Frame Inspection

We had Mark down for a frame inspection on Thursday 13th May. He found only two issues that he labelled as defects, with a number of other more minor things that he pointed out but didn't say they needed fixing. Defect 1 was that some of the roof trusses (the triangles supporting the roof) were at an angle, leaning toward the front of the house. Defect 2 was that some of the windows were supported by studs over 600mm apart, as they had used 2 studs in a gap where 3 were needed for the right spacing. He also had me take photos of a number of other things, in case there were problems later on.

Site supervisor said they will be fixing the defects when the carpenter comes down to do the portico, which will be as soon as they get replacement wood to build it.

Overall Mark said the frame was pretty good, with a lot of common mistakes avoided. He was expecting worse from a volume builder.



These are our roof tiles. Still lying in the back yard as they are waiting for the frame to be completed, after someone decided the frame wood would be better off in their house than ours.



He also suggested I document the windows lying in the water, as the reveals (the visible part of the window frame) aren't designed for this kind of exposure.



A bit too much cut out of this joist, he said. But not a disaster, especially as it wasn't in the middle of the joist where it would have caused more trouble.



The pipe here is off-center. Not as bad as some others I've seen! One pipe I saw in someone else's slab was in the entrance of the toilet instead of at the back, and they had to dig up the slab and lay some more pipe to fix it. The site supervisor said they have a little rotating attachment that will let them adjust it to the correct spot.



Mark pointed out that water collecting here wouldn't drain away. The site supervisor said they'll soak up the water before closing it off.

Even more frame!

We went down to the block again and saw we now have a wrapped ground floor, and quite a lot of roof frame. No garage though. I have managed to get truss layout from the builder and am chasing a frame layout as well.



The front left corner of the house, where the garage will be.



The back left corner of the house, looking into the outdoor room.



Our rear door sitting in the back yard, endangered by the fence that keeps falling over.



Gisele certifies the building site to be free of wild pokemon.



Meanwhile, Charlotte inspects all the empty tuna cans, making sure they are safe for handling.

More frame!

We now have a second storey! And so far things look to be in the right places. Luckily it was much less muddy this time we visited, so we didn't end up with huge, heavy mud-boots like last time.



Front left - garage will be between the camera and the house.



Front, slightly to the left.



Front right.



Second floor, looking towards the back. That mess of wood will turn into bedrooms later.



We caught this spy snooping around on the site.

Frame!

We visited the site the other day and found the beginnings of a frame. We've since been told the entire first floor frame is done, and that the second floor will be started today, weather permitting.



Some frame building materials.



Our independent inspector surveys the work done so far.



The wall frames were lying on their side on the slab when we visited (Saturday 17th April)

Slab!

We now have a slab! Much sooner than expected. Things look to be more or less in the right place, though we have yet to go out there with a tape measure. The slab was completed on Saturday 28th March.



Diggers digging on our block.



Pipes on our block - this is the right hand side of the block in the slab pictures, where the kitchen is.



This is actually another block nearby having the slab laid. But we are guessing that ours looked something like this.



And here is our slab! This is taken from the front corner of the garage.



And another picture of the slab, taken from the front of the house. Garage is on the left, and a pile of dirt at the back.

Site start scheduled

Site start has been scheduled for Monday 15th March!

Not much else to report apart from that. At least we will be back in Melbourne by the time the interesting stuff is happening (not that what's under the house isn't interesting, but we'll be around to watch things like bricks being laid).

The spa bath

Ok, it's time to put this episode on the record. When we chose our house we signed up for a promotion giving us a choice of the following four spa baths:

* 1915mm Ovelle Deluxe oval spa bath with tiled hob, hot pump, (6No) chrome plated recessed jets, (4No) mini adjustable jets and headrests.
* 1675mm Stylus Newbury rectangular island spa bath with tiled hob, hot pump and 6 white jets.
* 1800mm Stylus Newbury rectangular island spa bath (1800i) with tiled hob, hot pump and 6 white jets.
* 1850mm Tuscany rectangular spa bath with tiled hob, hot pump and coloured jets.'

We were told that we could have any of these, and naturally we chose the Ovelle, having the most features and also a nice oval shape. This selection was done in August 2009.

Just a few weeks ago we received an email "informing" us that we could not have the Ovelle as it was too large, and that we would be given the Newbury 1675 instead. That is quite a downgrade, and I replied (all correspondence was by email) that we are not happy with the change. Much to my surprise, the reply was that there was nothing we could do about it, and that we would get no compensation because it was a promotional item. I suggested other options like choosing a non-promotional spa bath with us paying for it, or even leaving the bath out altogether and installing one ourselves, but in every case the consultant tried to bludgeon us into accepting what was presented as our only option.

Email exchanges continued throughout the week with both us and the Metricon consultant getting more and more annoyed at each other until on Thursday I arranged a phone call for the following Friday morning to sort things out.

And that phone call was quite a surprise! Metricon said that they would offer us the Newbury 1800I, which is more spacious than the 1675 originally offered, and it also has the "I", which means that instead of 3 jets only on either side it has 12 jets plus 8 additional smaller jets. It's even better than the original one we were expecting to have. The consultant explained that the Ovelle really couldn't fit in our bathroom, and apologized for having told us originally that we could have it (this was the same person who did our colour consultation, including choice of spa bath).

So in the end everything turned out ok. We were even offered a free upgrade to chrome jets, which were included with the Ovelle but usually cost extra on the Newbury. But we learnt an important lesson - if something doesn't seem right, keep asking until you're satisfied. If we had given up we would have gotten the basic Newbury 1675.