Contract Appointment

All signed up!
17th February 2014

The contract appointment went well. No dramas really and we were quite happy with the fact that we didn't get too carried away at our colours/tiles/electrical appointment. We still had a few extra things to add at the last minute. We increased our ceiling batts to R5.0 (from the standard R3.0) due to our Colorbond roof. We also increased the towel rails so that we have 2 in each bathroom. We added a translucent half glass door to the garage back entry. Oh... and my favourite is that we finally got around to adding the 1700mm bath with jets in our bathroom (since we opted not to add a spa bath in our ensuite)! We also had to clarify that we didn't want carpet in the study as for some reason it was drawn up that way on the contract. Instead, we will have floorboards in the study just like the Drysdale display homes!

Lots of signing our names on two copies of the contract, and we were out on time. Porter Davis kindly sent our contract to our home loan lender to get the ball rolling for the construction part of the loan.

The appointment ended with signing up for their Rewards program.. sounds like we'll get discounts at some big stores. Looking forward to receiving the rewards card.

Our land estate developer sent through compaction reports on the weekend, however they appear to have had the work done during the start of 2013. Porter Davis will kindly organise for engineers to conduct their own compaction report as soon as our land settles... all without us even asking. Fingers crossed our site costs will come down.

Bring on the land title.... should be any day now! Then bring on building.. hopefully only 6 weeks before the build commences.

Tender Appointment

Friday 13th December 2013

 

Tender appointment was actually a little disheartening. Our site costs allocation was set at $15000 - our sales guy said this is quite generous and we might even come in under $12000. Anyway site costs have been quoted at $14908 due to the slab required. We still might save a few thousand if the compaction report comes back indicating that the soil isn't as bad as first thought. We have to wait til our land is titled before that can happen.

Also our other allocations such as 'electrical', 'spa bath', etc have also been removed from the quote as apparently the quote has to contain actual items. So basically our tender quote is the same price as the quote we received at sales..but without all our allocations! The tender price was bumped up due to an increase in OH&S costs due to our slab (Garage) being build to boundary (nearly $2k for manual handing charges!) and also a moderately priced NBN fibre pack! We were also advised about making our overhead kitchen cabinets higher and decided to go for the taller ones.. when the tender was drawn up we see that this 20cm extra height has cost us an additional $900+. So we have made a note to get them removed at contract stage. I also don't like the vagueness of how much it will cost for an upgrade to carpet category. Surely you would think they would have a spreadsheet of all house designs, how many square metres of carpet is in each house, and then the cost per square metre increase for each carpet category! It's really not that hard! So we haven't been told how much it is for category 2 or 3 carpet, and was advised to choose our preferred carpet and we will find out how much it is when we have our contract appointment!

I'm also not impressed that we've copped over $7000 in fire proofing as our land has been recently classed as bushfire - of course Porter Davis isn't to blame, but $7000 still does seem excessive and surely PD use this to their advantage and makes some extra cash. Our neighbours missed out on this levy as their houses were built earlier due to their land being in the previous stage release!

Somehow we're still looking forward to Hopetoun Interiors to make all our colour & electrical selections in February. We visited in November and spent a few hours working out some colours. We just need to be mindful not to stray too much from the standard inclusions!