Contract Meeting - Done!

Completed our contract meeting yesterday. Was expecting it to be along day based on what I'd read other people had experienced, but I didn't expect it to take that long as we weren't really making any major changes over what we had already agreed with the builder.

How wrong we were. Ended up taking 9.5hrs and most of it was just checking that the contract included all of the correct information. Most of the changes that were made were due to errors in the information the builder had over what we had told them we want. We did make a couple of changes that we hadn't previously included (sarking to the roof, insulation to the internal walls, sound insulation to the home theatre and we chose to upgrade the wall and roof insulation to larger batts).

Glad it's all over and done though and am now very positive over the whole experience yesterday. It was long, but the consultant was very good and made it a very easy process. Nothing we asked for was rejected, although we did have to question some of the prices they initially came back with and get them adjusted before agreeing to the extras (sarking for instance we got for 50% of what the builder originally wanted to charge us. Seems they made a mistake in the original pricing).

All of the plans should be submitted to the local council and also to Australand (the owner of the estate) over the coming week for approval and all things going well, hopefully the build will start sometime in early November. We have been told though, that any rejections could result in a sizeable delay as plans need will need to be changed to accommodate the request of either party, be signed off by us as acceptable and then be re-submitted to the relevant parties again for approval. This can apparently take up to 4 weeks.

We also had our final colours, electrical and flooring appointment last week at Porter Davis' World Of Style showroom in Southbank. We've got samples of some of the colours we selected, so I'll aim to get them uploaded to the blog sometime over the weekend.