Setout

Setout occurred  last week, however there has been an unforunate setback of the slab not going down last week as planned.

This was a big bummer for us, as we had taken time to travel to the site during the week to check out the slab - also no communication had been given to us about these issues. Seeing no slab down when it was expected when visiting onsite and only having been at Carlisle the previous day had left us pretty grumpy and frustrated.

After digging through things, it seems that south East water had yet to process the sewerage request - of course they had no issues with billing us several weeks prior to this for this service - which they took ages to process.. (I'm sure there is no shortages of people's rants with SE waters response times and services, while bleeding money of out you for them to not do anything!)

Carlisle themselves had not been informed of this and somewhere along the process whoever was chasing up someone or following up matters had broken down. It wouldn't have helped that our Carlisle Admin person was on annual leave - so the temporary person had to go back through things and chase them up to the best of their ability. Overall we felt let down, as if we hadn't of visited our site, no one would be chasing up the delay in paperwork / known what was happening - if it had been communicated that their was a delay, we would have taken things much easier, but being left in the dark was really harsh to see a blank site!

The house project has now been set back a week or two, which is a fairly big setback to us - since our build happened just prior to the increase in the FHOG we didn't receive the increase and yet our build start has been so slow, we might as well waited till afterwoods. The weather is also poor for the next week or two, so that may further delay the slab works.


Unfortunately I don't have pictures of the setout (we were to distracted by the lack of concrete slab!). Basically they have stakes placed at the edge of the lot, that allows you to see where certain parts of the house start/finish in a rough grid pattern.

We hope to revisit the site soon to see an actual slab down for some real progress to happen. Our updates from a SS are to be on Tuesdays - hope they are more positive in the future!

Build Drawings

Our build drawings finally arrived, a week later than they were meant to be. Unfortunately this meant we only had a couple of weekdays to review them, instead of the weekend. They have 5 business day return time on them, otherwise Carlisle auto accepts them as being correct.

We had picked up a few things that had been missed on our electrical diagram between different stages - we are currently chasing them up.

Our small win are that:
The house is finally at the right setback - a saga that we battled with at every step of our house with Carlisle - the land Estate/council said it was fine, while they were constantly in a panic of being 'to far forward' dispute clear guidelines in black and white. This should never have been a big issue or a battle to begin with, not sure why Carlisle was so stubborn on this single aspect.

With the above now correct, we have somewhat space in the backyard and less driveway/land scarping to do out the front (not a big thing to us). It also ensures that we are very well clear of the easement at the back.

Adjusted room sizes are correct and everything (minus a few electrical items) are correct.

Site Scrape

Dirt..

We now have some flattened out dirt for our block - the first stage of our house. The porch, garage and alfresco have all been dug out to allow for the dropdown of those areas.

We can't wait to see the slab down, so we really can start to visualize and see the project really materialize.

From the scape we can see that our land has no shortage of clay / poor water drainage - something we have started to plan for with further drainage post build and some good soil to be mixed in to allow lawn and garden to have a chance a growing.

Sadly not a pool, just our Alfresco!