Building with Kurmond Homes

I concur, I'm glad that someone has had a good experience with them, however the last 12 months have been a paperwork hell.

There are 5 other people on my street that all registered on the same date, and they all received their DA /CDC approvals in Feb. The latest one was on the 20th of Feb. My Approval came through on the 8th.

My street now consists of 2 homes with slab and frames, and 3 homes with bricks. And a vacant lot (mine).

Not to mention the ENTIRE ESTATE now has at LEAST frames up (one or two look like they are ready for people to move in). And I'm sitting here with an empty lot and probably not even starting until next month sometime.
Every single stage of the process takes so much longer than everyone else. A friend of mine purchased land in the same estate and the same release as me, so making comparisons is very easy with someone going through the same process, at the same time, in the same estate. It's quite heartbreaking really.
I don't want my home built in 3 months.
But I also don't want to wait for 15 weeks from council approval before I even have the insurance to build my house. Seriously.

Hi all,

Latest update.. finally got the contract on Friday 2 weeks ago, handed it in to their display office on the Sunday all signed.

Now two weeks later and still no insurance.. *sigh*. I feel your pain nada17

And now I have a problem with my neighbouring building... They have a built to boundary home, with their garage on the boundary. I totally get this, not a problem. BUT. We are on a slope.. I'm on the right hand side, and the property slopes from right down to the left, and also from the back down to the front.
The neighbour has excavated down about 400mm - 1200mm along the boundary (actually, they have excavated the easement on my block.. and then some.) The problem with them excavating that far down, ON the boundary, is that they haven't made any provision to retain the earth, because they SHOULD be restoring the easement back to natural ground level.
At the moment the brickwork of their garage wall is going to be on the boundary, and in theory, the natural ground level should be restored on my block, meaning that they are going to have earth up against their brick wall.... I feel sorry for my neighbour, this is going to be a massive water propblem.

AND THEN, they went and poured a pad of concrete behind the garage.. I assume this is for the water tank, but at this point they have excavated 1.2m down from natural ground level. They've got a little retaining wall to stop the earth perpendicular to their house from coming forward from the back of the block.... and no way to retain the 1.2m of soil from my block...

I don't even know how to fix this..

hi the dream,

you could contact the builder of your neighbour and speak to them.
they may have some provisions in mind.
They will need to put a retaining wall (or concrete upturn from the RWT footing) on boundary or restore the ground level on their site. it is just maybe no retaining walls is in builder's scope and therefore they don't care for now.

Yep, I agree nada17 and the dream. Kurmond slow delivery begins in the back room, long before construction commences. It’s now been a year since we signed our preliminary tender, and we have only just recieved our ‘final’ construction plans ( with some minor errors, so not yet final). So no final tender, no contract and no insurance as yet.

Our build is not complicated, our changes were quite minor, we signed off on all of our final colours etc over 6 months ago, final council approval has been in place since January, so no excuses in that regard. Construction was supposed to begin in April, then May, now they aren’t offering us a commencement date.

As for comparisons with building timeframes for other companies, I have spoken to others who have built, and looked at block sales and building going on around our suburb and feel pretty confident they aren’t all ‘the same’.

Hi guys, sorry that I couldn't come back here and update you on my progress. It was an extremely busy time for me.

Anyways regarding the Kurmond Home build, I started to see the problems are coming same as some others had mentioned!

First of all, CSO broke her first commitment and they didn't come up with anything before 23rd April. Once I followed up with them, they have sent some "authority plans" last week but I have no idea why there was no any communications with the colour selection lady, they have simply dump some plans without even any communication with the colour selection people. Also, the plans had some basic mistakes. So it seems no QA process at all. Its look like the head doesn't know what the tail does...


Also, colour selection lady yet didn't give me the appointments with few other external suppliers such as stairs and electrical, seems they keep those to the last minute to cover up their delays. We have completed the internal colour selection and sent her our selections but yet she didn't come back with the updated paperwork for those.

The biggest issue I notice with Kurmond homes is there is no project manager kind of person who coordinates throughout the process and among their own departments. I believe the job of CSO is to do this, but it seems she just pass the ball to someone. For example, when I highlighted the issues on the authority plans she just replies "I will pass those to the drafting department"!!!. But my expectation was not just passing those to someone else, but to find out why those errors occurred and then following up with the drafting department to get those fixed (not just pass my email!).


I would really expect Kurmond owners read this forum and get those people fixed. Otherwise, this way no one will be there to give any good feedback or reference for them.

I will update my own thread of building process depending on how they go next week.

viewtopic.php?f=31&t=91499

hi Mallik
Sorry to hear about your troubles.
I won't get tired repeating "keep checking again and again whatever they send you". Even if they were supposed to move one little wall, just keep checking all the drawings and everything on each drawings.
And good luck to all of us!

by the way, we got the slab this week!

]

nada17 Congratulations that you got your slab.

Regarding my build, the CSO had sent some explanations why things were like that in the authority plans. I now understand some are reasonable explanations. But for some, she conflicts with her own people in Kurmond. For example, originally we needed an extra toilet in the laundry and we signed the tender to include that. But later during the color selection, color selection lady suggested that it will be better to have extra cupboards instead of a toilet as we already have a powder room. We understood that is a correct suggestion and we accepted it. But later the CSO refused to remove that from the plan claiming that we already have signed the tender to include it! After several rounds of arguments, she finally agreed to charge $150 and remove it from the plan. She claimed that normally they charge $1000 to make that simple change in the plan but she will do it for a $150 for the good faith.

The issue here is, color consultant didn't say that there will be any extra charge to remove it and also I remember the sales person told us that we can change these kinds of things during the color selection. I don't see any reason why CSO would need to be this strict and make a customer unhappy for such a simple thing. But having said that I am happy that she had good faith to reduce her charge for that to $150.

The CSO also claimed that the color consultant will be slower and it will take longer if we need to update the changes that we did during the color selection in the authority plans. So we agreed to go ahead with the bare minimum that we need for the authority plans. But yet we didn't get the finalized plans.

Also regarding the color selection, the color selection consultant had finally (:)) ) send some paperworks, which had few issues that we pointed out, but she didn't come back yet with the final documents. But we didn't yet get appointments with staircase provider and with the electrician.

Things are obviously much slower than we expected, but I hope they will at least make sure they submit all the correct information to the council at the end of the day so that there will no any further delays.

That's funny. I was just looking at the Kurmond product reviews (easily found via a google search) and saw that the opening paragraphs for 'Jake' and 'Timbo's reviews are identical, even though construction for each supposedly finished a month apart.... What the...?

haha! spot on! it is even written in marketing language...

and I have a continuation of my story with delays of HBCF certificate..

Last week Kurmond sent us an invoice for Slab progress payment.
I forwarded it to my broker and told Kurmond that the payment may take a while because the bank received the HBCF certificate only on May 17th and they need more time to get all papers sorted.
Well guess what, today we are overdue with our progress payment and Kurmond keeps calling us requesting the money.
So when it takes THEM ages to get all papers in order - what's totally fine.
When the CLIENT needs more time to sort out things after Kurmond's delays - what's when they start calling and threatening that they will stop works!

Can you believe that?

They know that they delayed the insurance. They know that they have started works without commencement letter from the bank. They know that we cannot affect the bank with their procedures.
And they still put pressure on us.

So it is just continues stress to deal with Kurmond.

Hi Guys, last week was a big week for us. Kurmond home became very active and completed several things last week. The CSO clarified all the questions I had with authority plans and also she correctly escalated the things to her manager that she can't provide an answer. And finally, she confirmed that the authority plans are posted to the council. Kudos to Kurmond home staff!!!

My CSO informed me that the color selection officer is away on a family matter, so I understand why she was not relying on my emails so frequently. But Kurmond home got someone else to complete the external color selection paperwork that are required by the council. And also she mentioned me that she will follow up with Staircase appointment and also with the electrician appointment. So I believe there are no major blocking issues.

As per the CSO council takes 12 weeks for the approval and then again Kurmond home needs 6 weeks to get a construction certificate. So it seems a bit of waiting time.

Anyways what I can say is Kurmond home restored my faith again and hope the rest of the process would be the same.

hi, happy to hear you have progress!

which one is your council?
our council takes 4 weeks to process. 12 weeks is quite a lot of time.

anyone else has anything new?

we have been promised by our SS that the frame should have been arrived to the site before long weekend.
we didn't have a change to go to see but given that it was rainy I won't be surprised it would have been postponed.
the SS said that the frame should take 2 weeks (double storey).
We will probably have an update with pictures in 2 weeks time!

Hi All,

We finally got the insurance two weeks ago, it only took them two and a half weeks thankfully.

Since then it's been all systems go!
Excavation started two days ago! Yay

The neighbour still hasn't backfilled the boundary of our lot yet... not sure whats happening on that front.. Hope it doesn't hold them up, I'm sure they will use it as an excuse at some point though lol.

We got a new person at KH to deal with now, she's super quick and replies straight away, nice change of pace from our regular 2 week min turn around on everything up to this point.

great! we are almost at the same stage we are also feeling very excited!

our SS texted us and told us that the frame is going to be delayed, hopefully they start next week.
can't wait to see the frame!

Hi guys,

I went to see our site yesterday.
The ground floor frame is done. Hopefully they will finish the 1st floor and roof next week. Our SS confirmed that.

All looks good except for 2 things:
1) our stair window should be located between ground floor and 1st floor. that's not a standard feature for our design, we made it ourselves. so expected to see something allowing for placing the window on ground floor frame. Unfortunately there is a usual stud wall with no allowance for the window now.
2) we have have have a drain in the laundry wall which comes from upstairs. We saw the pipework in the slab so it is there, but again in the frame there is no allowance for that.

We will speak to our SS on Monday to clarify everything. Hopefully nothing to worry about.

Hi All,

Latest update, we have had waffle pods and reo in since Tuesday ready to go, but the weather has been bad so they haven't been able to pour. Hopefully they pour today!

Our frames are booked in to start in two weeks, and our SS hasn't moved these dates because of the weather, he's really pushing to get it moving. Can't complain about that, the change of pace is very exciting now.

Unfortunately the neighbour's over excavation means that we had to excavate a bit more and I need extra drop edge beams now.. Not sure how to resolve this with the neighbour's builder, KH said they were going to sort something but I haven't heard.

Oh, went to site on Peiring day... Lucky I did, they hadn't done the peirs deep enough at the rear of the house to allow for the pool we are planning on installing in the future. I had to pay extra to get the pool on the plans, and the pool issue held up my plans earlier in the year because they decided they needed it on there... But it was quickly solved and they dug the extra few 100mm to make sure it's not a problem.

How did everyone else go with their peirs? I haven't seen the variaiton for the peirs yet. I'm actually pretty sure I should get a credit back from it, I had about 120LM in the tender for it, which seems excessive compared to what was on site.

Hi the dream, that's great news!

Our SS told us that our frame is done! I am going to site tomorrow to see it.

As for piles, they did everything in one day we didn't have chance to inspect it.
We ended up having less LM of piles which was credited to us. But with that we had a deeper and larger area of dropped edge beam and therefore had to pay more for that.
That will happen to you probably.
You cannot do anything with it as paper plans are just paper plans and real construction site may have surprises.

We are pretty happy with our construction pace.
SS told us that the brickwork will start next week or so.

Hi guys!
We got our 1st floor frame installed.
Windows also installed.

All looks great!!!!!