Not even in Council but so OVER IT!

Hmmm..... Yes, well nearly 3 months on and we think the plans might actually be approved by Nelsons Ridge in the next few days. While you expect things to not run smoothly (after all we are only building a house) it's still a pain and basically frustrating.

So what were our delays? Builder sitting on Basix approval for a couple of weeks, basic issues with estate approval that were either builder errors or that builder should have picked up (eg brick ranges selection was in builders brick range but not allowed by estate... considering how many Eden Brae homes have been built in the estate!) Then couldn't be fixed because of Christmas close down. Review for approval was then delayed by another few weeks as the developer approver was on leave in laste January (and apparently noone else can do her job!) Now we're just waiting for the landscape architect to approve it (how long does that take??? Seriously - how hard can it be?)

Just to make it all more fun, we've been eternally frustrated by Home Option Gallery and the clowns they associate with. Is it really so hard to give clear information? So many things that weren't spec'd properly. An electrical plan where they can't even tell you what grade of speaker cabeling they'll be using in the home theatre (oh, and by the way if we want to provide our own, a reel isn't sufficient - apparently we have to cut it to the extact lengths for them!!!). A kitchen that will cost the earth simply because no competition exists - we have no choice but to go with the mob Eden Brae partner with. An EXTRA $11k (on top of allowances for the kitchen they had to install as part of the house contract anyway) just to make it a little bigger and put in some drawers. No stone benches or polyurethane cupboards!

At least with a lot of the inclusions we added into the rest of the house, the pricing was reasonable. The kitchen is plain robbery. We're a bit sore because we hate being so blatantly ripped off.

We can only hope that when it gets to council, that will be a bit easier given the hurdles we've jumped already. And even more we hope we get a good site supervisor and the actual building goes to painlessly (chances of this are reasonably slim though because we keep being told that there are things we can't have in our house as it's too hard for the builders... too easy for them to make mistakes. I thought they were professionals???)