Porter Davis homes

I would be a little bit nervous that your dependent on titles coming through mid 2018.

I guess you have to be comfortable with the worse case scenario.

Whereabouts are you building.

With the fixed site costs I guess you are just making a bet whether you are on more expensive land than usual to build on or not. If you have problems with your soil then it's probably going to be a lot more than that, if you have no issues at all then you could potentially have gotten it cheaper.
What little experience I have with land titling and anecdotal evidence suggests that it always takes longer for your land to title than what your developer says it will. Maybe it's only a month or two, but maybe it's 6 months in which case you will have some issues.
Bushfire costs are what they are, you just have to hope that the BAL gets removed before you start construction.

For the flooring I would say it depends on what you are after. Cat 1 means laminate timber, pretty basic carpet or ceramic tiles rather than porcelain ones. We were perfectly happy with the laminate timber and tiles but upgraded our carpet and underlay to get a nicer feeling and longer lasting product. Others seems to have done the opposite, or just left it all as Cat 1. Horses for courses as they say!

Hi. Building West of Melbourne.

Everything is increasing by 1 July. The sales consultant showed me the price increase by 12000-19000 by Saturday. If I make a deposit by Wednesday, I am saving myself from paying that price plus the promotion on stamp duty fee.

What do you reckon?

Ask them to sweeten the pot. There is a lot of competition at the moment with that magical date happening soon. I guess how much do you love The design.

They only gave me an additional of $1,000 discount. Not too sweet.

Hurrow


Hi. Thanks for your ideas. Can you suggest how can I haggle the price lower? Haha. He gave me 1000$ discount from the quote on top of promo prices.

Hi All,
A question for those who have already started to build.CAn any one please tell me what does porter davis mean by site cut?The builder have given us the site cut date on 3rd which is this monday .We went past our block yesterday to see there has been no activity except for the tap line .We were expecting they would put up a temp fencing or a portaloo but no there is nothing at all.We have not heard from anyone from PD after we signed off the contract variation and got the building permit.When does the site supervisor calls you .Are we supposed to get any letter from the builder stating they are starting to build .We have some weeds in our block not too much but we dont know what we should be doing .When we asked the BC she told us that we will be advised after the site is scrapped...which didn't happen till yesterday.So my question is when they say site cut do they adhere to the dates?We dont want to waste our time going to our block to see nothing really happening.Another thing is that we wanted to set up our home theatre post build .Initially we included it in our tender and then cancelled but forgot to keep the prewiring.We just realised our mistake now but the BC said there cant be any changes henceforth so what should we do>Can we request the BS and get the wiring done?Has anyone done it like that so far?we would need to run cables and a plug point on the roof...but just in case they refuse can it be done post build for a 2 storey building.Really confused at the moment
regards
priya

Hi Priya,

We had a site start date of the 26 of June (Monday just passed)
We got our fence on the Friday before our site start date.

We then saw our site scrape done Tuesday Wednesday and our concrete piers poured on Thursday. Friday I received a offical letter outlining rules, slab supervisor and other little things.

We are expecting a call of our Slab supervisor this week as we still haven't herd from him and find that very poor on his behalf.

If you are wondering what's happening I suggest emailing your building coordinator or if you have your slab supervisors number call him.

Now in regards to the pre wiring for your theatre. Push to speak to your building coordinators manager and ask if you can pay the variation free of $500 to add that pre wiring back in.
Remember you can also get a electrician out once your home is built to add wiring and speakers to your theatre.

We didn't get porter Davis to do any of our electrical as we will be doing all post handover.

I hope this help.

Thank you so much Danniellejayde for the informations.It looks like i need to call my building coordinator regarding what is happening with the site start .I will be pretty disappointed if the site cut date given to us and nothing happens.I tried to push with the wiring but our BC said we cant do any changes as we had already did a couple of changes like putting the cold water tap which we forgot and we had signed the form which states no more changes will be done.Its good to know that i can do it post handover though.Is it possible to do it post handover for a 2 storey building ..then i will stop worrying about it .thanks and regards
priya

Hi Priya,

Site cut usually involves some kind of excavation of soil from your block in order to make it level for the slab work to begin.

Re: your home theatre wiring, if you can push your BC, try to build a good relationship with your site supervisor and ask him if he would be ok to put you in touch with the electricians when they are on site and have the do a cash job on site. Or at least if he is ok to have 3rd party trades like the ones from from Big Picture people etc to do the pre-wiring (they are very hesitant with these things, so it really depends on your SS). The reason you would want to get pre-wiring now rather than post handover is because your theatre room is on the ground floor. You won't have much place to run wires through the ceiling on the ground floor.

If the above approaches don't work, all's not lost...you can still do wiring post handover, except that the wires will be visible along the walls, but there are ways to conceal them using mouldings or other channels. Or, you could also look at wireless solutions like Sonos (you still need power points for the speaker though...)

How many people here used Darbecca for inspections and your site supervisor was present for the inspections? Our site supervisor refuses to attend as he says he will just end up arguing with them because "they do things differently". When it comes time to rectify the defects the builders don't understand what some of them are because they weren't there when Darbecca was available to explain them.


- View my blog at www.waldorfgrangebuild.wordpress.com

You pay the bills, you call the shots. Assuming Darbecca are inspecting everything to check if it meets Australian standards, there shouldn't be too much room for the site supervisor to complain? He doesn't have to like it when they point out errors, but it's not at all unreasonable to expect him to rock up and have a discussion about it all. If he's refusing to do so then I'd be asking him for a proper explanation rather than some rubbish about them doing something differently.

We've only had the one Darbecca inspection so far and no supervisor in attendance, though concreters were which was great cause they could addressed things on the spot.

I guess it's not a requirement for the supervisor to be present but obviously would be so much better if they were so they can properly understand the list of defects.

At the end of the day they are going to have to address them whether they like it or not, so no point arguing about it! That excuse is a bit of a cop out!



Our 37sq Custom Hamptons Inspired Home:
http://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=86931

Ok rant time.

After lots of back and forth between PD and the developer, we've been told we can't have the facade in our plans. I'm not particularly attached to this facade, in fact the sole reason for choosing it is that it was the cheapest of all the options. It doesn't look wonderful, it doesn't look terrible, our hope as with pretty much everything in our house is that it looks ok. To try and keep the developer happy PD had made some changes to the original stuff with adding detail, eaves, second render colours etc which all added to the cost but whatever, if it has to be done it has to be done. PD had told us that this exact facade had been approved previously so it should be fine.

So today I get a call from PD saying that the developer now won't approve the facade, even though it is exactly the same as one which they have originally approved. Apparently they don't like the look of the roof or some such. I can honestly say that in my time on this forum I have seen absolutely zero people talking about the look of the roof line, in all my time looking at display houses and other houses for that matter I have made zero comments about roofs unless they feature a turret or tower or some such. Our house does not feature any turrets or towers, we're not trying to build the Guggenheim museum or the Taj Mahal, our house looks like pretty much every other house in the estate as far as I can tell.

So now PD are telling me that the developer is fine with a different facade in the PD range which costs another couple thousand dollars, and will require new engineering plans, a new energy rating and who knows what else, and will delay starting construction by another couple of weeks at least.

Arghhhhhhhhhhh!

Any thoughts or suggestions on what we can do?

That is very annoying, I also have never paid any remarks to a roof or heard of anyone having issues with how their roof looks. Seems like an absolute joke! Have you spoken to the developers yourself? I would be asking them why it was previously approved.

This sounds incredibly frustrating and we also encountered developer rejecting our facade. In the end we went back and forth with the developer, tried to show them similar houses already approved etc but to no avail. We just had to accept the changes to proceed.


- View my blog at www.waldorfgrangebuild.wordpress.com

Apparently the developer now wishes they hadn't approved the original facade/roof and won't be doing it again. No idea why or how it makes any difference to anyone whatsoever. We haven't spoken to the developers ourselves, apparently there has been a lot of back and forth between them and PD already on this.

I find it absolutely amazing that the developer has a say over it to this level of detail. I can see how they could complain if I wanted some extravagant roof line or facade or wanted to render my house pink with purple polka dots but our house is about as plain as it gets, if it was up to us it would be even plainer than what we had to try to change it to keeping them happy. The chances of anyone whatsoever looking at our place and saying that looks weird is pretty low. So why do they get to say that they don't like it and get to knock it back?

I remember reading about your issues with the developer and thinking that seems stupid, but at least with our house design we shouldn't have any issues. How wrong I was. And yep, it doesn't seem like there is a whole lot we can do about it except fork out several thousand dollars more and accept a multi week delay in starting construction.

BTW how did your meeting with the SS go to discuss the list of defects from Darbecca?

How frustrating. I remember when looking for a block on land in Esate one of the Estates here in Ballarat had really strict covenants that you had to get approval on your design from some sort of comittee of the Estate Developers, that along level of micro management was enough to send me looking elsewhere.

Is it going to cost you extra to do new engineering plans etc?

Hurrow, About to jump on a flight, so will keep this brief. PM Me if you want to chat later. Suggest you contact the Developer directly and raise your issue as a complaint with their management. We kind of went through the same hell b/w PD and Mirvac. In my case, It was almost like developer relations team at PD keep coming up with these excuses to delay site start...