Site scrape photos

Last week, I ended up concentrating too much on the height of the slab instead of the works that had been done on our block.

We went out again today and took some photos. Enjoy! 

Alfresco area:

Front cut depth:

Shot from the back alfresco side:

Examples of homes with flat driveways

After finding out that our home's Floor Level (FL) had been dropped to match that of the footpath. I decided to go have a look through some new estates at homes with flat driveways.

Here are a couple photos I took:

Brother's site visit

I mentioned a few weeks back that my brother and his fiancé are also building their first home. As I was visiting my parents in Bendigo for the weekend I decided to go on site and check out his build so far.

I was VERY impressed with the quality of work on his slab. JG have really done a top notch job. Here are some photos I took of his site. He is right across a reserve park, providing stunning view.

P.S This is going to be a metal frame house.

Slab height issue - Update

This morning at 8:50 am I got a call from my Building Coordinator. She wasn't kidding about making it her first priority. She pretty much put everything else on hold until we came to a solution for this issue. For that I am grateful! 

Here is a summary of what I was told:

• House was dropped by 200 mm as the original drawings did not have a Term Bench Mark (TBM) for the road. After the land titled and the second soil test this information was given to the builder and they automatically dropped the house level to align with the street height (100 mm higher as opposed to 300 mm higher). 
• There is a note on the drawing that the site needs to be scrapped to a minimum of 9.6 RL in order to remove surface vegetation and provide a level building platform. 
• The slab is 385 mm high so 9.6 RL + 0.385 = 9.985 RL which was the level used for the house floor
• The only way for the house level to be raised would have been to use fill under the slab. This is not ideal and I really did not want to go down that path.

So given the situation our best way forward was to do the following:

1. Raise the portico level and reduce the step down to 63 mm to match the garage. This means that the fall from the footpath will only be about 0.018 which is equivalent to 1.8 cm. 
2. Keep the remainder of the house levels as is.

Even though this is not ideal and we would have liked the house to site higher, unfortunately given our land contour the way Porter Davis has set-out the house is the best regarding a solid foundation. Adding compacted fill would have been silly on highly reactive soil IMO.

I made it very clear that the lack of communication to this change is disappointing and that it should have been made apparent to us through a Building Variation (BV). 

A massive thank you to all three members involved in today's discussions for a quick reaction to my concerns and fast turn around for a response and potential solution(s).

Site works halt 3 days into the build... We're off to a good start!

Many of the followers and regular visitors of this blog would know that our site works officially commenced exactly three days ago. You might also have noticed that after looking at our cut site that I had a bit of a hunch that something was not right. Well.. I was right.

After checking our final construction drawings yesterday I noticed that the floor level has been dropped by 200 mm from our contract drawings. This set off some alarms and I immediately proceeded to email my building coordinator and text my slab supervisor.

Unfortunately, that's all I could as it was after hours and that meant another sleepless night caused by our build. Being human, questions start to arise. Did I read the drawings correctly? Why did I miss this? Why did they do/miss this? etc...

This morning I waited anxiously for an email or phone call. That didn't happen. I wasn't going to wait as I knew I didn't have much time to react.

Finally, I managed to get through to my slab supervisor and building coordinator. After explaining the situation, they both agreed that they needed to look into this further and have called a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. Attendees will be our BC, SS and one more member in charge of siting and floor level designs at the PD Keilor office. Luckily, we all agreed that works will be stopped until this is rectified. I was very assertive about this as they had deviated from our contract drawings without any Building Variation (BV).

Since the site has been cut already, there are really only a few options that I can think of to rectify this (if they agree):

1. Fill, compact and raise the platform for the slab
2. Increase the thickness and in turn the height of the concrete floors

I would really appreciate some feedback of which would be the better solution of the two. Please comment or PM me if you can help. 

Thanks for reading and sorry about the essay!

Yet another surprise! Hopefully not too serious...

After reviewing our floor levels today I noticed that Porter Davis has reduced the total house level by 200 mm between our contract and final construction drawings. We missed this when we were checking our construction drawings. We were also not informed of this change at any point!

Here is a comparison of the two drawings. Hoping to have an answer for this first thing tomorrow morning.

Site cut complete

Hi All,

Went out (again!) today to have a look at the block and found that the site has been cut. I am a little concerned about the height of the garage floor to the footpath so I have posted my question on the homeone forum hoping that someone with the expertise can help me understand our drawings better.

My current understanding is that the garage floor should be ~40mm higher than the footpath.

http://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=75949

Here are some more photos: