It's been a little while since our last post.
Once the administration process starts, your whole outlook and perspective on all things house building begin to change.
Plans, appointments, secondary appointments, quotes, variations, phone calls (hundreds, a lot unanswered), questions (hundreds, falling on deaf ears), document errors (a lot), time delays due to the errors and rework of documents.
This becomes your whole focus as you try and get the final tender and sign off.
Most of the initial contract work is nothing until the real admin process starts, usually this is where you are committed and there's no going back (from the builder you choose)
We attended De Lorenzo (multiple informal visits, 1 appointment), Clipsal (2 appointments, due to the size of the house and limited time we had at the first visit) PGH Bricks (1 appointment)
My wife went by her self to the colour appointment and landscaping appointment. She found that they had double booked and she was given 15 minutes at each and felt rushed.
The kitchen appointment was at Knebel and we spent around an hour going through options.
For the tiles, carpet, kitchen, bathroom and laundry fit out we decided to have 2 parallel options to make the process a bit easier (not that this occurred). We selected the allowance range and then had quotes produced for a variation (upgrade). This we thought would be easy.
We ended up spending hours working through all the differences and down stream affects of upgrade options. Each variation brings additional costs or changes.
E.g Upgrade to polished porc tile. De lorenzo will quote you on the tile and laying etc, if you agree to this and sign the variation then Wisdom adds an extra cleaning amount into your Tender.
You have to check and double check everything, it gets very detailed when you add variation in these particular areas.
We had a shut down over Christmas 2014 which delayed our end panel, our council approval was quick (in and out in 5 weeks, everything met council guidelines so this was expected) eventually we started the build with the levelling taking place in late Feb, Slab poor was March.
We are now in July and have some rain delays and other delays caused by change of Site foremen (twice), this slows things as someone new has to get up to speed and make sure everything continues as planned (did not happen), Lock up was meant to be 29th June and Kitchen install 3rd July. 27th July and house still not lock up due to missing back sliders and Kitchen is going in today (supposedly). Just got off the phone from the site foreman who said he was onsite and Kitchen guys were there (want see it with my owns).
Attached are some time line photos from various points throughout the last 5 months.
Straightening the internal walls for gyprock
