It's been a tough month, to say the least. Literally, everything has gone wrong and it's been a difficult and stressful past month in terms of both land and builder. All these problems have just eaten into our lives like you wouldn't believe, and it has honestly felt like all we have been doing is every one else's jobs (and not our own!). It got to the point where I wanted to change builders, because we have lost our trust and faith in them.
The Land
First of all we had problems with our mortgage paperwork, that our broker was notified about a week before our solicitor called us to say
"I called the bank to book our settlement for Monday, and they aren't ready, they say they've reissued the mortgage documents to your broker, so I strongly advise you contact your broker"
Umm what the! We were supposed to settle in two business days! The following day was spent calling the bank, the broker, the solicitor, the vendor - what a mess! We both had to take the day off work to get to the banks head office with our broker, and resubmit the papers.
The bank told me that one of the documents we signed was witnessed by our broker, and should be witnessed by an independent party. When I told my broker she said "I've been doing this for over 15 years and I've never had a problem"...then the one piece of paper we had to resubmit she had to ask some random at the bank to witness! Great work.
Luckily our trusty solicitor was able to get the vendor to move settlement to the Tuesday without penalty.
Come Tuesday, day of Settlement...I get a call from my broker saying the bank says we have a shortfall of funds and they need it deposited into our bank account within the hour! What the!!! The broker says our solicitor should have told us, the solicitor says our broker should have told us...argh!
Come that afternoon, I get an email from my solicitor saying
"Unfortunately your matter did not settle today...the representative from the bank did not attend the correct venue...we have rescheduled for tomorrow afternoon"
Really?!
The House
We received our building plans about a week ago. The issues that we had previously highlighted during the tender stage, to my dismay, were again not rectified. They still had the old style master suite layout, the water tank had not been moved to the side of the house, and no provision for the fireplace.
So our Wisdom rep was able to change our master suite layout before our meeting, and noted the water tank as a variation in our plans. So this is the first time we actually see our home with the correct layout - only to find that now our balcony has lost half its size, and is now a juliette balcony. And the balcony we had was already quite small but could have fit a couple of chairs, what was left was space to fit two people standing that's it! Because of the layout change to the newer (2013) layout, they had to decrease the size of the balcony otherwise we couldn't fit a bed in the master suite.
We asked them to go back and find another solution because the balcony was useless to us, and the only reason we chose the facade was because of the balcony, if we had have known this was the implications of the newer layout then we probably would have chosen a different facade. They said this was the first Majestic 35 with the chosen facade they've had to do, that's why.
I looked up the Developer Guidelines, the Campbelltown Development Control Plan, and spoke to Planning NSW about articulation zones, because I was convinced that there was a way we could fit a bigger balcony in without having to push our house back, knowing we could fit it within the articulation zone. Once I had put all the measurements together, we forwarded the numbers to our Developer first for approval which we got, and then went back to Wisdom to tell them we had approval to increase the balcony size without pushing the house back. They requested a copy of the approval, and then were happy to make it happen.
Current Status
So, after a very stressful past two weeks we have finally settled on our land - YAY!!!
We are awaiting our new building plans, which should be back next week, once we approve them they will draw up the building contracts.
The next stage is colours, and developer and council approvals.
We know we still have a long road ahead, and I'm really hoping Wisdom don't let us down.
Cx
