sydneyalkirabuild
Hi Forg. Just had a good read of the old posts... looks great and nearly there now. Hope you don't mind a few questions, as we're heading in to the interiors / lock up stages soon as the final sections of roof tiling should go on next week...
Hiya!
Woah ... I don't know what defines "lock up stage", but we had tiles long before we had any doors which could be locked ...
sydneyalkirabuild
We noticed you've had the chance to take plenty of pics. Do you just head on site yourself without any of their staff there and are they relaxed about that? They pointed out to us in the contract that we can't go on site without the supervisor present, so just wondering if they're strict about this. Is the house locked after a certain stage?
Yeah the doors are locked, and you can't get in; but we've had questions & clarifications from heaps of the tradies and the site supervisor too, and so we've been onsite talking to them quite a lot. It's easy for us, as we're renting 4 doors up. So plenty of opportunity to take photos.
They definitely don't want you onsite without supervision.
sydneyalkirabuild
Have you got the sense that there's generally been people doing things each day during the interior fit out stage or do days go by with zero progress frequently?
Yeah it's pretty common that we feel there's no progress (no utes parked out front when I walk past at 7am, go inside after 2 weeks & only the guy who's asking you stuff appears to have done something). Of course, if they turned up at 7:30am I'd never know.
Gut-feel, though, I reckon that probably an average of 2 days out of every week there doesn't seem to be much happening. But the problem is that there have been a myriad of little jobs which someone only has to turn up for a short while to do, and then it can't be touched for a while. To give an example, the frameless shower screens are attached to a piece of metal which pokes-up from the floor between the tiles; this metal piece wasn't installed straight, and it took the installation of the screen itself before we noticed it. Now fixing it means removing the tiles around the metal strip, re-sealing, repositioning the metal strip, re-applying screed & then putting tiles back. Each of those steps needs only a short amount of these people's time & some day's worth of waiting.
sydneyalkirabuild
Looks like you're getting very close to (if not past) your contract end date now. Have they increased communication and work rate to try and ensure handover before the deadline or has the pace remained steady? Do they just simply pay you the $80/day on a weekly basis or something like that?
They've said they were going to hurry it up, and a feeling I got from the electrician (who didn't actually say anything - it was just an impression) is that the tradies are being leaned-on. But there are only so many tradies to go 'round, and they all still need to be scheduled, so it doesn't seem to me that anything is happening more quickly.
I presume that the $whatever/day for going past contract will come in the form of either a reduced final payment, or a cash-back cheque afterwards (I think that changing the contracted amount might cause issues with the bank).
sydneyalkirabuild
Have you had any hidden costs during the build which weren't in the tender and which weren't incurred due to your own variations / actions? We've had a couple so far (one related to gas connections, and one we're querying now about a fallen tree). Just wondering how you dealt with it and whether you pushed back and got success if you have experienced this at all.
Hmmm ... not really. The only one I can think of was due to a screw-up on their part, and after we pointed it out they cancelled the invoice. We did have to point it out, though, the invoice arrived & we weren't happy about it initially.
AvaG, no handover date yet ... I believe our site supervisor is back from leave today, though, so I'm expecting a call in the next couple of days to arrange an appointment for the final walk-through which is 2 weeks before handover ... I'm kinda hoping that walk-through will be next week.