New Updates

We got a new admin as site coordinator and we already received the Site Start Letter. So, officially, we move into the construction stage. YAH~~

Something I forgot to mention in my earlier posts:

1) We received the Home Warranty Insurance letter.

2) The Final Construction Drawings done.

3) The energy report states that my house will have R3.0 insulation on roof and R2.0 insulation on external walls, which I'm pretty happy with it.

4) My house will have H class base according to the Engineering Plan and soil test report.

5) My admin clarified that all downpipes of the house will be PVC not Colorbond (metal) material but painted with Colorbond colour.

6) My admin also clarified that the storage room door will open towards entry. She said the standard one should be opening inwards. Since my drawings show it opening outwards and no one corrected it, so she just write it down in my variation at no charge.

Now show u the fenced up site:

and the workflow up to today:

Building Permit Done + Site Cleaning

Got the building permit on 19th April!!!

We went to our site to do some cleaning, twice. I hate those irresponsible builders who dumped rubbish and rocks on our land! Since the rocks are super heavy, my back hurts all day.

Now waiting for the site start letter. Please just give to me ASAP!!!!!!

BTW, just to let u know my neighbours down the back and the east-side have already had their fence up, that's good.

Building Permit Applied

Building permit applied yesterday! My liason expected to get council approval at the end of next week.

About the sound batts, I decided not to go since the quote is around $1500 for between ground & 1st floor. I did not expected the price is soooo high, way above my budget ($800). Maybe I will discuss with my site supervisor after construction start to see if I could install some sound batts from bunnings by myself. 

I will do some site cleaning before getting my building permit. Too many rain these days!

Yah~Final Drawings Done!

Got my amended final drawings yesterday and signed today!!!! 

Here I share 3 pages from the final drawings:

As I required before, my admin raised a variation to make the shower rose move further away from the mixer so I can change it to a shower head with rail after handover.

I want to add some insulation/sound batts between garage and the living area, also between garage downstairs and bedroom 1 upstairs to avoid exhaust gas or noise from cars. My admin said it could not be done until my energy report is out. She told me to wait few more days for my energy report. 

I was bored during the waiting period, so I used Studio M to create a drawing about my bathroom, just for fun(:

Re-pegged by My Developer

This is really a surprise! I've no idea why my developer re-peg my northwest corner, but this is good! Now the boundary can't be more clear!

And my land......kinda messy, need a site clean before construction started!

I've heard that BB has a long admin time and I've hoped that I could be a lucky one to skip the long waiting period. But..........still waiting for my amended drawings!!!!!!!!!

Happy OR Not

After a long weekend, we phoned my admin today and finally got some progress there. 

1) I requested them to vent my rangehood externally, cost me $250, not too bad.

2) Relocated my rear garden tap to the outside of living room wall with no extra charge, which is good. 

3) BB accept my rear offset peg as a building peg, so 'SAVE ME' $720 for resurveying.

4) Got 820+620mm 2 doors instead of 620+620mm doors to the study room on ground floor at no extra costs.

5) Got a quote back for providing Cat 2 floor tiles (instead of concrete) to the storage room beneath the staircase, not cheap ($320)! But I can't be bothered to tile that area by myself after handover.

The bad thing is,

1) my admin says I can't relocated my ground-mounted clothesline in the back yard, I don't understand why!

2) When I was in colour selection, the staff told me I'll get a set of pot draws in the kitchen as standard , so I add 2 no. drawers at $100 each. After I got my drawings, I found that only the added 2 drawers appear in the kitchen. Now my admin told me no drawers come as standard. When I requested to add 2 more pot drawers today to make 4 no. all together and I'm willing to pay another $200, she was kind of saying 'no' and needs to confirm with the colour selection staff. Well, since the I don't have a write-down email as evidence, I can do nothing! I really want more drawers in the kitchen for storage convenience (having enough cupboard and pantry shelves already)!!!

Furthermore, I asked the progress of amended drawings, my admin said 'soon'~~Hope this is true.

Got The Developer Replied

The developer replied my email on Fri. They explained that is not a wrong peg, it is an offset peg. Since my west-north neighbour's land belongs to the stage developed before mine and already fenced up, the developer couldn't put an peg under or very close to the fence post when they were developing my stage, they just managed to put an offset peg to state the actual peg is the fence post, blah blah~

I forwarded the email to BB, hopes they could accept this answer and this offset peg.

Still Messing Around The Pegs

I think I found a wrong peg on my rear boundary! Where does that one come from?

Though the peg should be the land owner's responsibility after land settlement, but the wrong peg was not hammered into the ground by me! I took a pic and drew a graph to a guy whom is in the developer's customer relations office, and I request him to follow up this peg thing. Hope this can be solved ASAP!

By the way, according to my admin in BB, there are 3 cases in front of me are delayed, so mine is delayed as well! Not happy Jan!

Other's Fence Is Not A Peg

BB responses about my peg pics, my admin says other's fence might on a wrong place so it doesn't count. So the rear 'peg' we thought we had means nothing. BB do only need 3 pegs to start building. Since we only dug out 2 pegs in the front, another digging day is on the way~Let's say, hmmmmm, how about tomorrow? Hope everything goes smoothly and we can dig the third PEG out to save $720. Finger crossed!

Missing Pegs = $720!!!

I got an email Thursday from BB said that the pegs are missing on my lot, and offered a $720 deal to redo the land survey by BB. Gosh, that's a rob! I'm not paying that! So We grabbed a shovel and went to our land on Fri morning to dig. After searching the pegs based on the pics we took before, it turns out that where the pegs should be were temporary fenced inside the houses (which are under construction) next to our lot. It is inappropriate to dig without my neighbours permit since the pegs we shared are inside their fence at that time. 

When we was trying to contact council to get this problem fixed, we heard some one was talking in the house right-hand next to our land. We went inside and found 2 workers and asked for the contact No. of their site supervisor. Well, how lucky we are! And lucky again, their site supervisor is really really nice and made us stick around so he could meet us on the land 4 hours later, furthermore, he said he would like to help us to find our pegs. As he promised, in the afternoon, he and another person showed up. They took their tools to dig the pegs out for us really hard, and helped us to find 2 pegs in the front. It turns out that the pegs are not missing! They are just buried under some mud! Ughhhhhh~BB is so lazy and can't be bothered to dig at all! 

Since our rear pegs on one side is other's permanent fence already, so we got 3 pegs. We took a bottle of spray paint to mark out the pegs as pic showed below. Hope that BB can accept this result. If they don't, we're going to dig the hell out and locate our last peg, which would save us $720!!!

Got developer approval!!!

Actually, we got our developer approval last Friday, just a day after the application being logged. Light speed, isn't it?

Last Sunday we just sat by the table, grabbed every file we signed and checked them on the drawings. It is hard to read the drawings especially this is no where near what we known, we are the 'non-graphic guys', lolz~As a result, it took us 4hs to get 10 pages checked through and marked the incorrect drawings down with red pen. Then we scanned the drawings, send it back to our admin for further modification.

There are more errors than we thought, especially the electrical part. My previous 'marked up electrical plan' is based on the standard floor plan where the crossover is on the left side, but our final drawings is based on our actual land where the driveway crossover is on the right side. Now the whole floor plan is flipped over. When we were checking the final electricity drawings with the previous 'marked up plan', I have to flipped the paper over to understand the right direction and make sure every powerpoint, switch, light point, TV point etc. stay where they should be. God, that gives me a sore neck!

Hope that we could hear from our admin soon so that we could log our application in council earlier.

To Anonymous

To Anonymous: 

Mostly u are not able to negotiate on price, but hey, why don't u give it a try. If u succeed, u save money! I know some ppl negotiated on the fixed site costs by using other company's free quote, and they succeeded. For example, Burbank quotes u 8000 AUD for fixed site costs, and u got Simonds or Metricon free site costs' quotes previously which are 2000 lower. Using this as a bargaining tool to ask them redo the fixed site costs, and Burbank may lower the price. However, for the colour selection, I don't think you are able to bargain. Cuz they got a specific department calculating the price for each item for different houses. The colour selection people just give your advice on colour/style. The prices are calculated by the calculation department and they communicate via computer so you can get the price within the colour selection day.

About the time length, I'd say 1 year. Typically in Burbank, pre-consulting/pre-contract (fixed site costs)------contract singing------land titled------soil test------colour selection------drawing------construction------move in. Drawing would take u months to be done, I know someone wait about 5 months to make the drawings to be done correctly. Be prepared and push your admin frequently.

Finally got our house's drawings

New year new beginning, apparently our house's 2011 starts with the drawings. There were 3 small changes we requested in late 2010. We were lucky that we have not been charged any fees for those minor changes after the date of contract signing. Due to the changes we requested, the emails back and forth, the messages passed between different departments in Burbank, we have to wait longer time to get our drawings done. So guys, you better prepare everything before the colour selection to save your own time.

After a week hearing nothing from Burbank, we got an email today which is attached with our drawings and some answers for our previous email. Yeah! A big step! We are approaching to the actual construction. In the email, our admin says Burbank has already applied the building plan to the developer and will be approved in 10 business days. The application does not mean that we can not alter the drawings. We will have time to look through carefully, mark down the items they drew incorrectly and request further modification. 

There are 10 pages of the drawings. All the legend, notes and elevation, urghhhhhh~ Though it gives me a headache right now, I have to read through and cross check with my colour selections, electricity plan and contracts to make sure everything is right. Another thing is, our lovely admin kindly reminded that I haven't pick any tiles/carpet for my storage room under the staircase in the email and I can do it now without being charged 500AUD. OMG, can u imagine if I did not find this out and ended with a concrete floor in my storage room just besides to the hall way??!!! That's nightmare! Apparently me and my colour selection manager totally forgot about this during the colour selection.

Also, there are some good news. We found that our rainwater tank is a slimline model instead of standard one on the drawings. I'm not sure whether everyone build with Burbank will get a slimline rainwater tank. If you don't know, you better ask your admin. As suggested on the drawings, my backyard is over 110 sqm2 excluding the alfresco, oh I just love it!!! The clothes line (included in the promotion package) is 1.2m * 2.2m ground mounted, which is larger than I thought, nice, more clothes one time! The letterbox (included in the promotion package) is 0.88m height * 0.385m width, which is similar to the picture below, except mine will be in charcoal colour to matching our dark bricks colour. It looks like a lovely letterbox (:

Contract, Floor Plan, Facade & Promotion

We signed our contract with BB at 22nd Sep 2010, just a few days before our land is titled. 

The contract lists is as below:

As the contract lists shows, we chose some floor plan options. As a result, our floor plan changed from original one. See below:

For the facade choice is limited, only a few at a very high price. I remember the most expensive one (the only one with a balcony) is $20,000+, I'd rather pay $20,000 on somewhere else. So we go for the cheapest one, well, still cost $2000AUD. It is not too bad, isn't it?

                           

There is also a promotion package, of course we took the promotion package, the price is fair.