Browse Forums Building A New House Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 501Aug 04, 2017 1:43 pm Damn! Feel so bad for you. Such a rubbish process for you. Got talking to a customer at work and they built in Bendigo recently by the sounds of it and they could not be happier. She showed me some photos on the phone and there was some quality work done. They clearly had a good bunch of tradies and supervisor. She said the paperwork and communication from start to finish was flawless. As for us, our contact arrived. Unfortunately, there is crap we never asked for like render (which isn't even in the style of facade chosen) and floor boards and more and stuff missing that we did ask for, some of which was on the previous quote. We also asked for pricing on upgrades at the colour selection in June and was told they'd let us know before contract, but nope, it all got added to the build and is in the contract. Going to go over the whole thing this weekend, word by word before we take it in to them. There's going to be a big list. Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 502Aug 04, 2017 9:47 pm rattleAU Damn! Feel so bad for you. Such a rubbish process for you. Got talking to a customer at work and they built in Bendigo recently by the sounds of it and they could not be happier. She showed me some photos on the phone and there was some quality work done. They clearly had a good bunch of tradies and supervisor. She said the paperwork and communication from start to finish was flawless. As for us, our contact arrived. Unfortunately, there is crap we never asked for like render (which isn't even in the style of facade chosen) and floor boards and more and stuff missing that we did ask for, some of which was on the previous quote. We also asked for pricing on upgrades at the colour selection in June and was told they'd let us know before contract, but nope, it all got added to the build and is in the contract. Going to go over the whole thing this weekend, word by word before we take it in to them. There's going to be a big list. Thanks Rattle, it has been the worst build in history. Now our ss is trying to rush our settlement even though we are not happy with some of the work. We are now trying to contact his manager to deal with him instead. I totally understand your frustration with your contract. Make sure you check everything as they tend to not have any attention to detail in their work. Good luck with that as it took us almost 1yr going back n forth trying to get it right. Building with Dennis Family Homes Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 503Aug 08, 2017 8:43 am I finally have a settlement date and the area manager has promised that everything willbe done. Am getting excited now. Good luck everyone with your builds and hope yours will be much better than mine Building with Dennis Family Homes Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 504Aug 08, 2017 12:16 pm rtforresters I finally have a settlement date and the area manager has promised that everything willbe done. Am getting excited now. Good luck everyone with your builds and hope yours will be much better than mine I am so glad that the excitedment has begun again. it has been an epic build for you guys and I feel terrible that you had such an awful time. Hope he keeps on top of it and things go swimmingly now and it wont be too long now. When do they think it will be? Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 505Aug 08, 2017 12:22 pm rattleAU Damn! Feel so bad for you. Such a rubbish process for you. Got talking to a customer at work and they built in Bendigo recently by the sounds of it and they could not be happier. She showed me some photos on the phone and there was some quality work done. They clearly had a good bunch of tradies and supervisor. She said the paperwork and communication from start to finish was flawless. As for us, our contact arrived. Unfortunately, there is crap we never asked for like render (which isn't even in the style of facade chosen) and floor boards and more and stuff missing that we did ask for, some of which was on the previous quote. We also asked for pricing on upgrades at the colour selection in June and was told they'd let us know before contract, but nope, it all got added to the build and is in the contract. Going to go over the whole thing this weekend, word by word before we take it in to them. There's going to be a big list. Argh!! What a pain! Still waiting here. I think I am starting to annoy them slightly with my almost weekly emails - just random questions but I want them to know I still exist and am still waiting!! Last week, some poor soul from their marketing department rang and asked me if I was still interested in building a house and would I like one of their consultants to contact me?!! LOL - lets just say, she wont be calling me again in a hurry! Far out, I told her to make sure she tells potential clients just how bloody long they have to wait - one year now since we paid our initial deposit. =( Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 508Aug 08, 2017 8:48 pm Lenz88 rtforresters I finally have a settlement date and the area manager has promised that everything willbe done. Am getting excited now. Good luck everyone with your builds and hope yours will be much better than mine I am so glad that the excitedment has begun again. it has been an epic build for you guys and I feel terrible that you had such an awful time. Hope he keeps on top of it and things go swimmingly now and it wont be too long now. When do they think it will be? We have settlement this Friday finally. We have the fencing going up n concrete in week. Can't wait to see it all come together. I cant believe you still haven't got your final contract. What's their excuse? Building with Dennis Family Homes Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 509Aug 08, 2017 9:03 pm rtforresters Lenz88 rtforresters I finally have a settlement date and the area manager has promised that everything willbe done. Am getting excited now. Good luck everyone with your builds and hope yours will be much better than mine I am so glad that the excitedment has begun again. it has been an epic build for you guys and I feel terrible that you had such an awful time. Hope he keeps on top of it and things go swimmingly now and it wont be too long now. When do they think it will be? We have settlement this Friday finally. We have the fencing going up n concrete in week. Can't wait to see it all come together. I cant believe you still haven't got your final contract. What's their excuse? Apparently they are training up new staff and it takes awhile. They have had a sudden increase in house builds and they didnt have enough staff so recruiting and training is taking time. I asked the girl who called, whether they tell potential clients the wait time. The kids dont think its ever going to happen and my husband has started trawling other building companies ... I dont blame him really. It is that frustrating. I think we might walk if we dont get the contract as promised this month. Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 510Aug 08, 2017 9:06 pm I was tidying up my emaisl the other day and came across and email from another builder whose house design was second on our list - we actually got as far as siting and costing etc. The projected start date was Feb thsi year. We'd be moving in by now, had we signed with them. =( Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 511Aug 08, 2017 9:30 pm Lenz88 I was tidying up my emaisl the other day and came across and email from another builder whose house design was second on our list - we actually got as far as siting and costing etc. The projected start date was Feb thsi year. We'd be moving in by now, had we signed with them. =( Yeh, we were tossing up dfh or boutique homes. We were almost at contract stage with boutique homes but they refused to change the facade windows so we stayed with dfh. In hindsight we should have gone with boutique homes. Their contract process was so quick. We had it in 4wks with plan changes n all. I don't know why dfh takes almost 1yr. It's ridiculous. Building with Dennis Family Homes Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 512Aug 08, 2017 10:09 pm Nice rtforresters! Good to see you just about to cross the finish line. Feel free to go crazy with the photos. :-p We went in to see the consultant with the contract full of errors today and the poor thing earned her money and then some. You should have seen her face when we presented all the pages covered in sticky notes and we told her what some of the errors were. To be fair and very clear, it looks like she has inherited a heap of crap from a guy who left the job. Other errors appeared to be office staff, draftsmen, whoever, possibly acting on wrong info or conflicting info, some of which I assume, leads back to the previous consultant making decisions on our behalf and not telling us. It's now clear that the previous consultant who left, never offered us options or showed us info on items or procedures and we were not to know as we did not know these things existed. It's their job to inform us. We found out at colour selection that he signed off on the under bench oven and hidden range, which were never the options we wanted. Was a huge shock when that was presented to us. Today, the poor woman sat with us for 5 hours straight, while trying to answer incoming calls and assist people coming to the display for a look and went through every single thing, one by one. It went foreeeeeverrrrrr! My wife and I were totally drained in the end. We feel a bit better now that she's gone through and hopefully fixed everything. She really tried and when she made calls to other people for help, they were really good too. Now we just have to send the deposit, wait for these changes and paperwork to be done, read it all very carefully and hopefully sign off on that, wait for the council to have their say etc and we might be off and running in 6-8 weeks if I understand it correctly. Oh, it looks like our block (we own it and have the title) doesn't have survey pegs visible, so we'll be off to dig in the corners and see if they are still there. I think the land was sub divided a good 10 years ago. If not, we need to hire a surveyor. Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 513Aug 09, 2017 8:01 am Ill post photos once carpets n blinds are in next week. Hopefully it's smooth sailing from now on. I did notice that ppl in different departments don't liaise with one another. We'll ask for something and get something else. We had to go through 6 variations before they got our contract right. We wasted so much time. Fingers crossed you dont need to correct anything. Suxs about the survey pegs. That's an added cost you didnt need. Building with Dennis Family Homes Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 514Aug 09, 2017 11:22 am This is our 3rd time building with volume builders and we've had admin issues each time, so not surprised. This time, it looks like a person who was leaving the company did not perform to their best and it put a spanner in the works. I did freak yesterday when I saw that the total didn't include multiple extras, like squared off bathrooms and silk finish kitchen, even though they were listed. However... The removal of things like unwanted vinyl planks for the free floor tiles (promo) evened it out a bit and the bill for extra, so the final cost of extras a lot less than we were looking at. We had a close call with the glass splash back. Contract said that it requires a join at their discretion as it's longer than their max length requirements. Was spewing bad, but it turns out we are 20mm too long, so we just reduced the back of the kitchen by 20mm. Don't think we'll miss that 2cm's too much. Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 515Aug 12, 2017 9:03 pm We have finally had settlement on our home yesterday after 11 and half months of building hell. Anything that could go wrong with the house did and it's been one of the worst building experience ive ever had after having built with other builders before. So at settlement i expected our house to be presented in a clean and highly finished manner. To my disappointment the house was still very dirty, our grout lines are filthy and our bathroom wall tiles haven't even been cleaned. Bench tops still had a lot of residue of plaster and dirt, rooms weren't even vacuumed and had pebbles still. There were still lots of paint touch up in the plaster work that i know they have just removed the tape we applied during final walk through. Chaulking to our bathroom basins weren't even done, there was a hole in the roof that they had supposedly fixed, which was still there. Our dishwasher tap was not there. You pay for a brand new home and it definitely did not feel brand new. I'll now have to waste a whole day to clean the whole house from top to bottom. Lots of other little things which i could go on and on about. Just say i was very unimpressed with the whole process. To top it off at settlement all we got was some paperwork and keys in a bag. Other builders present you with a gift to congratulate you and all we got was thanks and see you later. I will be directing ppl to other builders. If you have a look on their facebook page, there's been a lot of unhappy clients. Building with Dennis Family Homes Building with Dennis Family Homes 517Aug 12, 2017 10:01 pm Ting Ting That would be a horror for any person moving into a new built house. Where about's did you build and did you think about or did a product review. We are in epping. We haven't put in our review yet but will definitely be putting it everywhere i can. Building with Dennis Family Homes Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 518Aug 13, 2017 2:01 pm Really wish you had a better experience and much better outcome. Have been following your process for quite a while (before I registered) and I'm glad you are at a point now where you can try to take ownership and move on to trying to enjoy the new home. I imagine that it won't be easy with reminders here and there, but I do wish you the very best. Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 519Aug 15, 2017 10:06 pm rattleAU This is our 3rd time building with volume builders and we've had admin issues each time, so not surprised. This time, it looks like a person who was leaving the company did not perform to their best and it put a spanner in the works. I did freak yesterday when I saw that the total didn't include multiple extras, like squared off bathrooms and silk finish kitchen, even though they were listed. However... The removal of things like unwanted vinyl planks for the free floor tiles (promo) evened it out a bit and the bill for extra, so the final cost of extras a lot less than we were looking at. We had a close call with the glass splash back. Contract said that it requires a join at their discretion as it's longer than their max length requirements. Was spewing bad, but it turns out we are 20mm too long, so we just reduced the back of the kitchen by 20mm. Don't think we'll miss that 2cm's too much. 2cm?!! argh, imagine not finding that out till later! i'd be spewing too! RT - hope you have settled well into your new home. I really have no words of comfort really - its been so horrid for you. x Re: Building with Dennis Family Homes 520Aug 16, 2017 2:30 pm Thanks guyz. Im slowly getting over complaining about the house. Just want to be in. On a positive we've been very busy this week and got some progress pics Bosch rangehood is in, just waiting for the oven which should be sone friday. Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Building with Dennis Family Homes Hi everyone, Newbie renovator here, after some advice for combining our family room in the picture and the alfresco and make a larger family room. There is a flush sill… 0 4891 Ask for references and speak to them. If they are defensive or try to avoid the request, walk. 1 74701 I would never build with Fowler homes. I built with them in 2021 and till date maintenance issues are pending. All their existing trades and businesses don't work with… 14 105553 |