Fence is gone and driveway is ready

Hi guys, seems like the building is finally coming to a end. No sure we will miss the 4 times a week trip to check what was new in the house. However, there are still plenty of things yet to start, but the main thing, the house is almost finished. Two weeks ago was our PCI, we thought it was just a informal walkthrough until a day before when WH sent us an email saying that our PCI was in the following days :-).

The PCI was around 3 hours, we brought to the meeting a list of observations that we compiled over our last visits, most of the items were still valid. Then we went through the house checking imperfections in painting, mortar in general, scratched windows and small details mostly. The meeting was at 7am and the SS was there before us, so he had already put some blue tape in several things to fix.

After the meeting the SS told us that he was able to accommodate all fixes and pending things in the next two weeks, so we can have the house ready before Easter. We were a little bit sceptic about the date, but after one week, it seems we may be able to get all things done. 

The biggest issue highlighted in the PCI was that the kitchen bench (or the tiles under it) were a little bit misaligned. We were told that it may be possible to play around with them to hide the misalignment. It is not a big issue, I didn't even notice, but my wife found it.. and as the SS told us, once you saw that kind of thing, it will bother you forever. 

Pending for this week are: fix this misalignment I mentioned, finishing the water tank installation, driveway sealing, carpet installation, replace damaged windows, mortar fixing, painting fixing and some gyprock repairs, main door painting. It sounds a lot now that I'm writing down the list, but we trust we will make it. The settlement day is  scheduled for this Thursday. Let see how things unfold...

Some photos from the last week:

The inspection certificate of our driveway.

The driveway was poured on Wednesday.

Yesterday, we went again to the house and we found that the fence is gone.. also the preparation works for the landscape were done. We are planning to to the landscape ourselves, so yesterday was the first time we can appreciate the magnitude of the work that is coming for us... :-)

Some dirt is still to be removed.

Now, the house feels a little bit .. how to say it... naked.. haha.. Anyway we will have the blinds installed this week, and the side fence is scheduled for the week after, so we can have a little bit or privacy. 

Brick Laying has started ... a month late

Hi, finally last week the brick laying has started, almost one month after it was expected, apparently WH can't cope with the demand and they are short of brick layers. Well, what should I care about it? We are paying for a house to be build, we are not getting it done for free, so as a minimum we were expecting the builder will have the personnel to accomplish its core business activity (build houses).

It has been very frustrating, first the weather and then in top of that the additional delay for the shortage of brick layers... WH seems to be taking more businesses that they can do or they don't care much about their customers. I hope they can make up for this delay, it is not just that we may get the house a month late, but any delay means lost money in extra weeks of rent from our current apartment.

This is how the house is looking today, the off-white doesn't look off-white, but as my neighbour told me, it may be that we need to wait a little bit and once is dry it may look different.

Slab.. done!!!

Our slab was poured today :-) It was very early in the morning, so no chance for us to take a look. We hope things keep at the same pace.  We just came back from VP, we had dinner in front of our lot, as a celebration for the slab :-) (it was just pizza, coca cola and 15 degrees Celsius), somebody was walking the dog close to our lot and gave us THE look. I hope she didn't think we were doing something weird. Anyway, here some photos. I reckon nothing else will happen for this week, so we will stop going to VP at least until next week.