It was this time last year that we thought that we were in business with our finance and all things being aligned. Paper work was signed early 2013, our colour, tile and electrical selections were all done in April 2013, this has been the longest wait of our lives!
Finance was knocked back twice - first time was due to the loan fine print not allowing a construction loan for a block of land where a dwelling already existed. The second time it was all approved by the bank however knocked back on mortgage insurance to the tune of $30k.
All was lost when one afternoon whilst driving home from work I had a call from my broker asking whether or not I was still interested in building our house. Arrgh, Yes, was my response without a second thought. In short, my broker had not given up, well after my wife and I had. That was four weeks ago. In contacting Metricon, I was shocked to discover that our extension deadline had lapsed and we had not paid any further funds to extend the date and as such we were up for an additional $43k as a price rise, thankfully Metricon applied a more common-sense approach and charged us much (much) less than this. Thankfully the increase was under the unconditional finance amount and meant we were in business!
Earlier this week the loan documents were passed over to Metricon, I received and email on Friday to say that our Site Start Date was 5 December and that I will be contacted prior to that to discuss the construction. Just like that we are back in business.
As the house is being built on our block, I have a front-row seat to the construction. I will be taking photos with every changing event and will keep the blog up-to-date!
Over the coming week, I will reflect on the journey so far and discuss our time with Studio M. I will also talk about some of the unknown issues with building on acreage - who knew about water treatment and drip fed irrigation, fire ratings, protected vegetation etc. All of these things pretty much equal the same thing - $$$$!
Please comment if you would like any information on anything I have said.
