The House as of Sept 10th 2009

I know I have been slack with the blog but here I am again. We have not had any major dramas so far with our supervisor nor the build. Mick will return calls and patiently answer all my questions keeping me informed on what is scheduled for the coming week. The house is coming up nicely and a drive past yesterday resulted in pics. I will keep you updated more frequently. We received a call from Di Lorenzo saying that the tiles we had chosen for our splashback has been discontinued..so off I went to select new splash back tiles. I chose the large formal tiles 600x300.

Brickwork continuation

Framework up & start Brick work

Slab Down July 29th 2009

July 27 2009

My little baby is suffering from the flu. So one day to the doctors we decided to detour and take a trip down site. Imagine our surprise. We weren't expecting them to start till 31 July 09 and we saw the bulldozer levelling our block. We now have a concrete slab too. I will be going to site to get photos of the slab over the weekend and post it soon. However here are some of the photos of what has been happening till now.

July 27th - We have a slab

Framework for slab

Peg Photos

And thanks to my friendly neighbour, I have some photos I can share with you

JULY 8th and signed off all plans

Gosh..its such a long process. From the time it was DA approved to now and none of it our delay. Our CSR has been excellent and keeping us updated through out the process, but the process itself is so long. After getting plans approved, we were waiting for final pcv's and artworks. That took some days, only to realise that they had made an error with one of the PCV's so they had to ammend it and s much back and forth, back and forth. What is annoying is we were prepared to sign off 4 weeks ago, but its taken them that long to get the final docs to us. Well...good news, we have signed off all our plans and documents. We have been pegged. Now we are waiting for estimation, a site supervisor and a start date. I will drive past the block over the weekend and get some photos of the land.

June 22nd and new CSR

An update from my end. Council approval was received on 5th June 2009. EB kept telling me they are waiting on bank documents, progress payment sheets and a go ahead from the bank. So DH kept chasing bank for documents. However a bank rep got confused and said that all correspondence was sent to EB on May 29. Yup..EB had misplaced the documents. What a waste of 17 days. Anyways, final plans have been requested for so I am pretty sure not long to go now. I have signed all my PCV's and the ball is in their court.

Helen Egginton who was with EB for a short period of time did an excellent job I must say. I am going to miss her. However, I met my new client rep and she did seem to know her stuff so I am hoping things will keep moving at the same speed.

So far, this is our third rep. Hmm..though they all have shown a level of efficiency, I am hoping no more changes to client reps.

WOOHOO! COUCIL APPROVAL

The Council did well with our plans. It got back to us within 3 weeks stating that an objection was made by one of our neighbours to include obscure glass in the bathrooms. This we had mentioned to Eden Brae during our color selection, but they had not shown it in the plans, so the plans had to go back to the drafts people which took a week and lodged back to council on June 1. However by Jun 5, council had stamped and approved the plans.

We lost 7 days due to EB carelessness.

Anyways Great News!! :) :) for council approval

So I will keep you posted as to where next and hopefully we will have a start date soon!

I'm so happy - but now is when the stress begins!

We are going to Council

April 29th and we are now lodging with Blacktown council. Today being May 14th, I called council to follow up on our DA. They are quite confident that we should have our approval by 23rd May 2009.

Price Contract Variations (PCV'S)

Every change, every addition, every subtraction warrants a PCV. Which is frustrating and annoying when you think oh..couldnt they have just deleted it from the original PCv and gotten you to sign it. But its the way they operate and I havent been too bad if i am only at PCV 9..have I?

I have made changes to ever corner of the house. In fact I walked into one of the other salespersons of EB and he mentioned "Hey arent you the one that has changed the whole house" Hmmm...yup that would be me.

Contract signing

On 29 Jan 2009, we bit the bullet and signed contract with Eden Brae. In the current global economy and several fingers pointing to us that this is really not the right time to build...heh heh we bit the bullet.

we have had meetings with clipsal - Home Option Gallery electrician. I thought they were pricey by $1000.00

The home option design consultant was good. Aysen was her name. Although color and design is such a personal thing and it is difficult to suggest an opinion without knowing the client's likes/dislikes in a given timespan of 3 hours but she tried hard to see what kind of a look I was after and then tried to provide ideas within that look. All upgrades I requested for were priced reasonably.

The kitchen design consultant was also very professional, Barbara was helpful and patient. However, this is the one area I was displeased about. I thought they were pricey in every quote from upgrade to caesarstone to extra cupboards to the microwave tower AND mother of mother..I had made changes to the kitchen layout. However, I didnt expect that just to make those changes would cost me an extra $3000 in redesign fees alone. And then..the additions of microwave wall tower, cupboards on top, upgrade to essastone etc etc were costs on top of the $3000.

As far as I found EB to be reasonable in their charges, the kitchen blew us out of range, so I urge all of you out there that if you are making changes to your kitchen, please be warned that you will be charged a redesign fee which is $$$$$$$$$$$ in thousands.

Pricing

Basically we were paying
a) Base Price - $276,800
b) Santa Monica Facade - $7750
c) Site cost - $4,000
d)Living promotion - $3400
e) Flooring to Living promotion - $500
f) Extra ceiling height - $4500
g) Other ammendments and additions - (allowed for about 20%) though hoping it wont be as much.

Deposit payment to Eden Brae 15/11/2008

On 15/11/2008, we paid $500 non refundable deposit to go ahead with the site survey and soil test.

And then went in to pay $1500 for a tender presentation. So far so good, though really as a client you really don't have the upper hand. If you want to build, you do as the builder says. Very scary. Though EB were very professional. Sara was great and she did everything she could to make us feel comfortable with the whole build. She was awesome. If you have to sign contract, go to Sara. She patiently listened to what you wanted as inclusions, what you wanted deleted, gave her own ideas in terms of door positioning and robes and is helpful. So - so far so good.

However, we had to pay an extra $4,000 in site cost, $300 for shadow diagram, $200 for electrical rough in and power supply, $150 for plumbing rough in. Apart from those costs, there were no other costs incurred with the exceptionof the upgrades and the changes we made in terms of windows and structural adjustments.

Each and every change we asked for was charged to us. Though we thought the charge to be reasonable, however our costs were escalating.

WISDOM OR EDEN BRAE

Sigh - what a decision. We were comparing the Aspiration 36 - and wanted to add an extra 2 squares, or the Madison 40 from the Eden Brae lifestyle range. Who to go with? Wisdom posts all had good reviews and they were quite new to the market, whereby Eden Brae had good and bad postings on the net, however had been around for longer and probably had enough experience and procedures in place to make the build smoother for us...(soooo hoping that is the case)

So with the pros and cons..outweighing the promotions and the inclusions...we decided Eden Brae it was.

Background

It was a wet wet night and my husband and several others camped outside the Landcom office at The Ponds waiting for the office to open at 9.00am in the morning to secure a small block of land
. Apparently DH got there at 9.00pm the previous night and there were already 6 people waiting ahead of him.

All said and done on November 1st 2009, we secured our block of land. We liked the Casaview range of buildings but were not too impressed with the service and also felt like all that we wanted/asked about were kind of played down. So off we went looking at Wisdom and comparing with Eden Brae. Tough choice we had.