Tandaland

I actually didn’t think it would be that hard to find a cartoon of an octopus wearing pants! Anyway… wasn’t really worth the effort… WORST PUN EVER!!

WOW!

Ok, well anyway…. we have on Occupancy Permit!! WOOT! This means our house is officially suitable for living in! Now all we need is the bank to go look at it and give it a rubber stamp, and then our second inspection, and then settlement and then move in!!

I reckon 2 weeks from now and we’ll be in! Fingers crossed!! We’ll be going by the block tonight to see our completed fence Yay!

Right now I should be writing a post about how excellent our inspection was, but alas it has been moved to Friday. Certainly not a big deal for us, they’re a month and a half early anyway!! Apparently they needed to redo some of the paint which meant delaying the cleaner, which means now we’ll do the inspection Friday arvo. We’re still really looking forward to it! If all goes well we should be able to finalise everything next week. It’s scary to think we could be moved in in only a couple of weeks!

We don’t expect there will be much to pick on though, the place was looking pretty nice last time we saw it, and our SS has been doing a great job of making sure everything is finished off nicely. Fingers crossed!

Whilst we’re still unsure about exactly when handover is, we know it is close! In the next week or so we’re hoping to hear when our first official inspection is. If all goes well, about 2 weeks after that we should have the keys to our new home!

It’s a difficult time because there is so much to do in so little time. Fortunately we’re not in a big hurry to move this time. Last time we moved we had only one week to clean the apartment we were moving to, move all our stuff in and clean the old place. To make matters worse, last time I had the flu as well! This time, however, we can take a bit more time. Obviously we don’t want the house sitting there unoccupied, so we’d like to be in fairly soon after handover. But it means we can take our time moving all the rest of the stuff over.

Other than the moving thing, we have some other big ticket items to pay for. We’ve gotten quotes for blinds ($7k), fences ($4k), driveway ($3k), decking ($4k) and moving ($3.5k)… and it’s actually a LOT of money..and money we don’t really have to go splurging. Needless to say, the new fridge, home theatre and car are well and truly OFF the list for now… especially given we have a kid on the way!

We’re probably going to move ourselves this time. It may take us a couple of trips, but it’s going to beat forking out $4k again like we did last year!

For blinds, we’re probably going to go with a combination of roman blinds with motorised roller blinds where appropriate. Down the track we may have to call in Mum to help us with some sheer light filtering stuff for behind the romans. We don’t have to funds to do it now… so we’re going to leave it.

We got a great quote from a guy for the decking, driveway and path… he’s basically ready to go, so now we’re just waiting for our handover date!

The fence place we got our quote from seem to be a bit confused. Firstly they sent has back a quote for a place in Point Cook, and then when they eventually sent us the correct one the measurements were wrong! So i don’t know what we’ll do there!

We also found out from our new neighbours (Hi Karen and Nik!) that we may not even be able to get the phone on until November! So that may slow down our moving in plans. No phone means no internet, and no internet means no work! EEK!

I’ve been a bit slack with the blog, but I’ve been just a little short of time this week Thuy and I are in Tokyo at the moment! Thuy was sent here on work, and I’ve tagged along to have a look around. I also have to work, so I’ve only had a couple of afternoons out and about. It’s a big place!

I’ll update the gallery when I get home and sorted through all the photos. But for now I just wanted to update what’s going on with the house! We left last friday, so we the last time we saw the block there were just a few pegs around the border of where the slab would be poured. Since then, the plumbing has been completed, and now apparently the slab is also done! Unfortunately, we can’t go and look at it… but I guess if you had the choice between a Japan trip or looking at concrete, which would you choose? In some ways it’s sad though, just because I wanted a photographic documentation of the journey… but whatever!

We’re back on Sunday, and we’ll be heading out there to take a look! Should be exciting!!

da na naaa naa, da na na na naaaaa!

Ahem.

Permits - done.
Construction Loan - finalised.
Land Settlement - completed.
Engineering Plans - signed.
Final Deposit - paid.
Start Date - UPDATE - SEE BELOW!

Well everything is now done. I just have to drop off the ammended plans signed and sealed. A couple of minor changes for permits, but otherwise all done and ready to go. As far as I can tell now, there is no reason for them not to start THIS WEEK. Assuming they have people ready and lined up to actually do the work that is

Getting close now!

UPDATE:

We now OFFICIALLY love Urbanedge

I just got back from dropping the rest of the paper work off, and it turns out that we already had a start date, and its already been and gone… we just didn’t know what we were looking for!!

We found out today that:
Site prep started on the 28th May
Power will be connected on the 6th of June
Pipes and stuff will be done on the 9th of June
Slab will start on the 11th June! NEXT WEDNESDAY!!!!

Gotta love our local governments.

Urbanedge are ready to go, and have everything lined up and ready to build our home, but believe it or not they have to wait for a Legal Point of Discharge permit! This is a $50 piece of paper that details exactly where our waste point needs to go into the pipe at the back of the block. Craziness!

Urbanedge have been on the case though, hassling the council for the paperwork… as there are two other houses they’re building in our estate also held up by the same paperwork I’d imagine. I might add that they’re the only ones in the estate that have started too, so a big thumbs up for them!

It appears that someone removed our boundary pegs! How rude! It appears that when the rear neighbours put up their temporary fencing that they disturbed/removed/relocated our boundary pegs, meaning that the land now needs to be re-surveyed.

It makes me wonder what happens if a bunch of kids come to an estate and move all the boundary markers 2 feet to the right. Could result in some interesting court action in a decade or two! It’s odd that such an important thing is left to 4 bits of wood sticking in the ground….

Just as we were about to start getting upset, we’ve received a little from Oliver Hume and a phone call from Choice Loans. Construction has finished at the estate, and the land will be titled within the next couple of weeks. This makes it about 2 months after they said it would be done, but given that we’re not ready to build anyway… no biggie.

We also heard back from Choice Loans about the documentation we need for finalising the land contract, and it is all fine and dandy and will be in the hands of the builders by next week. Again, given that the land has been delayed so much it ends up not really that big a deal. So the only question remains is whether the builders are being proactive, or whether they’re going to sit and wait for the final finance docs before they do anything. If they’re already getting the paperwork done, we should still be right to start building by mid-May, and if they haven’t well… we may still make May. So even worst case scenario, isn’t that far from what we were hoping way back in January when we were crossing our fingers for an April build. Frankly, that was always a little optimistic

We still haven’t heard about our taps though…..

We hate waiting.

Waiting is OK when you are waiting for a specific time or date. Like, “the show will start in 15 minutes” or, “we’re going OS in 8 weeks”. But I hate waiting for stuff that has no certainty. Phrases I hate are, “hopefully by the end of the week”, “around mid-month”, “April…maybe”.

Thuy calls it “elastic time” or something similar…but in Vietnamese.. so I think that was giờ dây chun…or something. You’re given a time, and it just stretches and stretches….

We’re actually patient people. But we just get annoyed when someone says, “Your land will be titled late march or mid-feb at the latest”… but mid-April is fast approaching and there is still no sign of it being titled. That in itself isn’t so bad, but it has a flow on effect, because it delays everything else.

In actual fact, we’re pretty lucky that we managed to get land AT ALL that is titled before about August. Some of the blocks we were looking at around Deer Park we wouldn’t have been able to build on until around September… so really we should be all smiles.

I hate being sold pork pies.

No real news… just waiting for our contract to be prepared….It was supposed to be done last week, but apparently will be done this week. Our land is also supposed to have title by now, but doesn’t appear that has happened either… so we’ll wait some more