bad attitude caused us to have a heated argument with him one day. Other than that, the project went smoothly and everything was up before the deadline.

On the day we moved in however, we noticed that water was leaking out of the false ceiling in the conference room. LEAKING! We initially thought it was the fire systems but on inspection, it was the aircon pipe causing the leak. Our false ceiling was soaked through. Gain City supplied the aircon and apparently they outsourced the installation to some 3rd party contractors who did a shoddy job.

Anyway, George’s follow up was good for the 1st year, but after that he was not so responsive anymore. We needed help with the carpet and even though we were willing to pay for it, he didn’t seem too keen to come back. But we did have the office in time smile.gif

Genova Design

We got the keys to our current place in mid October 09. However, because we had to travel, we had to delay finding a contractor until around mid November.

We contacted 3 companies: Gplan, East Pine, and one that is recommended by a friend, Genova Design.

I couldn’t get George, so we ended up with quotations from Gplan and Genova. John from Genova is a patient guy who went through with us a lot of details, even BEFORE we agreed to engage him. In fact, we felt so comfortable with the way he approach our project that after we left the discussion with him, my wife and I were hoping that his quote would be cheaper than the rest just so that we can just stop the hunt and engage him. Anyway, his quote came quite promptly and was overall slightly cheaper than the other that we were comparing with.

Since we had some experience with renovating our home and office, we knew there are some things which we can bargain for. We spent some time negotiating with John and we finally agreed on a price that is within our budget. We took out some stuffs that we are going to source ourselves and that helped quite a bit. Yay! Finally we can start work on our new project.

The progress thus far has been encouraging. This unit is quite old and badly maintained, and we had to practically hack away everything. Right now, all the hacking's been done and the wetworks are starting.

While we have not seen his final handiwork, we are quite hopeful that it will turn out well. We will keep you guys posted on the progress and will upload some pictures along the way.

In summary, I’ve really learnt that to save serious money, I have to get involved somehow in the whole process and source for suppliers myself and compare their prices with those that the ids have quoted. This may mean that some effort is needed to locate, discuss, and manage these suppliers but the cost savings may justify it. For this latest project, I sourced about 30% of the jobs from direct suppliers and I think its worth the effort. Feel free to PM me if you want to have more details on those.

Thanks for reading!