We had our Tender appointment yesterday and lets just say it do NOT go well.
Porter Davis had not done the siting of our house on the block correctly. I'm not sure what happened, but they had not taken in to account the fall on our land. I thought it was strange when the consultant said we were lucky to have such a flat block of land. I had to correct her and when she took a look at another plan she realised that the siting was wrong.
She swiftly took this back to estimating to price up our site works again.
In the meantime we went through the rest of the tender......next issue.
Our BAL rating is 12.5; this didn't come as a surprise as this is what it was with Boutique Homes, so I was expecting this. What I didn't expect was that we were told we had to upgrade to a Colorbond roof to comply with the BAL rating, so they slugged us with the cost to upgrade the roof ($5.5k) on top of the $3.5k to be BAL compliant. I questioned this, stating that we didn't have to upgrade the roof with Boutique Homes and that a work colleague of mine also has a BAL rating of 12.5 and he didn't have to upgrade his roof. Once again, she was off to check this.......surprise, surprise, we don't have to upgrade the roof to Colorbond, but we do have to have sarking in the roof. The roof upgrade was taken off, but our Bushfire compliance went from $3.5k to $6.5k. Come again? sarking costs how much?
We thought we had a little bit of a win when we discovered that estimating had not charged us for some extra rendering we had asked for. That was promptly quashed however when our consultant efficiently advised estimating they had missed this; isn't she the best?
After we finished going through the rest of the Tender, estimating still hadn't finished our new site works quote, so we were advised to head off for an early lunch (11:30am) and should be ready to go in about another hour and a half; they'll give us a call.
3 hours later we still had not heard anything so went back anyway. We were greeted with "There's been issues"; the last thing you want to hear.
Turns out they were having trouble fitting our house on the block correctly with all the fill and fall. They've had to move the house forward; meaning it now encroaches into the building envelope, place more fill in the rear meaning they are now 'building' over the easement and put retaining walls on both sides and to the front driveway side. The really shocking news? our site works went from a $25k estimate to a $40k estimate. On top of this, they reminded us that these site works are not fixed and could still change.
$40k to put our house on a block of land with 1.2m of fall? I couldn't believe it. Our land sales consultant couldn't believe it either. He said that other blocks in the estate with more than 2m of fall have been quoted $30k....$40k was extreme.
Needles to say we did not sign our tender and left the office on the brink of tears......why does this keep happening to us?
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