My Brown-eyed Girl

What do you do when you wake up one morning and just KNOW that your colours are wrong, wrong, wrong?  Or more specifically, when you proudly display your showroom full of samples to people you care about (read: people who believe their opinion is important to you), they ask you why on earth you would choose something so BROWN, and you although you try to duck out of it's way, screaming, pulsating, nauseating doubt comes and smacks you right on the bridge of your nose.

As prepared as you'd like to think you are (and we weren't), the reality of choosing the "clothes", the outer, street-presence, people who believe their opinion is important to you jealousy factor layer of your very expensive future home is seriously stressful - and doubt worthy.

So this person whose opinion...... asks why... I say, "Well, I liked this", pointing to a nifty little colour pallette sample courtesy of Boral.  "So why did you go with something different", I was asked.  "Well, they are Category 6 bricks" I say.  "And what are the ones you've chosen"? I'm asked.  Ummm... Category 6.

The reality is, or was - we didn't know how much Cat 6 bricks would cost.  It could have been $120 or $12,000.  Despite our best and most persistent efforts, PD were unable to sove the mystery of upgrade costings.  I won't bore you with detail, as everyone else who has built with them will know what I'm talking about, and everyone who hasn't wouldn't believe it anyway.  So we're a our colour appointment and we although we're lead to believe that our Hopetoun Interiors consultant doesn't have prices, we live on the edge and ask anyway.  Imagine our surprise when we're told Cat 6 will be roughly 6K on our house.  Quick weigh up - expensive house - percentage of brick upgrade to overall cost - dislike of pretty much Cat 1-5 bricks.  OK - we'll have that dark one.  Haven't done any of the home work checking out builds in progress with our preferred brick and other external combinations COZ WE DIDN'T KNOW HOW MUCH EACH CATEGORY WOULD BE.  Wow - it was weeks ago and I'm still kinda agitated about it.


I gotta say - from then on I was pretty dejected throughout the selection process.  Turns out our consultant knew the price of EVERYTHING and I'm thinking, why couldn't someone, ANYONE have told us this info before so we could rule things out and seriously consider upgrades that weren't as expensive as they might have been.


We push on through the process, accumulating browns to go with browns, and I'm not an anti-brown campaigner, but I do subscribe to their newsletter.  By the time we came to the end of the process, I may well have been sulking, but I'm entitled to write my own story here, so I'll say I was masking my frustration well.  Next we went to electricals, but thats a whole nuther post right there.

Quietly accepting that our house was going to look like the Brady Bunch pad resplendent in it's mission-brown-ness, I made peace with the fact that I could drive up the drive with my eyes shut each night and really, I'd never know what colour bricks, render, garage door, roof, fascia, gutter, blah blah blah that I had.  Good plan?

Was a good plan until someone whose opinion... had a look... "Hello Porter Davis - ummm - what's the last possible day we can change our colours?"