Good News

I've been thinking for a while that I should record the progress of our house construction somehow. It occurred to me today, when reading my sister's blog, that blogging might be the simplest way to convey its progress and frustrations to the world.

So before I get to the good news I guess I should give a brief introduction. After many months of trying to buy the right house in the right place we gave up, having only seen two that were close in that time and missing out. So we found land and found a builder. Our builder is Beechwood Homes, who we are told are one of the biggest builders in NSW. We started this process in early March.

After looking at the land, Beechwood said that they couldn't build our chosen design and so in their tender to us they substituted a plan which they said they could build. This plan did not meet any of our requirements apart from the fact that they could build it, so we were extremely disappointed.

Talking with them further we learnt we could customise the plan, so we've ended up rearranging almost all the internal walls. 17th May, and 2 tenders later, they had it close enough to right that we were prepared to pay our security deposit to them to have proper plans drawn up and to proceed with purchasing the land, however it was not without pain that we got to this point. Constantly it has been problems with communication - every time we would provide scale drawings of the design we wanted along with detailed descriptions of the changes and we'd get one line statements like "can't do it" back to us - "can't do what?" was the obvious question as the plans we provided had 20 or more changes, does that mean they can't do any of it??? If they could tell us what they could do then we could negotiate on other points. Anyway, our frustration eventually drove me to their head office where I spoke to someone and managed to clarify that with minor changes we could make it work for both them and us. So now we were proceeding. The weeks that they could have saved just by talking to us...

The next step was for them to draw plans. These plans were quite wrong. So another set of scale drawings and correction notes were given to them, they got it wrong again, tooing and froing led to 3 amendments to the tender and many many many weeks lost.

I think Beechwood are probably a very good company - they must be if they are one of the largest builders - maybe they are really good at building plans with little or no customisation - but they could do a lot to improve communication with their customers and if they did they could save a lot of wasted time and effort (money?) and not risk losing customers - the number of times we've almost walked away from them...

Today it is 6.5 months after we started the Beechwood process and we think they have the plans almost right. (can you believe it takes 3 weeks to write a 2 page document containing costs for changes, and 4 weeks to draw the updated plans? These are not major changes! I thought people used computers these days?) Now for the good news. We just received word from them that the plans are drawn and now only need to be checked and as soon as they do that they'll send them for the Nathers report (measures energy efficiency of the design) and send us a copy. Hooray! Lets hope that they got them close enough to right that we can submit them to council.

Looking forward to the next post being more good news...