McDonald Jones Homes - The new thread

Hi,

Just viewed your blog, the facade and landscaping have turned out well. May I know how much did landscaping cost you? And now that your house is done, have you received the name plate for the house from MJH?

Cheers.

Thanks. We are doing fencing & retaining walls (two sides), plain concrete Driveway, concrete footpath to front-patio, decking with composite material, all landscaping (pebbles/step-stones, gravel,edging, mulch, plants, turf), clothesline, letterbox, tiling for front-patio all with one landscaping company, costing us about 28k. Unfortunately I don't have much clarity on individual items as they were quoted together. 17sqm decking is 4.2K. Hope this helps!

And we have kind of 90 days to apply for the name plate, so haven't applied for it yet!!

Hi all, just got our contract from MDJH and have a question - liqidated damages is $35 per day. Is this reasonable?

I built with Oracle & ours was $1 per day. We tried to change it but they wouldn't budge.

Hi All,

Thought I share some facts about my build to date.
- My wife and I are building the Miami 16 Elite with a few modifications in SW Sydney.
- Overall, we felt the tender, drawings, selections, and agreement stages were handled by MJH's at a high standard.
- Granted, things are never perfect - we all have bad days and good - details are overlooked and sometimes misunderstood, but provided my wife and kept on top of things as much as possible, we navigated these stages with minimal issue.
- The building approval stage threw up a few obstacles. This was mainly due to the DA @ council. We were allocated a part-time assessor who was never at work. After 4 weeks, I called council to confirm progress, only to find nothing had been done. Two more weeks went by and still nothing. In fact, in that 6 weeks, two other MJH builds - two lots up from us, and the other 4 lots up - managed to surpass us in approval. This had a significant impact moving into the construction stage as both of these homes managed to get roof and brick up before us, all while our frame and windows sat out in the rain across Christmas. If I was little suspicious, I could conjure up some conspiracy theory about the other two homes and council; but I'm not.
- Where we are at now, the construction phase, has been interesting. Both Slab and Construction SS's are great. Most of the problems can be attributed to the contractors.
Here is a list of construction issues we are dealing with at the moment:
1. We asked for the the wet areas to be set down in the slab to allow for a level plain between these and the rest of the house. Unfortunately for us, 3 of the 4 wet areas have a wall on the outer edge of the house. Some how, the concreter's forgot to form up these outer edges. The frame has been put up, and there is a large gap (the height of the set down) between the frame and slab when looking from outside into the wet areas. This means the concreter needs to come back and build up the gaps in all 3 wet areas. Not sure what the implications of this are.
2. The slab was not measured as per the plans correctly. As such, the frame, mainly around the garage has overlapped the slab (10+ cm). In fact, after closer inspection, I'm quite sure the carpenter had to bend the same wall to fit. Looking closely, it appears all the horizontal studs are crumpled leading me to believe it doesn't line up with the slab well. All this will be concealed by the bricks but must have some impact on the integrity of the structure, or maybe not.
3. The gutter and fascia contractors didn't turn up the weeks before Christmas but still had the gutter and fascia delivered to the site. As expected, a few days after Christmas, it was mostly gone. Wondering if this could have been avoided if MJH's had put a lock on the fence? Perhaps not.
4. Last, the allocated bricklayer turned up a few hours over the 4 week lead up to Christmas and managed to put up 2 small sections of walls. Apparently, he was suppose to work across the holidays. As of yesterday, nothing else had been done so our SS reallocated the bricklayer.

I'm not really sure these are significant issue by any stretch. Would be interested to know if others have experience similar?

Hopefully, the rest of our build is smooth sailing.

Joe

Any pics of san marino 15 ?
We are building down in Renwick. Mittagong.

Hi, Im curious if you are happy with the decision to not have a wall between the family/dining and the childrens activity rooms? We are planing on doing the same with the Hermitage and Im concerned that it might look funny because the room will be so big. Thanks

Has anyone put 3m high ceilings in their house?

Hi
We are building the Hermitage Grande (4 bedroom) in Kenthurst. We are still at deposit variation stage.
We have made these changes
- Delete the wall between family/living and childrens activity
- Extending the alfresco over the kitchen
- Alternate kitchen layout with island bench
- Rear master suite layout
- extending garage
We are trying to decide on whether to go for 3m ceilings at the moment.
I like your idea of recessing the doors into the slab. I think we will add that now too!