Hi All,
I’ve been thinking about starting up my own thread for ages now and have always thought that I’m going so bloody slow there’s almost no point until my build gets somewhere!
Well - it’s still going nowhere fast so I may as well start now!!
My hubby and I are building our first home in the Honeywood Estate in Wandi with Commodore Homes. We initially signed a deal with another builder but pulled out due to some conflict (we figured if we were having issues at the PWA stage, what were we going to deal with later on?). Did a bit of research and it seemed that despite CH seeming to have a bit of a reputation for slow builds, their build quality sounded good. Being that we weren’t in a huge rush to get into the home, we decided to go for quality over time. We also really liked the changes that the sales guy made for us (the option to make changes wasn’t really available to us with the previous builder) so we bit the bullet and signed with CH.
I know I’d read about slow builds, but I definitely didn’t expect this level of slowness!!!
My hubby and I wanted to get onto anything to do with the build as soon as we had to, so whenever we were asked for forms to sign, plans to confirm etc, I can safely say that we responded straight away. At no point did we want any delays to be attributed to slackness on our part. Despite this, we are as of today, one of the two blocks on our street that currently have dirt, sand, and the neighbour’s rubbish on our block. The funny thing is our next door neighbour is with the builder we'd initially signed up with and it is almost completed. Not badly built either. *frustration* (Realistically speaking though, we wouldn’t have been happy with the plan that we had – well that's what we're trying to console ourselves with anyway!)
Here’s the timeline so far:
11/10/13 – Signed PWA with Commodore Homes
31/03/14 – Preliminary works commences
30/04/14 – Land Settlement
19/05/14 – First Meeting with builder
19/06/14 – Initial Drafting begins
17/07/14 – Contract signed with builder
18/08/14 – Pre-start
15/09/14 – Final Plans received
31/10/14 – Scheduling completed
Reading between the timelines were delays after delays! I think we’ve changed contract administrators about 4 times – the first time causing a huge delay because apparently our file was left sitting there doing nothing as there was no handover. Funny that reading through my initial emails with the sales guy, we were told that we’d be in by Winter 2014. Instead, it’s taken us over a year to go from signing the PWA to completing the scheduling!
Onto a bit of good news – we received a call from our new Construction Consultant to let us know that it would take approximately 3 weeks for slab to go down. Received a pretty generic letter to also advise us of the beginning of the construction process, so fingers crossed we will see something finally going on, on our block!!
I’ll post up our plan tonight – a bit too late now to ask for any recommendations on changes(!!) but it would be great if anyone knows of a similar build going up somewhere. Hubby and I have driven through Honeywood and a few other estates and have yet to see one of the same elevation despite it being one of the plans CH advertised with specials! (God I hope it’s not because it’s actually a really ugly elevation that no-one likes!) lol!! Anyway, it is the Villa, with some changes to the plan (i.e. changed it from 4 to 3 BR, moved Master BR to the back, etc).