Browse Forums Building A New House Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9547Mar 01, 2018 10:59 am Hi All, We are Newbies to the forum from Wollongong. We are planning to engage Wisdom to Build Majestic-35. We have read tons of pages on this forum and really appreciate the effort put in by you guys to share the knowledge and experiences which is very informative. We would appreciate your thoughts on a couple questions we have. We have come across the timelines from Tender to Handover and occasionally lasting over 2 years. 1. We have currently payed deposit for a Block of Land which is due to be Registered only in December 2018 or January 2019 according to the land developer. 2. We are a bit confused about when exactly is the Right time to engage the Builder with regards to the above timelines. 3. Do we have to wait till the land is Registered? Does the Builder require access to land before quoting us a fixed price? 4. Are we able to engage the builder immediately now and lock the current price and promotions as the Prices are skyrocketing every increase? If we can and do start the process with builder in the next couple of months ......does that reduce the overall timelines in the process? Does it benefit us and how quickly would they be able to start once the Land would have registered so we can factor in the 1000$ charges every month the build has not commenced? Appreciate your help and guidance. Thanks Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9548Mar 01, 2018 7:54 pm COOL6789 Hi All, We are Newbies to the forum from Wollongong. We are planning to engage Wisdom to Build Majestic-35. We have read tons of pages on this forum and really appreciate the effort put in by you guys to share the knowledge and experiences which is very informative. We would appreciate your thoughts on a couple questions we have. We have come across the timelines from Tender to Handover and occasionally lasting over 2 years. 1. We have currently payed deposit for a Block of Land which is due to be Registered only in December 2018 or January 2019 according to the land developer. 2. We are a bit confused about when exactly is the Right time to engage the Builder with regards to the above timelines. 3. Do we have to wait till the land is Registered? Does the Builder require access to land before quoting us a fixed price? 4. Are we able to engage the builder immediately now and lock the current price and promotions as the Prices are skyrocketing every increase? If we can and do start the process with builder in the next couple of months ......does that reduce the overall timelines in the process? Does it benefit us and how quickly would they be able to start once the Land would have registered so we can factor in the 1000$ charges every month the build has not commenced? Appreciate your help and guidance. Thanks Hi, We are building in Vista Park, are you guys in sanctuary ponds? Start the process with Wisdom now and pay to lock in the prices for longer. To be safe, id lock them in for 18 months as your land registration may be delayed. If you go over your fixed price period, you will pay price increases, so even if this happens you are no worse off than if you waited, as the price would be the same or more than the extra Wisdom charge you. Hope that makes sense! Without the land at practical completion, they will need to do the soil test and contours later so yes you won’t get an accurate price til then but you’ll get most of the costs and TBH there are always unexpected costs with building anyway! If the land is fairly flat the additional site costs won’t be much, ours were $4k for a deepened edge beam and $3k (ish) for H class slab which we knew about from the beginning. If you’re at sanctuary ponds there’s no natural gas out our way and you can’t pass basix without solar hot water so that’s another cost to consider. From us requesting tender with W to being lodged for CDC was almost 8 months, although developer approval took longer than expected. But anyway, if you start the process now you should be ready to go to council/CDC by the time your land is registered, then once approved it’ll only be 2 or 3 months til you start building. Building Monte Carlo 40- Wisdom homes Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9549Mar 01, 2018 8:15 pm ozmonkeyoy MandM+4 That is quite a list Oz, a fair few broken or damaged items which I guess will be fixed up easily but shouldn’t happen in the first place! The bowing is concerning, I hope it’s rectified to perfection for you! Jordann, I’m disappointed for you. I expected you to be done by now, your build was about 10 weeks ahead of ours when we started and the gap has definitely lessened now. It’s because our SS is booking more than one contractor at once now we’re on internals. With the externals some weeks only one piddly little job would get done which was frustrating. I think all 30 week contracts are actually 36 from site scrape to handover, and that if your build is running ahead of time there’s a fair chance they’ll move it back in the priority list. Ours was running a tad behind I think so it seems to have been bumped up, fingers crossed. Not long to go now for you though, a month or so and you’ll be in it. Its unfortunate to say but there are too many tradies that care only for their part, and do not care for other trades work, and things get damaged. No proof of who did it either because of the fact that the SS is hardly around. The bricks were our biggest issue. Lots of mortar repairs required. The bowing of the alfresco is going to be a big issue, because we have the balcony upstairs on top of it as well, not just the roof. That's a bit disappointing as that area was not custom and is standard on their master plans, so you would assume that the plans are compliment, and its probably back to the workmanship of the area..We'll just have to see how that plays out. Your build appears to be going along smoothly. Are there other Wisdom homes in the construction phase near you? Hopefully the SS is not as overworked as he was during our construction and is around more on yours. Oz I hope the bowing in your Alfresco can be rectified without too much of a headache for you. I don’t understand how that even happens with steel beams etc in place! I’m not sure how often SS is around ours but so far the quality appears to be good. There are 2 other W homes in close proximity and we’re all at around the same stage and sharing trades, so if they stuff up he’s got 3 houses to fix! Were the defects in your brickwork easy to spot? All I’ve noticed with ours is a couple of bricks with big chunks out of them which I will point out at PCI, and the usual mortar touch ups required. The one time I met SS he said ours were the best bricks in the whole estate and then pointed out defects on other people’s brick work lol. So hopefully he wasn’t BSing Painters at our place today, there was one still on site at 530 and she didn’t seem to speak much English so I didn’t go in to the house. But we should have had tiling complete and stone on this week too so the build is still going at a good pace. I’m cranky that we paid to have our kickboards modified and put on after the flooring, and yet the butlers pantry already has the kicks on. It probably just says “kitchen” on the paperwork but I can’t believe with the amount we spent that Timpelle didn’t check that with us. Just one section with scotia/L-channel will bug me. Building Monte Carlo 40- Wisdom homes Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9550Mar 02, 2018 1:20 am Hi all, Long time lurker finally posting here Congratulations and good luck to all of you progressing with their WH builds. Our story: Wifey and me have a sloping block of land that has been registered and settled finally. We had been in the process of finalising the design with WH but did not have the contours until settlement. The design we chose was the Manhattan 35 with some mods. This is our first home and guess it is a huge learning process for us. However, the journey has hit a blocker. We had our tender presentation in Greg hills and were informed about the site costs. The difference is almost 15% from the initial estimates, primarily due to high site costs. The land has about 3m fall over the building envelope. The design now has step down (about 4-5 steps) into the living and another step into the alfresco, which was a shock to us. We aren't sure about having so many steps. It may end up being a beautiful home with high ceilings of about 3.5m. But unfortunately, it has gone way beyond our budget now. Would you guys recommend a split level home (smaller in area) would be better suited? or a double storey split with retaining walls similar to what we have now? Would love to get some advice. TIA Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9551Mar 02, 2018 6:34 am COOL6789 Hi All, We are Newbies to the forum from Wollongong. We are planning to engage Wisdom to Build Majestic-35. We have read tons of pages on this forum and really appreciate the effort put in by you guys to share the knowledge and experiences which is very informative. We would appreciate your thoughts on a couple questions we have. We have come across the timelines from Tender to Handover and occasionally lasting over 2 years. 1. We have currently payed deposit for a Block of Land which is due to be Registered only in December 2018 or January 2019 according to the land developer. 2. We are a bit confused about when exactly is the Right time to engage the Builder with regards to the above timelines. 3. Do we have to wait till the land is Registered? Does the Builder require access to land before quoting us a fixed price? 4. Are we able to engage the builder immediately now and lock the current price and promotions as the Prices are skyrocketing every increase? If we can and do start the process with builder in the next couple of months ......does that reduce the overall timelines in the process? Does it benefit us and how quickly would they be able to start once the Land would have registered so we can factor in the 1000$ charges every month the build has not commenced? Appreciate your help and guidance. Thanks We requested our tender in Sept 2016 and had it presented mid Nov 2016. Our land was due to register June 2017 and if it had been on time our timeline would have been perfect. We finalised our contract early April 2017, then did our selections April-May and had signed off all the variations by the first week of June. Our land ended up being delayed until end of August 2017 so we lost 3 months, then we had some delays in CDC approval which added a couple more weeks. In the end our contract expired in Nov 2017 and but we didn’t move out of admin until end of Jan 2018. Christmas shutdowns didn’t help. All up we had 3.5 months of delays, and we were about 2.5 months over our tender period of 12 months. If everything had gone to plan we would have been ok, but the land delays killed us. I would allow a minimum of 3 months post land registration to actually get out of admin then add a buffer for land registration delays too. One thing I noticed is Wisdom really don’t rush if you allow plenty of time to get the admin done. There were people here with registered land or close to registering land that moved through much quicker than we did. Everything took the maximum estimated time for us. They definitely seem to prioritise based on how quickly you can start construction rather than processing everyone in order of when they requested their tender. Building Wisdom Aspiration 31 at Willowdale https://ourwillowdalehome.wordpress.com/ Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9552Mar 02, 2018 6:39 am Got our SS assigned yesterday. Hoping I might get a call today as the slab has gone down this week. Anyone else got KW in the South West area? Building Wisdom Aspiration 31 at Willowdale https://ourwillowdalehome.wordpress.com/ Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9553Mar 02, 2018 8:05 am whichbuilder Hi all, Long time lurker finally posting here Congratulations and good luck to all of you progressing with their WH builds. Our story: Wifey and me have a sloping block of land that has been registered and settled finally. We had been in the process of finalising the design with WH but did not have the contours until settlement. The design we chose was the Manhattan 35 with some mods. This is our first home and guess it is a huge learning process for us. However, the journey has hit a blocker. We had our tender presentation in Greg hills and were informed about the site costs. The difference is almost 15% from the initial estimates, primarily due to high site costs. The land has about 3m fall over the building envelope. The design now has step down (about 4-5 steps) into the living and another step into the alfresco, which was a shock to us. We aren't sure about having so many steps. It may end up being a beautiful home with high ceilings of about 3.5m. But unfortunately, it has gone way beyond our budget now. Would you guys recommend a split level home (smaller in area) would be better suited? or a double storey split with retaining walls similar to what we have now? Would love to get some advice. TIA How long is your land? I’d be going for a single storey design, split level. W have some great designs that are almost as big as a 35 square double storey anyway. My back neighbour is building the Sorrento which offers almost as many rooms as our 40 square Monte Carlo and much cheaper base price. Also have you factored in upgrade costs for electrical, tiling, kitchen upgrades, flooring etc? Building Monte Carlo 40- Wisdom homes Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9554Mar 02, 2018 10:22 am MandM+4 whichbuilder Hi all, Long time lurker finally posting here Congratulations and good luck to all of you progressing with their WH builds. Our story: Wifey and me have a sloping block of land that has been registered and settled finally. We had been in the process of finalising the design with WH but did not have the contours until settlement. The design we chose was the Manhattan 35 with some mods. This is our first home and guess it is a huge learning process for us. However, the journey has hit a blocker. We had our tender presentation in Greg hills and were informed about the site costs. The difference is almost 15% from the initial estimates, primarily due to high site costs. The land has about 3m fall over the building envelope. The design now has step down (about 4-5 steps) into the living and another step into the alfresco, which was a shock to us. We aren't sure about having so many steps. It may end up being a beautiful home with high ceilings of about 3.5m. But unfortunately, it has gone way beyond our budget now. Would you guys recommend a split level home (smaller in area) would be better suited? or a double storey split with retaining walls similar to what we have now? Would love to get some advice. TIA How long is your land? I’d be going for a single storey design, split level. W have some great designs that are almost as big as a 35 square double storey anyway. My back neighbour is building the Sorrento which offers almost as many rooms as our 40 square Monte Carlo and much cheaper base price. Also have you factored in upgrade costs for electrical, tiling, kitchen upgrades, flooring etc? Hi MandM+4 , Thanks for the reply. Our block is long (about 40m deep). But if we go any longer than the current length, it makes it costlier as more slope comes into picture. We were more keen on a double storey so that we could enjoy the bush views at the back. Seems like it will come at a cost. We had some PA for all items (2-5k each) initially, but after a visit to DL to get an idea, we realised we would be spending more than that for sure. Haven't looked into the electrical and kitchen selections yet. Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9555Mar 02, 2018 10:54 am whichbuilder MandM+4 whichbuilder Hi all, Long time lurker finally posting here Congratulations and good luck to all of you progressing with their WH builds. Our story: Wifey and me have a sloping block of land that has been registered and settled finally. We had been in the process of finalising the design with WH but did not have the contours until settlement. The design we chose was the Manhattan 35 with some mods. This is our first home and guess it is a huge learning process for us. However, the journey has hit a blocker. We had our tender presentation in Greg hills and were informed about the site costs. The difference is almost 15% from the initial estimates, primarily due to high site costs. The land has about 3m fall over the building envelope. The design now has step down (about 4-5 steps) into the living and another step into the alfresco, which was a shock to us. We aren't sure about having so many steps. It may end up being a beautiful home with high ceilings of about 3.5m. But unfortunately, it has gone way beyond our budget now. Would you guys recommend a split level home (smaller in area) would be better suited? or a double storey split with retaining walls similar to what we have now? Would love to get some advice. TIA How long is your land? I’d be going for a single storey design, split level. W have some great designs that are almost as big as a 35 square double storey anyway. My back neighbour is building the Sorrento which offers almost as many rooms as our 40 square Monte Carlo and much cheaper base price. Also have you factored in upgrade costs for electrical, tiling, kitchen upgrades, flooring etc? Hi MandM+4 , Thanks for the reply. Our block is long (about 40m deep). But if we go any longer than the current length, it makes it costlier as more slope comes into picture. We were more keen on a double storey so that we could enjoy the bush views at the back. Seems like it will come at a cost. We had some PA for all items (2-5k each) initially, but after a visit to DL to get an idea, we realised we would be spending more than that for sure. Haven't looked into the electrical and kitchen selections yet. Yes the more slope will add to the cost but I would guess nothing like the additional $80k or so to build a double storey over a single. Building Monte Carlo 40- Wisdom homes Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9556Mar 02, 2018 12:01 pm whichbuilder Hi all, Long time lurker finally posting here Congratulations and good luck to all of you progressing with their WH builds. Our story: Wifey and me have a sloping block of land that has been registered and settled finally. We had been in the process of finalising the design with WH but did not have the contours until settlement. The design we chose was the Manhattan 35 with some mods. This is our first home and guess it is a huge learning process for us. However, the journey has hit a blocker. We had our tender presentation in Greg hills and were informed about the site costs. The difference is almost 15% from the initial estimates, primarily due to high site costs. The land has about 3m fall over the building envelope. The design now has step down (about 4-5 steps) into the living and another step into the alfresco, which was a shock to us. We aren't sure about having so many steps. It may end up being a beautiful home with high ceilings of about 3.5m. But unfortunately, it has gone way beyond our budget now. Would you guys recommend a split level home (smaller in area) would be better suited? or a double storey split with retaining walls similar to what we have now? Would love to get some advice. TIA The parties have reached a mutual understanding in resolution of each of the other parties concerns Simeon McGovern Affordable Custom Homes, We design and build to your budget Ashington Homes www.ashingtonhomes.com.au Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9558Mar 02, 2018 12:30 pm Yara it just takes someone with some know how. I was also surprised that they dropped the alfresco down below the house. hey may be better off leaving the alfresco out at this stage and building a timber deck after certification. had to give proper advice without seeing the design. The whole idea of a cut and fill is to minimise cost and then use drop edge beams within the house to retain the soil. My point is that you need a builder who specialises in this and who has the design and costs refined. I suspect wisdom are overestimating the costs as this it outside their comfort zone. Most of these builders are set up for relatively level blocks. Simeon McGovern Affordable Custom Homes, We design and build to your budget Ashington Homes www.ashingtonhomes.com.au Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9559Mar 02, 2018 12:47 pm Jenifermarie Got our SS assigned yesterday. Hoping I might get a call today as the slab has gone down this week. Anyone else got KW in the South West area? Building Wisdom Aspiration 31 at Willowdale https://ourwillowdalehome.wordpress.com/ I’m trying to remember when we got calls in those early weeks. Our SS gave my hubby a call to introduce himself before the slab even went down and calls us every Friday without fail but hubby took the first few calls so I can’t remember if he called us while nothing was happening. Our slab went down on a Monday and then nothing happened for 2 weeks, then the 3rd week they did the exterior plumbing and 4th week they started the frames. Hopefully yours runs a week earlier as it felt like a long wait after the initial excitement of the slab! Building Monte Carlo 40- Wisdom homes Re: Building with Wisdom Homes 9560Mar 02, 2018 1:32 pm Hi All, Has anyone got below advise: the Sydney Water records indicate that your proposed building will potentially impact on their underground asset. This application will now need to be assessed by an Accredited Water Service Coordinators (WSC) and a Sewer Peg Out or Works as Executed (WAE) Plan will need to be obtained in order to process your plans accordingly. Once the Sewer Peg Out or WAE is completed, the application will be re-assessed. If Sydney Waters assets will not be affected then an approval will be issued, alternatively, amended Engineers Plans may be required. and what consequences it comes with? Kindly help & advise BuildingWashington 32 with W https://buildyourfirsthome.wordpress.com/ Contract: 26/11/2017 DA: 28/03/2018 Admin : 26/04/2018 Const: 11/05/2018 Slab: 16/05/2018 Can someone please offer some advice? Im DESPERATE. Because I'm completely and utterly exhausted. 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