Friday, 19 April 2013

Hey, Big Tender!

It's been almost a month now since I was last on here...just shows how slowly things are moving I think, but we're getting there.

Really not much has happened, we've been [not so] patiently awaiting our tender presentation at Wisdom head office. In the meantime, we've been looking around at other builders and designs considering getting another tender to compare costs with. We both quite clearly have our hearts set on this one, so we haven't really come to a decision on another builder or another design either way!


The tender took around 4 weeks to prepare - this included contour reports, bore hole reports, soil testing, etc, plus a siting of our chosen home on the land and then putting together the cost estimate and tender itself.

On Wednesday we had our tender presentation at the Wisdom Homes head office. The lady that presented this to us we both thought was fantastic - she was able to answer our questions, and if she was unable to, she made a note of what we required and promised to get back to us. So she was very straight forward and gave us the information which we required - which if you've gone through this before, is quite refreshing!


The site costs ended up being a little bit more than expected, but close enough to what we had estimated and provisioned for so we were extremely relieved to hear it!


My only real problems with the tender were:

  • I had specifically asked for the tender to be written in compliance with not only the Council Guidelines, but also the Estate Guidelines which were attached - this what not done, and I had to correct things like roof pitch, water tank size and placement, etc
  • I had asked about putting the application through CDC instead of council for a 10 day turnaround for approval, and was told this was a completely different tender and they required a Section 149 Certificate - to which we replied that we asked about it and wasn't informed we had to have the tender made specifically for it, and the latter was indeed supplied by us
  • They used an older house layout to what we had been looking at - which, much to my partners amusement, I had a huge freak out about but is just a minor fix anyway, phew.
After the tender presentation, we've gone back to have a think about what things we want to keep/remove/add to our tender. It's now Friday (two days later) and we've been in constant communication with our presenter and have ironed out all the amendments we want made to the tender, and we should receive the revised tender by the end of next week!

It's a little exciting - once we sign off on the tender, all the plans will start being put together and we'll get to pick colours, carpets, tiles, bricks, lighting, landscaping, etc.

We actually haven't signed off on our land yet - so we're hoping to get that sorted next week before we sign the tender...haha oh dear.

Cx

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