Contract Appointment

So the big day had come for us to sign our contract and find out how big of a whole it was going to burn in our wallets! To say I was slightly worried about it being over our budget was an understatement!

We got to Porter Davis and found out that our Building Coordinator was on annual leave - which didn't phase us as she doesn't take our appointment, she only show us to our meeting room. Simon who took our Tender appointment also took us through the Contract - if you get him you will find his very helpful and friendly :)

So one of the first things that we find out is that we're being charged for upgrades to batts in the exterior walls and ceiling to get a 6 star energy rating - Simon marked it straight away and said he would check on it for us. I also questioned about whether the designs met a 6 star rating before the slab is taken into account and he said that they were - we had made minimal changes to the design and yet they wanted to charge us to get it back up to the 6 stars. When he went back up after our discussion it turns out they decided not to charge us for these cost - makes me wonder how many people don't question it and just pay. The difference in us not paying for those upgrades meant we could keep our security system!

While going through the contract we may have jumped ahead and looked at the overall price.... lets just say it was not within our budget! While going through all the cost it became apparent that a lot of the costing that we're given to us at Hopetoun during the colour appoint were way off the mark and under quoted. As I had previously mentioned we had chosen to upgrade the downstairs doors and for some reason our consultant (remember how I mentioned we had trainee's for our appointments..) had decided to change the doors to something else as they believed they didn't come in the size we needed. This change that we didn't approve added another $600 or so to our final price! Simon tried finding the doors they had chosen but couldn't so went and checked this for us and it turned out that the doors we chose did indeed come in the size we needed so we changed it back to the doors we wanted.

We continued through and removed what we thought we could live without - such as pre-wiring the Sound System and a few other choices from our colour appointment. If you ever do go through the process of building a house make sure you look at everything closely as we found for some reason one shower had been upgraded to something different to all other ones even though we had previously made them the same. Our cabinetry in the laundry which we were paying for was not included in the drawings but we had extra cabinets in the pantry where it was meant to be just shelves. This was picked up when we were counting the number of cabinet handles we were paying for!

I didn't mention a handy idea that we came up with for our island bench for power. Since it has a stone bench top with water fall edges theres no spots to put power - so we wanted to add 2 power points to the top draw. We had mentioned this at our Tender appointment and provisioned the power points at our electrical appointment. It wasn't included in the contract so it was another thing that Simon had to chase up for us. They checked with their cabinetry suppler and they were able to do it and for once at no charge :) here's an idea of what we will have instead of the normal top draw:

So after going through all the pricing and taking out what we could to get it closer to our budget it was time for signing and boy was there lots to sign! Make sure when you're going into your appointment that your hand is ready for a workout! I'm sure by the end of it my signature was way different to my first one!

Once finally done with all the paperwork we were done, YAY! So now they're going to pass our finally contract onto Choice who are handling our loan application and hopefully all will go well with that process - again a little worried as land values where we're building have not been coming back that great but we're hoping it wont be too bad and that it should still all work out fine.

Once I get an electronic version of our contract I will put some of the house design up. Heres to the next 8 months going fast so that we can get into our new home :)