Sorry it’s been a while since we posted anything….life has just been so busy of late. As for news about the house – well I forgot to mention that we finally received the refund from St George because they caused us to delay settlement on the land a week late. You may remember we had to pay a $330 late settlement fee which is much in the scheme of things but I refused to be the one to pay it on principle because it was entirely St George’s fault. The original email requesting reimbursement was sent in the middle of June and finally, (after numerous emails, the last one of which was not the most polite I must say but hey I’d lost my bloody patience with them) we got an email on Oct 9th (only took 4 months, yeah for customer service!!) saying they would be reimbursing us the $330 into our mortgage account. We waited with bated breathe and then…….they paid us $300 back. Initially I was fingers at the ready to fire off another email about the missing 30 bucks but then thought fuck this, I’m not wasting any more time on it and admitted partial defeat. But it does prove that if you stand your ground when in the right and spend a bit of time and annoy then enough they will pay you just to make it stop, hehehe!!
The other piece of news is that we are very glad we got an independent builders report, well worth the money because he found a few major things which had to be put right. And to be clear it’s not a dig at the builders because as I understand it they use sub contractors. To be honest it really depends on them so even if you have real faith in your builders I still highly recommend getting a report and “pre plaster”. That means when the frame, pipe, wiring, etc is done and all the brickwork but before they put plaster board up. Ensure you send a copy of the report to your builder ASAP to minimise delays in the house build. Also after things have been fixed (or not) ensure you get something in writing from the builder on what was fixed and how and what was not fixed and why not. Also be sure to organise to look around yourselves with the site supervisor before plasterboard (a bit late after if something is wrong). We did find a few things that weren’t right, plug sockets in the wrong place and most importantly a lack of wiring in the theatre room to what we were expecting. It turns out that the work we had organised directly with the electricians (as advised by the builder to do) had not been passed on to the builders hence the site supervisor had no idea anything was missing. Oh and just last week when we looked around (see photos below) we noticed that the doors that had been hung on the theatre room were not the “paid extra for solid doors” to help with sound proofing. They were leaning up against the wall outside the study ready to hang and the study doors had been hung on the theatre room!!!
Oh and one other thing was we received an email from the land developer about a “violation” and that they had advised our builders. It turns out that our air con unit on the roof is too high up and can be seen from the street which is a big no-no. Not sure what the builders are going to do about it at the moment but we checked it out and you have to walk at least two houses up on the other side of the street before you just see the top of it so not really that bad. And the annoying thing is that there is a house right nearby on a corner block and all the stuff like the air con unit etc is right there on the side street for the world to see. How can ours be an issue when they have made no attempt to put it the other side of the house (not visible from either street it’s on the corner of)??
Anyway enough about all that….it’s time for photos. They range from mid Nov when the brickwork was being finished off and the plasterboard inside ready to go up
Then in early Dec the scaffold was gone and the render was done.
And then the week before Christmas we had all the plasterboard, stairs and kitchen cabinets!! Plus a few other inside pictures..
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
