Browse Forums Building A New House Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 221Oct 30, 2010 9:22 am How exciting - great pics on the blog by the way - do you mind me asking what colour your garage door and also your kitchen cupboards and benchtops are? I really like the dark colour around your windows at the front too, I think it looks really nice. How weird is that about the gaps under the door!! why would they do that.. Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 222Oct 31, 2010 7:33 pm Hi Lee75 and thanks allyd, Must be exciting finally seeing some building action Lee! We can't wait to get to that stage, unfortunately we have a bit of a wait though! Not really expecting any action until mid to late Jan next year as we haven't even gone to council yet. And allyd, just checked out your blog and your house is looking great! Good to hear about Robert, I am pretty sure 2 friends of ours had him as their SS and said he was fantastic. They said he was very pedantic about the quality of workmanship and if he saw anything out of order he would get it fixed without them having to tell him to fix it. So we are pretty sure that Robert will be our SS as well when we finally get there. Not long now for your keys though! Good to hear from you guys Signed with Homestead: 27-07-2010 Land Settled: 10-08-2010 Building Design: Custom design based on Homestead's Sandridge Building Contract Signed: 19-11-2010 Site Scrape: 21-02-2011 Follow our building process at our blog... http://nathandjessbuild.blogspot.com/ Support our business - Indulge Yourself Lingerie http://www.indulgeyourselflingerie.com.au Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 223Oct 31, 2010 7:41 pm Hi Nathan & Jessica, yes it is great to finally see some action! I hope you guys get started quicker than ours did, ours was ridiculous! I just want to say I think your plan is great, that is the pantry of my dreams (sad I know) - the main bedroom WIR is pretty awesome too! Congrats I think you will have a really lovely house and I look forward to seeing your progress as it happens! Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 224Oct 31, 2010 8:02 pm Thanks Lee, haha, we don't think its sad, after all, we are the ones building it lol. We are just in preapproval at the moment, so we are hoping for a positive outcome there, otherwise it will be back to the drawing board, fingers crossed! How long did yours take to start? Signed with Homestead: 27-07-2010 Land Settled: 10-08-2010 Building Design: Custom design based on Homestead's Sandridge Building Contract Signed: 19-11-2010 Site Scrape: 21-02-2011 Follow our building process at our blog... http://nathandjessbuild.blogspot.com/ Support our business - Indulge Yourself Lingerie http://www.indulgeyourselflingerie.com.au Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 225Oct 31, 2010 8:06 pm We signed in January, and have just had the site scrape... so about 10 months! But Allyd had a very different experience so I dont think its typical for the company - we were just unlucky I think! Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 226Nov 02, 2010 1:02 pm Welcome nathanandjessica, good luck on your journey with homestead. I think it went quiet as builds were winding up or as is the case with Lee and ourselves it is taking longer than expected. We are in a similar stage as Lee as we signed begining of February but have had such delays and errors with Homestead and now been in council for almost 4 months that we are getting to the point of thinking of pulling the plug but then see the results of others like allyd and hear from others of good builds with homestead so are perservering. We have had 6 or 7 redraws, I think it was 5 before they got it right and we then got the yellows but we have had 2 more redraws because of issues that homestead knew council would not accept. Finally had some positive outcome when I was able to talk to a more senior manager annoyingly it still cost me more $ but was able to negotiate and get a reasonable pricing. I would have to say the biggest issue with homestead is that no one can answer questions, contract manager says that should talk to home consultant who says we shouldn't have to deal with him anymmore as it is with homestead but assists then contract manager says home consultant gave wrong info "shouldn't have said that" and so it goes. It is also frustrating because council have said if it wasn't for the ammendments required it would have been approved easily although saying that there are now issues with trees and then wait and see about fire stuff with CFS. On a positive it has given us an opportunity to get stuff done to our block with out rushing. We finally got demolition done now need to do more retaining but waiting on homestead to let us know how they intend to build ie cut or fill or bit of both, again have to chase people as no one knows. On a diffferent note allyd your house is looking good gives us much needed encouragement. What are the bricks that you chose and are they different on the facade to the rest of the house and what color are the roof tiles? They both look similar to what we are looking at doing. Lee who did you have scrape your site, homestead or subcontract? Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 227Nov 02, 2010 1:48 pm Hi Kyma, keep persevering but don't blindly persevere. The side bricks are Austral Settlers Grey with the front face brick being "King" something,I can't seem to find them on the PDF brochure but apparently they are the most expensive. You will need to go to the display showroom. The roof tiles are Capri Shadow Grey which are a cross sprayed tile, on a dull overcast day the roof looks one colour but on a sunny day the roof has a mottled look, which was exactly what I wanted. Having read some of the troubles everyone is having I feel my own issues pale into insignificance, I was hit by a 5K increase, $4400 because of the 90 day clause and the rest because of soil removal and site access (mud). These costs were manageable for us and all it means is I don't get my HT now, the HT room will just sit idle for a few months. Keep your collective chins up and understand that they are in the game for the money. http://ourlamontbuild-allydandmei.blogspot.com/ Initial signing and deposit done Soil test done Contract signed Demolition of old house done All finance approved Building approval from council Site prep done Trenching done Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 228Nov 02, 2010 6:39 pm Kyma - oh I feel your pain, and I am looking forward to the fun part which hopefully has started. We got HS to do the site scrape. Does all this mean you have not even had selections yet? one thing that annoyed me is that our selections stuff took a couple of months (!!) and most other builders do this while plans are in council etc, its a pain that they tack this onto the end so it makes a longer wait to start date. Have you been to beaumnts, the brick place etc in preparation? Allyd what are your kitchen cupboards and benchtop? I have chosen a white laminate benchtop and am worried about how it will look, but I would be pleased if it looked like yours (if it is stone well then no wonder it looks good!).. Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 229Nov 02, 2010 7:03 pm Hi Lee, our kitchen cupboards are the same as what's in their show room, Chocolate pear. The bench top is just laminate, Formica "Escarpment", can't afford the real stuff LOL. It's looking OK, need to wait until the flooring is down. We are going with vinyl plank flooring, "Honey Oak", throughtout the entrance, dine, living and main bedroom. We don't like carpet. The kitchen design actually has a flaw, the fridge position only allows for the door to open opposite to the kitchen work area. It should open to allow free access from the food preparation area, if you chose a fridge that opens the other way it can never open up fully for cleaning and rearranging shelf's. It's difficult to explain but I really only discovered this when buying a fridge last week. In our design the fridge and pantry should have been swapped. http://ourlamontbuild-allydandmei.blogspot.com/ Initial signing and deposit done Soil test done Contract signed Demolition of old house done All finance approved Building approval from council Site prep done Trenching done Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 230Nov 04, 2010 10:25 pm Hi Lee no we havent had selections yet but we have been to Austral brick and selected what we want and asked for a price, plan A is ascot pewter in random stone (possibly homestead blend) on front normal else where and plan B is vintage grey. Brick people excellent ended up being some one I knew from 20 years ago. We did go to Beaumonts to have a look then made appointment which we had today but that was like pulling teeth. The supposed assistant wasn't sure if she could help us as we didn't have final approval but we explained that the house is basically approved just waiting on horticulture and arborist reports eventually decided to help after we asked someone else where she had gone. Overall we might as well just done it ourselves as she didn't contribute anything except calculating how much more we would have to pay for our choices, unfortunately got follow up in a couple of weeks to try to finalise selection maybe she will be more help then. Allyd I think we are thinking alike as the colour we are thinking for the kitchen cupboards is chocolate pear but most probably go for a lighter/whiter benchtop although the plan is to convert to stone in next five years. We are also going for the same roof tiles as they are the only ones that seemed to match gutter, garage etc and the fact that we didn't really like any of the other tiles. Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 231Nov 05, 2010 8:57 am Kyma thats really strange about your experience with beaumts, we definitely didnt have council approval when we went in to austral or beaumts but we just took our plans and they went from those. I was gobsmacked by the prices though, our upgrade costs were initially over $4k for some pretty average looking tiles but we chose to go with a smaller wall tile and it ended up being less than $2k. Still - tiles were something I was not going to spend extra money on, but it didnt work out that way. What was the issue you had with trees just out of interest? I have come across from these forums THE most amazing arborist/tree lopper so if you need details let me know. We have used him now for cutting down about 6 trees and will be pruning one soon. Allyd- I think I know what you mean about your fridge, I had a look at your plan from your blog - so basically as it is butted against the wall the door does not open fully is that what you mean? what a pain hey. I am a bit worried about our kitchen to be honest as it was a custom design in a small space so we wont know what it is like til we see it. It is all looking very nice. Did you have an independent building inspector? Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 232Nov 05, 2010 9:13 am It's great to hear some of you getting into the real stuff! It's good when it starts going up. We too have had headaches with Homestead admin, but we're finally through that...just waiting for the bank to lend us copious amounts of money and we'll hopefully be away! It has been quite frustrating given that compared to some we've had a fairly straight forward design and selections phase...yet somehow they've managed to drag it out for months and months. We had 1 plan redraw, and that was just to fix one window, and our selections were done within a day with one ammendment, yet it's taken forever for them to just send the bloody paperwork out. Phone call upon phone call hastling them about it and we just coudn't get it out of them. As discussed in another thread, we also had to fight over a missing fill compaction certificate, which wasn't missing at all, the Homestead Building guy just didn't look for it, and instead wanted to double our footings. Nice try. It took him a month and a half to *not* find the certificate, and it took my partner and I half a day to find two copies from two different sources (Land agent, and Council...the first places we looked). It's frustrating that we have never done this before, yet we can source stuff that the professionals allegedly can't. Anyway, c'mon Mr Banker! I'm ready to roll! Homestead Homes SA: The Lamont Bayswood Estate; Aldinga Beach Preliminary Signing: April 2010 Floorplans: 13 June 2010 Building Contract: 19 June 2010 Selections: 28 Sept 2010 Scraped; Trenching: 21 Jan 2011 Slab Poured: 28 Jan 2011 Framing: 17 Feb 2011 | Completed 24 Feb 2011 Roof & Gutters: 02 Mar 2011 Bricks: 03 Mar 2011 Wire-up: 12 Mar 2011 Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 233Nov 05, 2010 12:29 pm @ rockabilly Kid, have you signed of on the design yet? As I posted earlier the Lamont kitchen design is borked by Homestead. The fridge and pantry should be swapped, they are of similar sizes and it lends the fridge opening to be easily increased from a stated 850 to whatever. Our fridge opening actually ended being 830, not a show stopper but food for thought. @ lee75, no we haven't worried about a independent building inspection yet. As we live right next door to our build I have kept a very close eye on all proceedings. But one thing I'm doing is making the last payment as a bank cheque not EFT. (our funding was not a construction type loan) http://ourlamontbuild-allydandmei.blogspot.com/ Initial signing and deposit done Soil test done Contract signed Demolition of old house done All finance approved Building approval from council Site prep done Trenching done Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 234Nov 08, 2010 9:31 am Already signed off, though we could change it if we wanted, but we're already 6 months behind where we need to be. Also, we've gone for double the size Pantry, so a simple swap doesn't work. I measured it up and our fridge should be okay...of course i've yet to see how it goes with the handle against the wall as you mentioned. Homestead Homes SA: The Lamont Bayswood Estate; Aldinga Beach Preliminary Signing: April 2010 Floorplans: 13 June 2010 Building Contract: 19 June 2010 Selections: 28 Sept 2010 Scraped; Trenching: 21 Jan 2011 Slab Poured: 28 Jan 2011 Framing: 17 Feb 2011 | Completed 24 Feb 2011 Roof & Gutters: 02 Mar 2011 Bricks: 03 Mar 2011 Wire-up: 12 Mar 2011 Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 235Nov 08, 2010 9:35 pm WE HAVE KEYS AND WE'RE NOT AFRAID TO USE THEM Ahem...eerr yes well we had our hand over today and everything went well. Only had one small scare but that was sorted out with a phone call, they missed the automatic roller door control. It's on the plan and our pricing schedule but not on their building schedule, all good, just need to organise a time with Gliderol to fit the controls. Other than that the SS sorted a glaring nail jutting out on door frame and fixed a small issue with some double doors whilst I was there. There will no doubt be some issues that will arise over the next 90 days but hopefully nothing crazy, in truth I've got more to worry about outside the house than inside. http://ourlamontbuild-allydandmei.blogspot.com/ Initial signing and deposit done Soil test done Contract signed Demolition of old house done All finance approved Building approval from council Site prep done Trenching done Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 236Nov 09, 2010 9:34 am allyd WE HAVE KEYS AND WE'RE NOT AFRAID TO USE THEM Congratulations allyd!!! Thats great news! Hope you don't find too many issues with your house, how exciting! It has been really good to read about everyone's experiences, there are many issues on here that you have all had, but most of them I myself would never have thought of checking. I am sure we will have issues, everyone seems to at some stage. Thank you also kyma! To give a quick update on us, when received pre approval from the bank yesterday for our full build amount. Which is fantastic because we now don't need to cull things off the plans or any upgrades. Put our final changes into the builder yesterday, going straight to yellows and should have them end of this week or early next week (HOPEFULLY)! Signed with Homestead: 27-07-2010 Land Settled: 10-08-2010 Building Design: Custom design based on Homestead's Sandridge Building Contract Signed: 19-11-2010 Site Scrape: 21-02-2011 Follow our building process at our blog... http://nathandjessbuild.blogspot.com/ Support our business - Indulge Yourself Lingerie http://www.indulgeyourselflingerie.com.au Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 237Nov 09, 2010 8:33 pm allyd - CONGRATULATIONS!! wow, so exciting. Nathanandjess - i hope it happens quickly for you! us - we have a portaloo - woo hoo. its nice to see stuff happen before you expect it! hope everyone else is good. Howie must be enjoying his new house, havent heard from him for a while!! Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 238Nov 16, 2010 12:55 pm Lee75 - Well at least you can go to the toilet now when you visit It would be nice having the unexpected! Well we received a copy of our yellows today and we are going to sign the contract tomorrow at lunch! Can't wait! Signed with Homestead: 27-07-2010 Land Settled: 10-08-2010 Building Design: Custom design based on Homestead's Sandridge Building Contract Signed: 19-11-2010 Site Scrape: 21-02-2011 Follow our building process at our blog... http://nathandjessbuild.blogspot.com/ Support our business - Indulge Yourself Lingerie http://www.indulgeyourselflingerie.com.au Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 239Nov 16, 2010 3:03 pm allyd Hi Kyma, keep persevering but don't blindly persevere. The side bricks are Austral Settlers Grey with the front face brick being "King" something,I can't seem to find them on the PDF brochure but apparently they are the most expensive. You will need to go to the display showroom. The roof tiles are Capri Shadow Grey which are a cross sprayed tile, on a dull overcast day the roof looks one colour but on a sunny day the roof has a mottled look, which was exactly what I wanted. Having read some of the troubles everyone is having I feel my own issues pale into insignificance, I was hit by a 5K increase, $4400 because of the 90 day clause and the rest because of soil removal and site access (mud). These costs were manageable for us and all it means is I don't get my HT now, the HT room will just sit idle for a few months. Keep your collective chins up and understand that they are in the game for the money. I just looked at your blog Allyd. Your house looks great Allyd. I love your kitchen. We also picked the settlers grey bricks and the shadow grey tiles. What colour are your gutters? contract signed: Nov 09 Released to Construction: 23 Jul 10 Slab poured: 9 Aug 10 Frame completed: 30 Aug 10 Windows & Gutters: 7 Sep 10 Bricks: 15 - 23 Sep 10 Roof: 24 Sep 10 Gyprock: 20 Oct 10 Lockup: 25 Oct 10 Kitchen: 27 Oct 10 Tiling: 6 - 9 Nov 10 Painting: 17 Nov 10 Carpet: 30 Nov 10 PCI: 15 Dec 10 Handover: 17 Dec 10 https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=35943 Re: Homestead Homes (SA)? Any opinion? 240Nov 16, 2010 4:10 pm carlswil allyd Hi Kyma, keep persevering but don't blindly persevere. The side bricks are Austral Settlers Grey with the front face brick being "King" something,I can't seem to find them on the PDF brochure but apparently they are the most expensive. You will need to go to the display showroom. The roof tiles are Capri Shadow Grey which are a cross sprayed tile, on a dull overcast day the roof looks one colour but on a sunny day the roof has a mottled look, which was exactly what I wanted. Having read some of the troubles everyone is having I feel my own issues pale into insignificance, I was hit by a 5K increase, $4400 because of the 90 day clause and the rest because of soil removal and site access (mud). These costs were manageable for us and all it means is I don't get my HT now, the HT room will just sit idle for a few months. Keep your collective chins up and understand that they are in the game for the money. I just looked at your blog Allyd. Your house looks great Allyd. I love your kitchen. We also picked the settlers grey bricks and the shadow grey tiles. What colour are your gutters? Hi Carlswil, thanks for the comments, we are getting our floors done this week starting tomorrow so I will be posting some pics soon. Our gutters are Woodland Grey http://ourlamontbuild-allydandmei.blogspot.com/ Initial signing and deposit done Soil test done Contract signed Demolition of old house done All finance approved Building approval from council Site prep done Trenching done Thanks for the suggestion. The space between shower and sinks was too tight. I agree about the toilet location. So I have tried two other options: The lower one is… 3 6128 these look like missing batts. Go up and take a look. But yeah moisure meter is a completely different tool 4 9447 Ask for references and speak to them. If they are defensive or try to avoid the request, walk. 1 74682 |