Settlement

Well its official, at long last, we settled on the land on Wednesday last week. Ben and I are now the proud owners of six hundred and twenty-five square metres of dirt, time to go plant some crops. We are officially in debt for the rest of our lives!

Other recent revelations on the build, we have encountered a couple of unexpected 'after-we-signed-the-contract' expenses... unfortunately these weren't taken into account in our homeloan, which has already been approved so will now have to come out of our pockets, or rather, our of our wedding budget.

Both of these complications confirm the advice I've been given by several people which I will put out there to anyone about to build a house - QUESTION EVERYTHING!

Concrete piering: 

It appears the 30 lineal metres included in our contract wasn't enough. After the builders sent us an initial variation for $6000- of additional concrete piering, we consulted with my expert uncle the quantity surveyor, who confirmed our thoughts that this seemed fairly excessive. Additionally, friends who just built a two storey place in a nearby suburb didn't even need this ammount of additional peiering so surely it was too much for our little one storey house.

We left the variation unsigned while we were overseas for eight weeks then had a meeting with the builders. They explained the requirement for the additional piering, but assured us the price would be closer to $1500-$2000, much to our relief, however we still decided to wait for the surveyor's report before signing anything off.

The end result came back last week at ~$1900, still a decent chunk of money, but better than the original $6000 they told us it would be. Our house better be super stable after all that!

EER:

The next hiccup we faced was meeting the Six Star Energy Efficiency Requirements. Turns out our house met the requirements, originally. That is until we got to playing with the window sizes. Wanting a bright, open and airy house I had enlarged just about every window in the place.

And so it was, another unexpected variation arrived informing us we'd need to pay around $4000-$5000- for one of two options, both including double glazing variations and downsizing a number of windows, in order to meet the EER.

The double glazing I was ok with, after all in the long run this would save us a bundle in heating/cooling bills, but downsizing the windows was a definitive no-go. If I could have fit more windows into that place I would have, there was no way I wanted to make the ones I had any smaller.

And so, after numerous emails to the builders we were able to get the plan evaluated externally and a third option was provided to us - additional double glazing and leaving the windows all as is, and, it came in cheaper than the options of changing the window sizes!