Saturday, 29 November 2014

Back in Business

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.

Monday, 12 November 2012

Laying Idle

Hello again blog! It has been a while - just on three months actually!

Since last time there has been some movement in the right direction! We now have quotes from Town Planners (RiskSMART) and we are currently looking at these to see who can achieve what we want for the smallest fee!

The geo-engineer report came back and for that $800 we found out that YES we can build, apparently Metricon know what they are doing when they propose a dwelling be build on a slope - Go Figure!

Our block is being re-valued as a way to allow refinancing to occur and therefore allowing us to apply for a construction loan. My parents have visited and have done an amazing job of clearing out a heap of lantana - Thanks a heap Dad & Jo!! The place still looks amazing.

FROM METRICON - we have plans on a contour map to which we made a couple of little tweaks to. Our sales assistant was away this last week (getting married) so that has stalled us getting the Preliminary Contract signed, handing over $1000 and then moving to Contract. If the planets align, the valuer will be kind and give us what we want/deserve; the Town Planner gets things happening quickly and we can progress with the build!

What Metricon has done to get the Denver to fit on our site looks amazing, especially considering the extent of the cut and fill - the back verandah looks amazing! I just hope everything else runs smoothly too.