So far so good.

I received a call on Thursday from the Customer Service girl, just to introduce herself and to tell me that the plans had been ordered. I was mighty impressed by the level of service that we have received so far, it is a vast difference to what we have been used to.

Just as long as they keep it up, I will be one happy camper......

A friend and I went out to The Ponds on Friday, I had to pick up some plans that I had left there and also the receipt for our new deposit, we had a big look around and she loved it just like we do, I took some sneaky photo's of the kitchen which I just adore (I can't wait to cook up a storm in this kitchen) it will have an StGeorge induction 90cm cooktop (as there is no gas in the street and it was $10000 to bring it in to our place) and a 60cm underbench oven that cleans itself!!!!!

Back to the plans they said that it will take around 2 weeks to be ready, and then we go through them to make sure they are all correct before any changes that need to be made are done and then off to Council.

The Officer that we had on the last DA thinks that he might get it again so he is looking out for it, we have addressed all the things that were wrong the last time so that hopefully it will go through really quickly (the last one took 7 weeks).

Not much else to report, we are off to the city today for some retail therapy........

Here we go on that rollercoaster again....

We got the costings back for the garage to be raised, it was not as big a shock as the last one but still $6000 odd dollars. I have given up counting hundreds now as everything seems to be in thousands.

It is amazing how you can go from one figure to $50,000 more without so much as a blink of an eyelid. They are called "upgrades" must haves in my language, you know the ones that look so damn good that when you see the standard one you think I couldn't possibly live with that. I know I am a marketer's dream come true, I am sure that they aim all their advertisements at me!!!!

So I am off the track again, that's me just rambling on can't help myself, maybe there is a self help group for that, can you imagine "Hi my name is Danma and I ramble on".

So today our news is we have paid for the plans to get drawn up, that hopefully is a start in the right direction and we can start this roller coaster ride all over again.

I seem to spend all my time trying to find out things, like how high is the brick wall going to be on the side of the house, because if it is under 6.00metres then we can go 900mm from the side boundary that is what the Clarendon one was so I am pretty sure it will be what the Wisdom will be.
The only difference is we have raised the garage so we will have to wait until the plans are drawn up to see the exact dimensions.

Time wise I hope that they get onto it straight away, because one of my other flaws is that I am terribly impatient, I think that I have passed that one on to my kids............

A bit of good news- I think....

Spoke to the Storm water engineer yesterday and after a bit of checking he said that if we raised the Garage level to 34.1 then we would not need the transpiration pit in the backyard (that also means we don't need all the pipes going to it).

So not knowing anything about levels in houses I duly wrote it down and rang our sales person. We looked at the drawings and at the moment the garage level is at 33.78 so it looked to me that it wasn't that much of a difference (you know how you become a expert as soon as you start doing something or watching something, think of the Olympics!!!!)

It looks like they will have to push a bit more dirt to the front of the house to bring it up a bit so that the water can run back to the street.
We may need a drop edge beam if this happens, (I think that's what its called) so we are waiting on costings , hopefully we will have it today.

Tender ready in 11 days......

Well we got a phone call from the new builder at 12.30 yesterday to say the tender was ready, (They must be kidding right......) It took them 11 days to get it ready and it is nearly all right (that also is unheard of, 2 small mistakes, probably more like misunderstanding's that can be easily fixed).

We have gone over what we wanted again, it must be me (in fact I know it's me, I can't help myself) you know you see an upgrade and then you can't possibly have the standard one.
Oh well that's what we work for, all the upgrades......
I have done a spreadsheet this morning with Must Have's, Maybe's and No's (though the first lot of no's were the mistakes that we weren't having anyway, how funny).

Anyway I have got rid of a few things like making the Alfresco area 1.4mtrs wider as we thought that the cost was too much for the amount of use that we would get out of it. The gutter guards are also going, we will put them in later, so I have taken out around $10,000 all up and am just over what we were up to with Clarendon.

The only difference is that this has carpets, tiles, driveway's and a lot of higher spec'd inclusions but this house is also smaller(38sq).

So what now, well I have to get onto the Stormwater Engineer and speak to him about our Hydraulics as we had a shock when we got the Clarendon Variation of $23,000 that we hadn't budgeted for. It was all to do with the water tanks (we needed a slimline tank, Clarendon didn't do a 450mm slimline tank) so we had to put one in underground and that escalated the costs.
Hopefully we will have some good news about the hydraulics tomorrow.

All done, we have a clear block

2 days and the house and trees are all gone, stumps are gone, and we have a sediment fence.

All in a day's work

Nearly all gone

Half way through the demo

Only 1/2 the house left.
Useless fact of the week: The hardwood in the roof goes to China to have all the nails taken out and is then chopped up in little pieces and turned into floorboards and sent back to Australia.

Just before the demo

And so the story begins.........

We sold our home in November 07 moved out 1 week before Christmas (I don't recommend doing this to any sane person) and purchased a 2bedroom run down full brick cottage on a 746sq mtr block.
We moved into a small rental home while we looked for our dream home.

FOUND - one dream home!!!! Courtesy of Clarendon some changes to be made nothing structural just an extra en suite upstairs and down and an extra 1mtr to the study. Not too hard you would think!!!

Well 8 months on with the Council DA approved we had to face the facts that Clarendon were not going to build our home, as we would not sign a variation to our contract, that had us responsible for the costs of re pinning neighbours property if they damaged them during construction.

We spoke to The Department of Fair Trading, The Insurance Ombudsman and our Solicitor and they all said the same DO NOT SIGN IT, so we had to take this advice on board even though friends had said don't worry about it, that's not going to happen.

So we told them, we can't sign this and they told us we can't build it. It is awful to get so far but not have anything to show for it (except some plans we can't use and surveys that they have kept and $4000 paid to them which is non refundable), we had knocked down the existing house 3 weeks before all this had happened, so we were left with a empty block and a DA approval that is for a Clarendon Home that we can't build.

What next!!!

Well off we go to some other builders armed with the condition in our DA that is standard to our Council and ask them would you make us sign that we are responsible for the damage to any adjoining properties if you damage it during construction?

Most said no as this wasn't really meant for our type of build but for builds where the garages are constructed under the home.

We found a home we really liked it being the Impression 38 MKII by Wisdom Homes and after speaking to our sales consultant and the director they have said that they would not have this condition. So we pay our money again for the contour survey and we ask for a new tender.

We are hoping that we may have this tender over the weekend, all being well and fingers crossed, if this happens it will have taken them 1 1/2 weeks where as it took Clarendon 6 1/2 weeks to get to this stage and then everything that they did was wrong, but that is a whole new story and we have moved on from it.

We still have a few changes that we are going to make and the OH is out there now trying to make the study bigger.