Browse Forums Building A New House 1 Oct 22, 2009 6:50 pm Hi all Can anyone shed some light what exactly happens once you've signed the building contract? If you could add some timeframes, and the order of events as well. For example: 1. Site peg-out (?) - approx 1 week after contracts signed 2. Put in sewage/water pipes (??) - approx 1 week after peg-out 3. Build framework for slab (???) - approx 1 week after pipes ... etc. BTW, it's a knockdown rebuild in Sydney; site ready from our side. Thanks heaps!! My signature is distracting people from my wise posts ... Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 2Oct 22, 2009 7:18 pm I reckon it depends a lot. In my case when I visited the land 4 weeks (20 working days) since I was officially in the construction, the land was already excavated and piers were installed... This is despite the initial statement from the builder it might take at least 20 days before anything will even start... Wandering when the slab will be ready. Hope soon or even sooner. ... built a Promenade with Clarendon. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=25104 20-10-09 - excavation and piering completed ... 12-04-10 - Basins fixed. Connecting to the electrical grid 23-04-10 - PCI 07-05-10 - HANDOVER! Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 4Oct 22, 2009 7:48 pm Ours is a new build, however this is what we were: Contract Signed - about 2 months before site start Peg out - Sometime within the 2 weeks before site start date. Wasnt checking the site for those few weeks. Site cut (Site Start Date) - 15th Concrete Piers poured - 17th Plumbing and formwork complete - 20th Waffles and Reo installed - 23rd Slab poured - 27th (lost 2 days due to bad weather) Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 5Oct 22, 2009 8:50 pm Lex Thanks a lot! What a coincidence, we're also with Clarendon! My CSO said that all things have already been ordered (even before we signed!?!), and that my SS would be able to tell me when will they come over for the first time. However, she didn't know who is my SS (??!!?). When did you find out who is your SS, BTW? So, it looks like it's the "excavation", then piers, then ... Welcome to the club I'm building at Lakewood. The CSO, Cathie, has been very helpful. I received a letter on Monday (so it was 19 days since moving into the construction) showing the full roadmap of the process as well as the contact details of the SS. The SS is yet to contact me, however, as soon as work is being done it is OK, but yes, getting status updates is a good thing. I reckon your letter is on its way. There are 41 steps and the piers is the #6. Good luck with your build! ... built a Promenade with Clarendon. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=25104 20-10-09 - excavation and piering completed ... 12-04-10 - Basins fixed. Connecting to the electrical grid 23-04-10 - PCI 07-05-10 - HANDOVER! Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 6Oct 22, 2009 10:39 pm Hey, thanks, guys! Good luck with your builds too! I guess we'll "see" a lot of each others on these pages in many months to come ... My CSO did mention a letter, but nothing about the steps (and I always like to know what is around the corner). Cheers My signature is distracting people from my wise posts ... Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 7Oct 26, 2009 9:24 am Hey Sierra, how come it took 2 months from signing to starting?? Who is your builder? Didn't they have the clause in the contact which states their obligations to start within a certain period (eg. 20 days in our case)? Cheers My signature is distracting people from my wise posts ... Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 8Oct 26, 2009 10:00 am Lex Hey Sierra, how come it took 2 months from signing to starting?? Who is your builder? Didn't they have the clause in the contact which states their obligations to start within a certain period (eg. 20 days in our case)? Cheers In my case I signed the contract in May (was going on leave and did not want to miss the FHBG that was set to expire on 30th of June that time). However, final variations and reconciliations were signed in Sep. I was quite keen to have everything included in my contract -- I believe that Clarendon have tiles selection and a few more items to be added half-way through -- in my case everything has been included, priced and FIXED -- by doing so I made it impossible to Clarendon to make any increase as they did in Heathen's case But yeah, since I paid the first installment (5% of the contract price) it took 20 days to see something happening on the block... On the Saturday (24-Oct) I was quite confident that the slab will be finished in a week's time, however, considering the weather I'm not that confident (I wished I could trust the BOM) ... built a Promenade with Clarendon. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=25104 20-10-09 - excavation and piering completed ... 12-04-10 - Basins fixed. Connecting to the electrical grid 23-04-10 - PCI 07-05-10 - HANDOVER! Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 9Oct 26, 2009 11:00 am Hi E, ebyelyakov signed the contract in May (was going on leave and did not want to miss the FHBG that was set to expire on 30th of June that time). However, final variations and reconciliations were signed in Sep I am so confused - our Tender clearly said that they could increase the base house price (if it increased in the meantime, and it did, considerably) if we didn't sign The Building Contract (the real one) by the end of tender expiry AND provided them with the proof that our old house has been demolished. Then, the "draft" HIA contract they gave us (long time ago, when we paid the 4k deposit) had a clause where they needed to start within 20 days after us signing the real contract (ie. not the Tender). So, we thought that's the standard way. Which leads me to ask - how come they didn't start (20 days) after you signed in May!??!? (Unless you meant you signed the Tender in May?) Did you get them to change the contract so that final things can be done when you are ready?? And how did you manage to do that ??? We tried to change some caluses in the contract - they replied with a flat refusal. BTW, we also HAD to do the tiling as part of final contract (: I was shocked about that, because our initial brochure had that it's done "at frame stage". This happened when we were in the middle of kitchen design changes and internal colours selection (which takes so much time when you're unsure!) and kinda took us off-track. Yes, we also paid 5% at the signing. It's actually good, as we were expecting to pay the 5% plus ALL of the variations (it turns out that this was just another of their process changes, but this one was good for us!!). Anyway, back to my original thought - you say that "final variations and reconciliations were signed in Sep". So, were these the post-contract variations then?? If yes, were you charged the $1k for each of the variation? Or anything, really? (Our contract says 1k for each and any PCV!!!!, so we tried to be really careful and get it all done before the sign.) Hehehehe, funny about the BOM - but I trusted them last week and that's why I haven't bothered to drive myself some 5-10 minutes to check it out! BTW, I still have a few small things I'd like to tidy up on our site, before we are barred from it!! Cheers! My signature is distracting people from my wise posts ... Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 10Oct 26, 2009 11:31 am Frankly I do not really know. The three copies of the contract were signed in May and I should say that it was a hard job for an IT person like me to write so much with a pen The actual tender was signed some time in November 2008, when I had to pay my initial 4000K deposit (it was actually 3400 because I paid $600 at the very beginning to cover site survey and initial drafting costs). The reason Clarendon agreed to have the contract signed when we were still at the Council was because we were going away for 7 weeks and I wanted to make sure nothing would be delayed in addition to the fact that I was not interested in loosing the 24K FHBG. In the middle of July we were still at the Council and Clarendon applied a 3K increase to the base price. When the conditional DA was issued, Clarendon had to fix a few things -- replacing a 2KL water tank with a 3KL one, add a pergola to the secondary street and something else. None of those PVCs had a charge applied (I remember that the tender presenter said us that any PVC will incur a $1000 fee) -- maybe because these were not initiated by me. The total number of PVCs was 5 and the biggest one was for the tiles - something about a 5K increase. I also had the construction loan unconditionally approved beforehand (in May as well). After all PVC we done, Clarendon produced a Final Consolidation Contract on 29th of August and luckily we did not have to re-sign it -- just a variations list and some sort of declaration stating we were happy with the plans and acknowledge our understanding that past that point "absolutely no variations/changes were possible". With all that, I had a gap of about 15K between what the bank did approve and the final cost of the construction. Clarendon were quite happy to accept me covering this difference -- I had to email them my bank statements to show I had enough cash to cover that difference. The bank issued an ACC at the beginning of September and a few days later I was asked to pay by 5% and this was it. ... built a Promenade with Clarendon. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=25104 20-10-09 - excavation and piering completed ... 12-04-10 - Basins fixed. Connecting to the electrical grid 23-04-10 - PCI 07-05-10 - HANDOVER! Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 11Oct 26, 2009 1:02 pm I guess it really depends on who is building your home, what other jobs they have going and when the concrete company is available to do your site (I am sure there are other reasons). For example ours took a week all up and the concrete was poured on the 6th working day. Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 12Oct 26, 2009 4:39 pm Wow, what a difference in the process and what people get told and dealt, by the same company and at the same time!! Our timeframes were actually more or less excatly like yours, E!! (Sorry, I quickly shortened your UserName from ebyelyakov ... yep, you can guess it - IT ! And I'm missing my shorthand-ed editors like the command line and Word . Have you got any ideas how to "fix" this one??) I guess a lot depends on the CSO. Ours is quite hard to talk to, let alone get any useful information out of her; and replies ... what replies !?!??! And if you don't know any alternative paths, you can just do what you're told, or accept what you're offered. $, who are you building with?? One week - is it really "from sign to start"?? That must be the record! Cheers My signature is distracting people from my wise posts ... Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 13Oct 26, 2009 5:28 pm Lex I guess that in addition to the personal quality of the CSO some part goes to the customer themselves -- how we able to establish communication with the builder, how we are successful in clarifying assumptions, keeping everyone accountable for what they need to do within the constraints of time, etc... I'm not saying that we HAVE to do it -- it is simply my own bitter experience about how this bloody building industry works.... I won't not go much further on complaining about such a bad customer services -- there should be another topic for this... So, if you want something do -- micromanage, communicate and keep people accountable. The only person I could not align and keep accountable was the tender presenter.. She felt like a ghost -- everything would go through here without settling anywhere in her mind... Complaining to her manager about not responding to emails or voice-messages I got that "she responded indeed to all 3 emails you sent"... I tried to explain to her manager that I sent about 30 messages and have a habit to keep my archives pretty well organised.. However, it did not work much.. Probably their tender presenting department is full of ghost.. Dunno... Fortunately I did not have much chance to continue my studies of ghosts at Clarendon because a few weeks after those complaints I was in Strong Arms of our CSO Cathie ... built a Promenade with Clarendon. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=25104 20-10-09 - excavation and piering completed ... 12-04-10 - Basins fixed. Connecting to the electrical grid 23-04-10 - PCI 07-05-10 - HANDOVER! Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 14Oct 26, 2009 5:37 pm Lex Wow, what a difference in the process and what people get told and dealt, by the same company and at the same time!! Our timeframes were actually more or less excatly like yours, E!! (Sorry, I quickly shortened your UserName from ebyelyakov ... yep, you can guess it - IT ! And I'm missing my shorthand-ed editors like the command line and Word . Have you got any ideas how to "fix" this one??) I guess a lot depends on the CSO. Ours is quite hard to talk to, let alone get any useful information out of her; and replies ... what replies !?!??! And if you don't know any alternative paths, you can just do what you're told, or accept what you're offered. $, who are you building with?? One week - is it really "from sign to start"?? That must be the record! Cheers Oops no , sorry for the confusion. I was referring to Sierra's post re: the site prep etc. So, to clear things up....6 days for concrete to be laid. I think plans were signed the first week of October. Building with a custom builder. Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Constructio 15Oct 26, 2009 7:46 pm Lex Hey Sierra, how come it took 2 months from signing to starting?? Who is your builder? Didn't they have the clause in the contact which states their obligations to start within a certain period (eg. 20 days in our case)? Cheers Lex.. it was the bank. 8 weeks for uncond. approval on the constuction part of the loan. Pretty crazy! Builder was ready to start well before the finance came through. We missed our original site start by about a month. Once they had confirmation they were onsite the next week. Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 16Oct 26, 2009 10:45 pm Hmmm ... from all of your experiences, I again arrive to the same conclusion - "it depends" ! Of course, this is without looking into details of individual tenders, but basically - different people get different deals when the same process and rules are applied by the same company, even in things that are supposedly not negotiable. In theory, this equation can't add up, but it apparently can in practice . About the "ghost town" at Big C ... my tender presenter was actually the best person I worked with there! Really has the ear (and soul, I may add!!) for the poor client. Kinda a stark contrast to the rest of the flock. Always showed respect (at least when you can see) and always listened, amazing with people, experienced, skilled, polished to perfection, almost reads your mind (we had many lenghty sessions with him during our "design" stage as we made some biggish changes to the house, so had to figure out and cover some loose ends). He was not amused with the "quality" of their own staff (to put it mildly), eg. drafting who repeatedly couldn't (or didn't) read his notes and thick red pen mark-ups on the plans! Yeah, he was pulling his hair out ... Re. the CSO ... I saw that name Cathie somewhere on this Forum ... will have to search. Mine seems to be quite the opposite. She is good in what she does, but unfair to the client and doesn't give away absolutely anything that could even remotely be helpful to the client. It doesn't matter how you approach her. Falls into the typical feedback that so many people gave about their CSOs - she ignores you if you're chasing issues that matter to you; if you bring things up, she quickly turns it around and tries to make it out as if it's your fault. Their drafters made a few bad changes on our very final plans, just a few days before tender expiry and just like that (there was no need for them, no consultation with us, no informing us of the changes) and they wanted us to sign it. A few were very undesirable changes for us and I fought hard with her to get them restored back to what we asked and signed for and what council approved. She was telling me "if you request another change, it's going to cost you 1k" - whatta?!?!?!? What request, what change?! You get the idea ... I get so warn out by these episodes ... hehehhe ... My signature is distracting people from my wise posts ... Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 17Oct 27, 2009 10:53 am Yeah, the experience different... I hope one day the building industry will discover such things as Lean, Six Sigma and so one and will try to achieve order in their processes in order to achieve consistent outputs I'm glad that between tender presenter and the CSO, the first one was a bad one -- the CSO stays with you until the end of construction being the primary point of contact for all non-technical questions. In several months we suffered with the tender presenter, she responded to probably 30% of my emails and did not return a single voice message (I should say that every time I called her or the front-desk I inevitably got to the voice mail). So far so good. The SS is yet to contact me, however, from that letter with the "building with Clarendon journey" I understand that the SS looks after the construction only after the concrete slab has been put... The concreting is done by a special "Clarendon concrete department" -- possibly ghosts as well (I never heard a word from them) - however, as the activity on my land shows they are quite good in what they do and how. ... built a Promenade with Clarendon. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=25104 20-10-09 - excavation and piering completed ... 12-04-10 - Basins fixed. Connecting to the electrical grid 23-04-10 - PCI 07-05-10 - HANDOVER! Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 18Oct 28, 2009 7:29 am Good for you, E, that you got a good CSO. Did she promise (either verbally or in writing) that she would contact you on a weekly basis and have a chat about what's happening? I figure that's some kind of a norm. As for us, we can only be thankful that we got who we got during the design phase, since the design was critical for us, and our person was able to step in, offer advice and alternatives, warn us of problems with our proposals, explain things, etc. Our guy was living the design of our house as if it was going to be his own!! Can't imagine what would've happened if we had someone like you did. At the end of the day, the design matters and will stay forever with the house. And since it's there black on white, we need to make sure it's followed (within tolerances ). Yeah, it's going to be tough, but we never had any illusions about a smooth journey. Actually, we are one of those "reluctant clients" - took us ages to decide to build simply because we couldn't bear the thought of going through this ... last day of tender expiry we were searching realestate.com to see if there's anything that we'd like and just move in! Hahhaahahahhaahha (the smileys are not enough!!)... My signature is distracting people from my wise posts ... Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 19Oct 28, 2009 8:45 am Lex Good for you, E, that you got a good CSO. Did she promise (either verbally or in writing) that she would contact you on a weekly basis and have a chat about what's happening? I figure that's some kind of a norm. Not really. Having a year-long relation with this industry I lowered my expectations to a below-zero level I should say that before the construction she was quite OK (however, I would say any of service delivery or project manager in IT would be sacked for maintaining such a *poor* level of communication). In her last mail with the construction roadmap she said that the SS was responsible for all further updates... a week ago a wrote an email cheering them for such a great progress on my land and she understood that the SS did not talk do me... She said he would try to fix the problem and it has been silent since... ... built a Promenade with Clarendon. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=25104 20-10-09 - excavation and piering completed ... 12-04-10 - Basins fixed. Connecting to the electrical grid 23-04-10 - PCI 07-05-10 - HANDOVER! Re: Anyone wants to share All About The Start of Construction? 20Oct 28, 2009 9:27 pm Well, I hope it all gets good again! Funny about a year-old relationship ... we tried to start that relationship about 5-6 years ago (yes, that's when we first approached them and sat down with one of their sales people!!), but we were so unimpressed with our chat that we ran away as far as we could! Then we came back a few weeks later, pretending like we knew nothing, and tried to snatch another person, but when the original sales person saw us sitting there, they quickly called this person and had a little chat and we had to go see that first person again!! (Well, in their eyes and not knowing it was our plan all along, it seemed like poaching of clients !!) Needless to say that our second talk ended fruitlessly but politely. And then there we were, about 1 year ago, sitting there again. This time the crew has changed and we were safe , the dreaded person nowhere in sight. The person that saw us this time was young(er) and quick, not to mention very informative and knowlegable, and we pretty much forked out the initial deposit right away. Mind you, I wouldn't be sitting here and writing this right now if it wasn't for their special "birthday" offer - we needed just that tiny little push to get us over the line to approach them again. But as I already wrote, we were swinging from yey to ney all along, until we sat down and I actually saw them signing the contract after us ... that's how keen we've been on building ourselves! 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