Council Approval

Finally we are making some actual progress. Council finally gave their approval the other day after we had to push our house back another 1.5m and put in a ridiculous driveway on our plans.

The driveway we want enters the property on the left hand side and comes across the front of the house and loops around to the garage on the right hand side of the house-thus serving the purpose of driveway and firebreak while minimising disturbance of vegetation.

Despite there being no actual council regulations against it and the specific mention to use driveways as firebreaks, the council rejected the permit based on having a driveway that was not a direct route into the building envelope.

We tried to appeal our case directly to the council including showing pictures and satellite images of more than 25% of other houses in our direct area having the same driveway. The council representative said that these driveways were all illegally done and would not grant us an exception to the rule as they were trying to discourage it. I am pretty sure most concreters wouldn't lay down a driveway unless they had prior council approval. Not to mention what did they put on their plans to get their building permit. I asked if there was anything stopping us driving over the ground to get to the garage and he said as long as we weren't putting down bitumen etc then it was fine.

The grounds  he rejected our permit on was that is was a development outside the building envelope. We showed him the glossary of terms that basically wrecked his case and the items that mentioned driveways could be placed outside the building envelope but then he would say it was in the act- which says nothing to do with driveways.

Jake and I had spent hours preparing our argument including developing a ridiculous threat that we could put the driveway directly into the building envelope on the left hand side and then take it around the back of the house and to the right hand side. As this would be all in the building envelope they would not be able to stop us and it would mean the clearing of a substantial amount of trees. Most of the regulations are all about trying to keep the area looking natural and maintain ample vegetation. To our shock the representative actually suggested we do that.

We could tell we were getting nowhere so we decided to change the plans to the proposed driveway and get our permit and fight the driveway battle at a later date.

Onward to scheduling!

More delay....

By now you think we would have a slab down....nope.

Since pre start there has been an endless list of errors and time delays on the part of the builder.
The price on the vanity mentioned in the previous post was not an error, the prestart person had written down that we wanted a pedestal wall basin (costs more due to plumbing having to come up from the ground). We had instead asked for a wall basin thinking it would save us money getting rid of a vanity and mirror. They only offered us a credit of $223 so we turned it down.
The aircon quote took forever to come back but is now sorted.

Our Prestart person had not been replying to our emails promptly and one took 6 working days and a reminder to get a reply too. Add to that her constant ignoring of questions. It took us over a month to get a reply to one of our questions by continually asking it.

We decided to ask for the manager to contact us due to the mistakes and delays. The prestart person decided to ignore our request 3 times so we went back to our original contact person with Ventura who had since left the company and they got the manager to contact us. Now the manager is aware of what has been happening we get a response to our email within 24 hours and hope errors will no longer be occuring.

Lately we have been battling the fact that the builder wants to put a builders margin on our allowance for balustrade  We have an allowance for $1000/m internal and $800 external which we understood to mean we could spend up to this amount. We ended up saving $16000 on the quote that we got (we had to get a quote ourselves, they wouldn't lift a finger to help us). Rather then give us the whole credit they gave us $11000. When we questioned it they raised it to $13000. We continued to question it and they went to there general manager who said nope they had every right to subtract a builders margin from the allowance as if that would have always been the way.
We believe we are in the right and that that should have been written into the allowance if that was the case but decided to let it go so we can get on with the build.
So we hand the final -final- final document in on Tuesday and then onto scheduling.

Pre Start!

We finally had pre-start last Tuesday.
The meeting all went smoothly as we have had most of our selections picked for months.
Though she couldn't supply us with the prices of some options at the time, the lady said we would have all additional prices by the end of the day or next morning at the latest. By Friday we still didn't have them and she wasn't  answering or returning our calls or emails. At 5:25 we finally received them, no explanation. The prices were riddled with errors. The funniest of which was that to save on costs we removed a vanity and mirror to replace it with a wall basin. They say that will cost an extra $900....I'm hoping that should be a credit.
We have also been asking for the air conditioning plan for a long time as we received it with an initial quote from another builder. At one stage they tried to give us the more expensive three phase one but we can't have that in our area (how unlucky). They attached a very rough layout of where the outlets would be (which looked to be drawn in MS Paint) with no legend, model number, price or information on why it had been done the way it had. All this was included in the other quote we received.
We itemised all the things that were lacking and wrong and have requested another meeting. I am hoping all these hiccups before we start building will mean none while we build....
I have attached pictures of our choices. Enjoy and let me know what you think. As always a warning colours may not appear exactly how they look in person.

From here we need to finalise the pre-start stuff, apply for council approval, 6 star energy approval and get a quote for our wrought iron balustrade.

Contract Signed- Finally

So the last few months have been full of ups and downs when its come to getting to build our house. Bottom line is we found a bank that gave us the minimum evaluation needed to allow us to build. We have to have a ridiculously large deposit to make up the gap but its worth it to start soon.

We signed the contract and have pre start set for the 22nd of January. They offered us three earlier dates to begin with and an hour later took them all back and offered early February. Jake fought hard and they decided it would be okay to do three pre-starts in one week.

I don't like the way they did the contract. Any errors we found in the contract (of which there were many) they wrote a PCV (post contract variation) for so we don't get to see plans with the correction and have to trust that the written word is what we want.... So I recommend not paying your initial deposit till you have everything right, we didn't have this choice because we wanted a soil test done on the block.

We went over it with a fine tooth comb many times to make sure we had everything exactly the way we wanted it.

Despite having told them many times we did not want awning windows, they still placed them along the front of our house and when they finally took them out we were credited over $800!

Now on to colour selection!

Block

Well as of last Wednesday the block is ours. Well technically it's the banks but anyway....

It was kind of a bitter sweet affair as it was great for the land to be ours, but reinforced the disappointment of not being able to build on that land yet.

Our families joined us on a rainy Sunday to put up a mesh fence at the front of the property so the dogs can roam free when we are there. We also burnt off some of the fallen branches before fire ban hits.

We didn't realise it was going to rain until we were all committed and excited about going out. The fire still burnt strongly despite the rain.

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We also put up a hammock so we can spend some relaxing time out there imagining our future house and land.

A Big Disappointment

So imagine this,
After a long battle over the building cost of the house, we received the contract and were all set to make our deadline of having both loans settle at the same time. All our dreams were coming true. Then...

The evaluation on the house came back at 150,000 less than the building cost, 200,000 less than what it would have cost us to build if we hadn't played hard ball with our builder. Basically we were capped due to no houses having sold in the area in the last 3 months at the price range we were looking at.

This simply put means we cannot build. We were beyond disappointed.
We have since got a second evaluation which wasn't much better and are now looking at finance through our builder.  I highly doubt we will be building any time soon.

But the block will still settle next weekend and we will work on landscaping for a while.

Playing Hard Ball

Okay time for an update.

We had kinda stalled on progress for a while because while we thought we knew which builder we were going with we were still getting a quote from another builder. It took a while because the first time we got it done, the plans weren't identical. So builder B came back to us a couple of weeks ago with an almost identical quote for $50,000 less. We took this to Builder A (after they got back from their company retreat) asking them to bring their quote down.

Builder A came back with $27,500 off. This didn't seem enough given that there are only slight difference in the quote. I basically told Jake they hadn't met the bench mark I had set (As Builder A is my favourite and we are further along the line with them) and that I would go with Builder B. Jake thought it was weird that I had suddenly switched so he kept bugging me about it (he wanted me to be 100% happy with the decision).

So I went  back to Builder A saying we wanted more and that it was their last chance. Low and behold they come back with another $10,000 off and an option of a further $10,000 off if we bought back the floor plan.
That extra $10,000 was all we needed to met the requirements for the home loan without taking anything else off the plan.

We are also now eligible for the First Home Buyers Grant which means we will be a further $14,000 better off. This means we can afford to floor and paint our home as soon as it is built.

This is where I give my husband a lot of praise as it was he who sought another detailed quote (I didn't really want to go to all the work, nor waste another builders time). If he hadn't we would be in the process of cutting things out of our dream home to be able to afford it by settlement. Thank you Jake!

So, where to from here, the quote is getting neatened up and re sent to us. Once we have proofed it they will continue to finished the contract (which they started ages ago) which will include the modification we have made since signing the initial quotation. I'm really glad it will all be in one and on the official plans etc.

From there we get the bank to evaluate the house and apply for the FHBG and that should all be ready by settlement of the block.It means that we wont be ready to build by settlement as we have to get shire approval. But ohwell, who can complain about a getting your dream home for cheaper!