It's been a while

Mostly it's been frustrating. Whenever they have been ready to work it's been raining and when it's not raining they have been elsewhere. So we watch each week crawl by. Just to to make matters worse, some heel dumped their site fill on our property right in front of the locked gates midway down the block. By the time we the builders had removed the rubbish, repositioned the fencing and it had rained on the scheduled delivery date - we had lost another week.

Tomorrow might bring better news for us - weather permitting. The Hebel has finally been delivered so we might have walls up by the end of the week. Here's hoping.

Lower floor framing

When we left off frames had been delivered to the site. By the end of last week the lower floor framing was pretty much done.

From what we can see from next door, we're hoping that little items will be fixed before they do the second storey. We now have an assigned site supervisor who Eug met by pure coincidence on Tuesday morning and got a bit of an update on when to expect more framing to arrive etc.

Some of the building materials have been moved around but as far as we and our neighbours know it's not the builder who has moved them. This is a bit of a concern. I never knew I would worry about a block of dirt, concrete slab and a bunch of lumber. LOL

Framing delivered

We went away for a short break and when we came back we were greeted by the sight of a heap of framing ready to go. Maybe next week will see our frames erected, weather permitting. We will also have a site supervisor at last. It's all very good, very organised and very exciting.

Fingers crossed for the following week.

Plumbing done

Surprisingly there were people on site last week doing the plumbing. It was completed on Saturday or today.

There are also non-Metricon related people accessing our site which we have to put a stop to ASAP. It's a result of a bit of a misunderstanding about the permission we gave. We thought it was implied that permission was revoked once we had started our building. Oh well.

It takes much longer than you expect...

We wanted to wait until we had approval for the house before we chose a place to rent. We did find a bargain, not overly convenient and very tiny but at least $100 per week cheaper than any other suitable property. We moved on the 29th of October. Our normal removalists were unavailable (I suspect they remembered the rather large and heavy furniture and chose not to take our job as a result). My dearest found a person advertising on a pole in the city and engaged their services. They turned up in a truck about the size of a HiAce van and took all day to move us to a house in the same suburb as we were already in. During the process they damaged almost every single piece of furniture and showed a total lack of common sense including putting heavy pieces of furniture with the doors and drawers facing the wall. Horrific day. Moral of the story - don't hire removalists you find advertising on telegraph poles.

The demolisher started on 2 November but took a while because they were overbooked. (They charge about half the price of other demolishers so no wonder really).

Everything was sorted out by 25th November which was still in time to not have to pay extra money due to price rises. The excavation and piering occured around the 11th of December, the slab was poured by the 20th and we received the first big bill on the 21st. The weather has been perfect for curing the slab and now we wait until the building company goes back to work after the Christmas holiday period. We're thinking it will be the 9th of January.

Finally signed on the dotted line

We are definitely building the Metricon Nolan 41 but have decided to skip building the pool for now. It's all too complicated for us, and expensive. Who would have thought that an itty bitty pool would cost about $70,000 including fencing and paving? We have decided to have carpet, tiles, window dressing, grass and a driveway instead. Seems like the most sensible option.

We had been planning to build two homes on our 1500sqm block but the State Government ruined those plans. Rather than leave our energy sucking high carbon footprint 1950's home on our unsustainably large block of land we will build the more energy efficient home on said unsustainably large block, stress about paying the mortgage on it and hope for a change in the rules to something more sensible than what they currently are.

I'm excited about building our new home but I have a hard time believing that we will actually get to live in it. In 6 weeks time we should have approved plans and approval to demolish this decaying hovel and we are at the business end of this journey. In 4 weeks we make our decisions on colours and finishes. It should be interesting to see how much that will add to the price tag.

Too many choices

Metricon isn't a cheap project home builder to choose but their quality seems to be above that of your run of the mill project home builder. They show so much attention to detail and they do what they say they will do during the tender process and when they say they will do it.

Apart from the surveyors and soil testers it's been crickets so far from the other company and it has been almost a month since we handed over our $1,000 to them. In the meantime we have gone off their design somewhat and are most enthused about going with Metricon.

Our problems with any home we build are the ever spiralling costs which have us nervous, a few technical difficulties to overcome and the incredible amount of choice we have at Metricon. Which is a nice problem to have really. Especially if you are Metricon.

When we went to our tender appointment we balked at the end sum, which isn't the end of the costs, just what we know so far. $63,000 odd thousand in site costs and then $27,000 to split the floor just was not what we were expecting.

This prompted me to go back to my spreadsheet. It looks like we might be better off going back to the first home we liked as it still fits the bill best for us with only small changes. Having come so far on the Phoenix, my husband is loathe to change now. I also quail at the thought of going back to our lovely sales consultant to tell her that we have changed our minds again for the fourth time and that we are going back to our first choice.

Although I would be happy with almost any home they have on offer I wish they didn't cost so much as it is scaring the living daylights out of me that the final cost including renting, demolition and interest will cost twice the base price of the house.

Who knew?