The tile supplier and installer for Provincial is Di Lorenzo. Di Lorenzo called us to come in and pick our tiles about the time we were going to have the slab go down. You can go in and see what is included in the standard range before … which we did, but unfortunately getting pricing is a big hassle and just doesn’t happen.
Had heard a lot of bad experiences about Di Lorenzo and admittedly the time we went to look at the selection we weren’t too impressed with the ability of staff to give us a helping hand or any kind of price guidance. Our actual consultant on the day was fantastic however, she helped us with the tile choices quite a bit and suggested a good feature tile for us.
My feedback is that the wall tile selection for standard is actually pretty good with a lot of the tiles in 200x600mm size which is big enough and stylish enough. The floor tiles on the other hand are tiny they shouldn’t even be sold in this day and age, but you can upgrade to the larger tiles without any additional tile charge. You do however get charged extra to lay the tiles. For the standard Fairlight bathrooms this worked out to approx. $140 for the laundry, $120 for the main bathroom, and $250 for the ensuite. Why they couldn’t tell us this earlier is beyond me ?
We also upgraded to the square tile look smart wastes ($38 each), and we used a feature tile on the inside wall of our niches. Total bill was roughly $900 worth of upgrades.
We were given the option of including floor to ceiling tiling at our color selection stage, but there was so much fear in us of hidden site costs popping up we didn’t opt to do it. It would have been roughly $1300 cheaper had we selected it at colors. The quote was about $4.5k for Di Lorenzo to do floor to ceiling tiles, with part of the massive difference being $350 charged per room to reinstall cornices. We were told this was a Provincial charge, only for Provincial to tell us it was a Di Lorenzo charge. We figured we are not paying $700 to have cornices reinstalled… that’s just a downright ridiculous charge. We decided neither party would profit anymore off us from tiling and left it at standard heights.
I reckon if Provincial reviewed some of its processes, they would probably find a lot of customers spending more money on upgrades if they could provide some certainty around site and other costs. So far I think I am up for roughly $2,500 in unexpected BASIX and site costs which could have easily been foreseen, especially the BASIX. We still have the occupational certificate to get which I have heard is about $500.
Overall still happy with the crew at Provincial though.
Our Ensuite Wall Tiles
Palatino white our Matt white wall tiles
The standards tile range at Di Lorenzo
Our Ensuite Tiles.
Trio Flax Gloss Wall tiles
Greyish floor tiles
Our Main Bathroom tile selection.
Matt White Wall tiles
Greyish Floor tiles to be used in the Main, WC, and Laundry
