Tiles – Charcoal, White and Manhattan​

This blog started out covering all 3 types of floor coverings, but its a little long and detailed so it will just cover the Poter Davis provided floor and wall tiles.

We have decided to do the timber and carpet floors after the house hand over, this means we will be given our house with a bare concrete slab downstairs and particle board floors upstairs. At least the bathrooms and laundry will have their tile floors down.

The tiles we picked at World of Style for the floors are a Cat 2 price range tile called Regina Charcoal.

 

FLOOR TILES

National Tiles provide the tiles for Porter Davis, they have a small range that you can choose from, it’s not their full selection, unfortunately, it’s just the ‘builders choice’ range.

Floor Tile Plan provided by National Tiles from World of Style

Options in our price range.

Our house is not going to be a cheap build and we are spending a lot of money in a lot of areas but tiles just aren’t one of those areas. We set ourselves a budget of $3,000 and because we came in under budget, I got to spend the savings on underfloor heating in the master bathroom.

Top right and bottom left tiles are Cat 3 price range tiles, top left tile is Cat 1 and bottom right is a Cat 2 tile.

We went into our selection day thinking that we would be choosing the top left Cat 1 tile, its called Como Grey, however, there would have been a surcharge for upgrading from a 300mm x 300mm tile to a 450mm x 450mm tile. For tiles Cat 2 and above the larger sizes are already included but you still have to pay extra for levelling up. Dave liked the vein lines on the bottom right tile, and I didn’t mind them because the veins are light and you won’t see the pattern repeat in it very obviously. So that was our choice, it looks different in the photo below – just different lighting.

World of Style are meant to give you samples of your choices so you know the colours and selections you choose on the day. Unfortunately, National Tiles don’t give you samples like they should, they say they don’t have the stock levels to keep samples.

So we didn’t get a sample of our Regina Charcoal from WOS. They say you can order them online, I did this and they never showed up. I went into two different stores and they didn’t have any samples for us. Finally, after 10 weeks I did a last ditch effort and got myself a sample, pity it was the outdoor version the colour is the same – just a little rougher texture.

PRICING

World of Style has a price guide book, the way it reads it should be given to clients when they start the building journey, however, the sales people guard these with their life… so when a newbie put down her book and turned her back I got lots of pictures and they have come in very handy. I’ll post the full book in another post. Notes in the books say Pricing effective as of 1.1.2017 but the book was only given out the staff as of 1.7.2017.

At every turn there is another cost, below is what we spent on tiles in our house.

Remeber we signed in April 2017 and did our WOS selection in October 2017 so this pricing may be out of date as of January the 1st 2018.

WALL TILES

You get Stacked or Straight lay as standard, but if you want a Brickbond, Diamond lay or Herringbone lay then you have to pay more, herringbone is about 3 times more expensive then brick lay.

National Tiles floor plans for the walls and splashback.

 

We choose to take the Cat 1 builders inclusion for all of our wall tiling.  This will be a gloss white 300mm x 1000mm Subway tile.  Laid in Brickbond.

We picked a grey grout colour called Manhattan. Below is the Geelong display house that has the same coloured grout and wall tiles as what we have chosen.

All the bathrooms and laundry have 20mm Silestone counter tops in Blanco Matrix and Pencil round edging. All the cabinets in those areas are going to be done in Pewter Colourtech (two pack) textured finish with Shaker V-line profile.

Inside the bathroom niches will be a baby subway tile. In the above floor plans its shown as a pink area. The below pic shows the standard 300mm x 100mm tile and the mini subways for the back walls of the niches.  This gives you an idea of how small they are.

 

WATERPROOFING

Porter Davis has updated their waterproofing policy and they now cover the whole bathroom in waterproofing if it is located on the 1st floor, not just the shower area like they used to 6 months ago, I guess too many people complained. The new policy didn’t cover the toliet area if it’s a seperate room – too bad if that over flows! And they only waterproof the shower area downstairs.  As they build on a concrete slab I guess they dont see the point in protecting the whole room or laundry area.

We were happy a pay extra to have the two 1st floor toilets (WC’s) waterproofed, approximately $100  each – Bargain! However, our BC came back to us and confirmed a further change in policy to now include all first-floor wet areas at no extra charge.  It’s still not an option to protect the ground floor slab.

I asked our building coordinator for a plan of the waterproofing, they don’t have anything formal but she took a highlighter to our plans and sent me the below, prior to the WC’s being added.