Went and saw the salesman in his office today to sign the building contract. First piece of good news was that the house plan was given the preliminary go ahead from the local council despite the problems I discussed yesterday. Of course there is a chance that they may change their mind and we may end up having to alter the plan to comply with some bureaucratic requirement. This could potentially mean more costs.

The building contract we signed was the standard contract offered by the Housing Industry Association here in Australia. Using the standard contract, written in plain English makes the whole process a lot easier to understand. The salesman was great and took us through every section of the contract and explained its purpose and potential effects on us. Key things that came out of it are:

The whole process took a bit over an hour and included some preliminary selections for the house such as the shape of internal archways. It would have taken longer but the salesman's printer ran out of ink and some of the paperwork was not signed. This will be mailed to us in the next week.

In spite of not signing some paperwork with the main contract signed and the deposit paid the actual process of building can start. This will include drawing up a site plan, conducting soil tests and writing engineering reports, and submitting the plans to council for development and building approval. We've been told 3-4 months from today we can expect the foundations to go down. Here's hoping it's only that long!

One of the retaining wall contractors rang me just a short time (kudos to him) after receiving the request for quote. He was strongly emphasizing the need to have the retaining walls installed before the house was built or costs will be considerably higher. This goes completely against what I was told by our builder here. The retaining wall contractor said 'under the act' that we were to be given reasonable time to install retaining walls between levelling the land and preparing the land for laying the foundations.

I need to call our builder immediately and get this sorted out.

So I jumped on the phone and called the builder about having the retaining walls installed before the house is built. They put me through to someone who was a 'project manager'. He basically listened to my spiel, agreed with me, and then said it was up to me to negotiate this with my 'site supervisor' when we were assigned one. Blah.

I haven't posted for a while, simply because nothing has happened. It's been 9 weeks since we signed the building contract and today we received the engineers soil report and footings design.

The quality of the documentation and exactly what we were to do with it left a lot to be desired. I'm a professional engineer and I've got to say the drawings and report were thoroughly confusing to me, I'd hate to think how someone with no technical background would interpret them. The financial impact is an additional $1000 for footings (we had allowed $10,000) and another $500 for a site survey because there are no marker pegs on the site.

On the variations schedule there were 9 points and I had to ring up and get clarification on each one. The two that concern me the most are the level the council has chosen for the house. It means that retaining walls are now required around the whole block. Bummer. The other thing that bothers me is a cryptic mention of 'rock encountered' in one of the 5 bores taken on the site during the soil test. The contract variation just says 'owner to take note that rock encountered during soil test'. On asking this means that we *could* end up being charged more for the site to be cleared.

Our responsibilities duing the whole process are quite vague as are the order in which things are to be done. If I hadn't phoned the builder I would have had no idea that it is our responsibility to remove all soil from the site after they have levelled it out. I also am very unclear as to when we can have the retaining walls installed. To me it makes sense to have them done after the block is levelled and before the foundation is layed to allow access to front end loaders and so on. However, the person I spoke to on the phone at the builder suggested we don't put down the retaining walls until after the house is built.

This doesn't sound right to me.

My wife made appointments with the Kitchen and Interior supply companies today for final selections. The Interior fitout selection is due for 2:00pm on August 17 and the kitchen fitout selection is due for 2:00pm on August 18.

I know my wife has some pretty strong ideas about the interior of the house so she's pretty much in charge of this side of things. She's leaning toward a color scheme including browns, but not going for a full brown/brown fitout, just some touches here and there. This will hopefully make the interior look relatively modern but it shouldn't age too badly when the brown color scheme thing goes out of fashion.

WDP releases their new marker, the G7. The G7 has retained the Angels' classically beautiful form, albeit in a tighter, more athletic package, but that is where most of the similarities end...

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