Well that's settled then... We're officially the owners of a block of land!

Finally! Settlement successfully completed 2 days shy of Christmas day. We are officially the proud owners of this new block of land.

Through in some photos of the new estate park too.

Cheers :)

Land has titled!

Hi All,

Finally! Some great news and another milestone achieved for our build.

We have been informed that our block of land has titled. Settlement is expected to be on the 23/12/2014 which will be a great Christmas present for us.

Even though we have been delayed by 2 months due to waiting on titles we are very excited to progress our build.

Some other news...

• Our house design has been approved by the Design Review Committee (DRC) 
• We have a new Build Co-ordinator. Email responses are now always with 24hrs even after hours! She has been so helpful and has given us more information in 2 weeks about our build then we had received since we first paid the deposit.

Thank you for reading. 

Land title delay :(

Hi All,

As I am currently overseas it has been quite difficult to update our blog regularly and this will be the case for the remainder of November.

Unfortunately, the developer has decided to delay the titles of our blocks (no idea why!!). The reason they gave was that they are worried about everyone starting to build at the same time and the traffic coming in and out of the estate will be too heavy for the works to continue smoothly on the front entrance.

This is really disappointing for us. We even received a letter from the developer to say that our titles are due in October and to prepare ourselves for settlement. I think something big must have happened for them to delay by two months.

We are now looking at a site start of January 2015. If we are lucky.

Hope to have some better news next time.

Quick update

We received a second valuation from another company and thankfully it came in higher than the previous one. Even though it would have been better to get the full construction amount we are much better off now.

I am leaving for a business trip tomorrow and won't be back till December. We're predicting that the slab will not be poured until then but have already organized an Independent Inspector in case we get to slab stage during my absence.

As of today this is what's pending:

• Developer Design Approval
• Final loan approval (construction)
• Land Title and Settlement 
• 2nd Soil test after Title
• Building permits
• Final construction drawings
• Post Contract Variation document

Unfortunately all the above will happen throughout November so my Fiance will be quite busy on her own.

Old vs New plans .PDF overlay

Even though my BC probably thinks I'm crazy, I decided to overlay the electrical .PDFs to ensure the only changes that had been made were the ones we requested.

This was done using a tool called 'Bluebeam Revu'. It allows you to overlay two .PDFs colouring the old one in red and the new one in green. Wherever it matches the colour turns to black so you know there is no change in that area. Here's an example.

This comes in very handy when doing post contract variations and when signing off the final construction drawings.

This tool can be seen here: http://bluebeam.com/us/products/revu/  unfortunately it's not free :(

Some updates

The last few days have been pretty busy regarding our build. Here are some updates we received.

Bank:

• Second valuation to be ordered from a different company
• Rejected the stage payment schedule PD have requested

Builder (BC):

• Updated electrical layout as follows:
• Added Switch Plate at Front Door for internal lights
• Added 2x 2 way switching cost to lights in hallway
• Reconfigured switching as per client request
• Moved switch in laundry to beside door/linen cupboard
• Amended our colour selections to reflect architraves/skirting/internal door colour as 'White'
• Accepted bank's request to go back to the standard HIA progress payment schedule

We have our fingers crossed that the next valuation comes in higher than before otherwise we will have to pay some LMI. 

Bank valuation woes

Seems like I was right to be nervous. The bank valuation has come in MUCH lower than our contract price. This is really disappointing since it was the only major hurdle left to ensure we can go ahead with the build.

The bank will contact me tomorrow to discuss figures but I'm fairly sure I know the exact amount we need to make up the difference. Hopefully we have other options other than having to pay LMI.