2 months and counting

I can't believe how long it has been since my last post. 

Our chunky king size bed looks pretty small in our new bedroom

We received our keys on Friday December 3rd at about 6pm and we started moving in the next day.

We've had a few ups and downs since then and at times it feels like we're in a never ending nightmare.  I'll write up posts about that shortly, but I thought I'd answer a couple of questions that people left in the comments section.

Firstly, Robert - our contract length was 383 days and we received the keys after 191 days.  Way back at site start time we thought we'd be in the house around February of this year so it actually went a lot quicker than we anticipated.  That being said - the house was essentially finished in late October, there were only minor things that needed to be completed and there were weeks where no one was on site.

Secondly, DMFAN - we love the Denver, there's plenty of space and it works really well for us.  Check over your plans carefully as there are a lot of wall cut outs and you may not want them all.  Also, if you're going with the 43, the back of the workshop/garage is open.  You have to pay extra to either have it bricked or an extra garage door put in. 

In terms of lay out and selections there is nothing that we would change.  I'll add a qualifier here - your level of happiness with the finished product will come down to the site supervisor you get.  While overall we're happy with our house, the lack of attention to detail and poor finishing really drops the quality from a great house down to a good house, which is incredibly disappointing and frustrating, particularly given the amount of money paid.

I'll be back over the weekend to fill you in on our ongoing problems.

Oops

I think that might be what our SS said today (or perhaps something stronger?!). 

We were concerned that the expansion joint in our slab had received no termite protection treatments.  Our building inspector at work suggested I contact the company that issued the building permit as they are required to have all the termite treatment information prior to a Certificate of Occupancy being issued.  To cut a long story short the company contracted to provide the termite protection treatments were never told that we had an expansion joint and so it hadn't been treated.  We're furious.  It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet for termites.

I'm impressed with the service we received from Plan Scan.  I was put straight through to the surveyor who issued our permit - he listened to my concerns, promised to follow up on it and then rang me back to let me know the outcome.  I only wish Metricon's customer service was half as good!

We had our final inspection last Thursday and when I have calmed down a bit more I'll post about it.

Red dots

No pictures today.  The house is finished.  The Certificate of Occupancy has been ordered and it's time for the final inspections to begin.  Hopefully this isn't going to be a drawn out process as the sale of our house settles on the 8th December!

I went up to the new house today and there are red dots everywhere!  I'm assuming this means that the Metricon quality assurance people have been through the house and it looks like our tradespeople have some work to do.  We can't get inside the house so I'm not sure how many dots are inside but there are a lot of red dots on our windows.  There's a number of bent frames where is looks like they've been dropped before they've been installed, there's windows that meet at the top and have 7mm gaps at the bottom and yet other windows that have gaps at the top, meet in the middle and have gaps at the bottom again.  Short of pulling out the windows I'm not really sure what can be done to fix some of the problems - but I'm sure Metricon will come up with something.

Still waiting on a few other issues to be resolved.  They include:

• Obtaining a credit (or at the very least not being charged) for work we completed,
• Adequate termite protection,
• Payment of the electricity bills (as our land is larger than 700m2 we had to arrange the electricity connection so it's in our name, not Metricon's)
• Credit for the tree guards (temporary fencing to go around trees on our nature strip) listed in our contract.  When we signed our contract we argued that these weren't necessary and it would be better to put a guard around our water meter, but we were told they were mandatory and couldn't be removed from the contract.  The tree guards were never even on site, let alone erected, but our water meter did get run over within days of the site start!

The Brick Saga

So here's the house after the patchwork bricks were pulled down and the site cleaned.

Our SS and the Austral Bricks representative said that we were unlucky and unfortunately it was a bad batch of bricks, some had been in the kiln a lot longer than others resulting in the darker colour. Austral told us that it would be at least three weeks before another batch would be made and our SS suggested that we select a different brick.



The Austral rep dropped in some samples of similar bricks and we went back through all the brochures. There was nothing that we really liked so we called our SS and had a chat with him. The hold up with the bricks wasn't a major problem for Metricon because they couldn't find a bricky to do the job, all their usual guys were on other jobs.



The Austral rep came up with a solution. They would sort the bricks before they put them on the truck so that we had a consistent colour.



Here's what arrived.

You can imagine how frustrated and unimpressed we were. They were even worse than the first lot we had received.

We've now had a third lot of bricks delivered. By this stage we were quite wary of anything said by Austral. We looked over the bricks ourselves and there is still some variation between the pallets. The bricks are suppsed to be so similar that they don't need mixing.

On Wednesday Wade had a meeting on site with our SS and the Austral rep. They built a couple of 'walls' with the bricks to get an idea of how they would look. We gave our SS the go ahead to use them, he had a bricky lined up to start on Thursday.

Our SS rang us late Thursday to say that the bricky had been to check out the job and had decided that it was too big, he wasn't going to do it.

At this point we were beginning to wonder if our house was ever going to be bricked (bearing in mind that the bricking was originally set for early July). The SS rang us on Friday to say that he had a bricky lined up to start on Monday and that he is someone that he has worked with for years and will do a good job.

So cross your fingers for us, hopefully I'll have some progress to show you on Monday.

It's enough to make you cry

Day 71. As you can see from our time line over on the right hand side our bricks started going up on Tuesday. Today we talked to our SS and they will have to come right back down again. To top it all off our new camera has disappeared. It really is enough to make you cry!

I stoppped in at the house at lunchtime on Tuesday and the brickies had done about three panels. They'd done a great job - really neat and clean. I wasn't really that concerned by the dark patch, I thought it was a combination of wet bricks and shadow. Tuesday night Wade had a look and took the picture below. We chose Harvest Malt from Austral Bricks - they are supposed to have only very mild variations and don't need to be mixed. You can see from the image below that they're not mild variations!

Before our SS inspected the bricks it was suggested that we could have the darker bricks bleached to match. When we were down at the house tonight our SS said that the walls looked like a checker board (and they do) and would have to come down. If they don't come down now the only alternative is to render the whole house on completion and that's not what we want.

Our SS said that he'll keep pushing the inside along but it could be another month now before any more bricking is done.

On a more positive note the wonderful lady in accounts got back to me very quickly with an amended statement of account which included the credit and we were also able to talk to the cabinet maker and get the laundry benchtop and cabinets fixed up - just in the nick of time too as they were starting to build the cabinetry this week.

Check and double check everything

Still no action on the brick front, apparently when our SS was off sick the brickies decided they no longer wished to work for Metricon, so now we have brickies from another area coming in to do ours. Our SS talked them through the job on Friday so fingers crossed we'll see some action this coming week.

Our insulation was installed on Friday so there was some progress. We decided to add some additional sound proofing insulation and luckily we were able to deal directly with the contractors.

Here's the link in to the title. I was flicking through our colour schedule today and I found an error. The colours for the laundry benchtop and cabinets had been reversed. so our benchtop will be brown and our cabinets white (yuck - not the look we were after!!). We'll call the cabinet maker directly to see whether the cabinets have been built or not. If they have, I'm not sure there is much we can do - it's their mistake but we did sign off on it. If it hasn't been built then we have a chance to get it fixed.

Must have been the day for finding errors. Every time I looked at our statement of account I felt a little niggle that something wasn't quite right, so I sat down and went through all our variations and compared them to what was listed. Turns out I was right. There is a $965 credit missing from the statement. Needless to say I've sent off a couple of emails today.

Latest happenings

Since my last post some progress has been made on a few of the problems we have identified.

Concrete boxing and reo has been set up in a couple of places where the house frame was overhanging the slab to support the brickwork. Our SS told us that the exposed reo will be fixed this week and the brickies are due to start tomorrow.

The plumbers have been and roughed in all the interior pipework. We were a bit surprised to find pipework that hadn't been properly clipped, but this is easily fixed before plastering begins. The duct work and heating unit have been installed - I'm really looking forward to having ducted heating next winter.

Our chippie has been on site to straighten walls and check that everything is OK.

The electricians were on site today running cables for the power points and lights. Due to the size and length of our house (and the associated electrical demands) a secondary power board is being installed in our linen cupboard. A bit disappointed with the locations of some power points, in many rooms we have two double power points on one wall. We thought that the outlets would be evenly spaced, both 600mm in from the adjoining walls, however one is right in the very corner and the other is about 600mm in. These aren't hard to fix before the plaster is done, but that's not how our electrical layout plan looks.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the progress the brickies make tomorrow and will definitely have photos. Our new camera has arrived but I ran out of daylight to get proper photos today.

Colour Me Happy

Warning - very long post! I have no new pictures so I've snagged some of the Denver from Metricon's website.




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This made me think it might be a good idea to list all our colour selections in case anyone is interested. I'll list the colours and then you can scroll down for our experience at the Studio M appointment.





Exterior
Traditional facade
Bricks: Austral Harvest Malt (an upgrade to Category 3)
Mortar: Natural with rolled joints
Roof: Colorbond Woodland Grey
Gutter: Colorbond Paperbark
Fascia: Colorbond Paperbark
Windows: Colorbond Paperbark
Front door: Merbau stain
Bi-part door: Merbau stain
Garage sectional door: Colorbond Paperbark
Portico render: Dulux - Malay Grey


Interior:
Walls: Dulux antique white USA
Ceiling, doors, architraves and skirts: Dulux Lexicon (quarter strength)
All cabinetry: Laminex Burnished Wood
Laundry benchtop: Laminate Ash White
Kitchen, Ensuite, Bathroom, Powder Room benchtop: Caesar Stone - Osprey
Kitchen Splashback: Mist Silver metallic (upgrade - Cat 2)
Floor tile: Vibe Mocha 400x400
Wall tile: Gloss Stone 300x600
Bath/Spa hob: Studio brown 300x600




Here's the low down on our appointment...


The Studio M appointment is the biggy, the one everyone says you have to be really prepared for. Metricon warns that this appointment will take at least three hours and asks you to bring along images of colour schemes, kitchens, bathrooms etc that you like.


We did our homework. We went around every Metricon display home in the district looking at colours, cupboards, benchtops etc. We had magazine pages and catalogue pages and we were really looking forward to the consultation, both excited and oddly nervous.


The Good - we love all our selections (listed above)


The Bad - hmmm, over all I have to say this was not one of the best experiences.


We were the first appointment of the day and our consultant was running late.

We felt like we were being pushed/rushed through the appointment. We walked out the door 2 hours and 15 minutes later. After all the talk about taking your time and being happy with your choices - we actually felt very uncomfortable during the session. Our consultant went on to tell us that she had spent 5 full contact hours with a client who had a house half the size of ours on the previous day. That didn't make us feel any better.


We asked to see our external colour selections all together on the computer - this is a major decision and one you want to get right. Our consultant tried to talk us out of this and when we insisted we were made to feel like we were really putting her out. She was then unable to quickly find the Studio M site (I had to tell her the web address!) and then said that it would take her too long to actually find our selections so she'd just put in something pretty close. Except it wasn't.


As we'd already signed our contracts, all selections were raised as a pre-construction variation. The paperwork was shocking. Make sure you double check yours. We were charged for items that were included in our promotion and there were multiple duplications.