[Progress.010] Tiger Tail and final construction set drawing received

Tiger Tail
This is not about animals in the zoo :-), it's about our neighbour's power line that run across our property.

Found some explaination from the web:
tiger tails means pipe type cable covers, used as a warning to visually indicate the position of overhead power lines. Note: A tiger tail is also known as a torapoli pipe.

The builder wants us to "tiger tail tag" the neighbour's power line. Got a quote from an electrician for $2,500, which is ridiculously high. Will shop around for a few other quotes.

Update:
Found these 2 pictures from Work Near Overhead Power Lines: Code of Practice(PDF, about 1MB):



"final" final construction set of drawings received
Received the "final" final construction set of drawings from builder yesterday. All questions and issues we raised all sorted out except the ensuite door can't be changed to sliding door due to the way the shower pipes are connected.

Booked for final meeting next Tuesday and we are ready to sign the contract, Yeah!

[Tips.006] Ask for a copy of Contract in early stages

I found a lot of people asking questions in homeone.com.au forum about the progress payment details. You can actually ask your builder for a copy of the contract in the early stages (e.g. after you paid $600 for your initial site survey, soil test, ...etc, or before paying for preparing drawing for council submission).

Most project home builders use the standard "Building Contract for New Dwellings" from HIA (this link is for NSW, other states also available). Anyone can spend $22 to get a copy. But it's the changes your builder added that makes each builder's contract unique.

Changes to Progress Payments
Using ours as example, the standard contract has 6 stages for progress payments: Floor slab complete, roof frame complete, close up complete, fixings complete, painting complete and practical completion. Our builder cross the whole lot and put in their own ones: deposit, slab, frame, roof on, lock up and practical completion, including a percentage for each stage. We don't like some of the figures and are working on it with the builder.

Other Changes
Our builder also added a few clauses here and there to protect themselve, such as:
"An automatic extension of time applies for every day a progress payment is late. No notification by builder is necessary."
"adverse weather means any rain day recorded by the Bureau of Meteorology - daily rainfall report." --> so if it rains in New Castle, our construction site in Sydney will have to stop, thanks for that!
....

The contract is in plain English, but I still recommend to find a solicitor to go through it for you.

If you can request for a copy of contract earlier in the process, you can try to work out any issues with the builder. Rather than having everything done and council approved then you are stuck and have not much bargain power in case you found some unreasonable surprises in the contract.

[Tips.005] Check the location of your external lights

I learned this from another customer of our builde near Regents Park.

They have a neighbour just built with ******* Home, and high up under the eaves outside of Main bedroom on first floor, there was a sensor light installed. The idea was to put it high up there so that the area it can detect movements (and turn on the light) will be larger.

After they moved in, and electricity connected, they found that it's giving too many false alarms as the sensor picks up lots of activities from the neighbour's back yard as well. They tried to adjust the sensor and guess what, they can't reach it any more as it's too high and they have to pay someone with really long ladder just to adjust the sensor's covering angle. Of course the other option is to turn it off, but since you already paid the money for that, why border switching it off?

The lesson/tip is, if you are planning for external lights, make sure it's within reachable height.

[Others.003] New Home Inspection / Process of Building a Home

I am currently reasearching for information about new home inspection. Although the builder has their own inspector/certifier, the inspector is paid by the builder and we would prefer to spend some money (about $300-$450) to get a second opinion from the experts. Especially before every payment.

Found this site for a home inspector which provides some good information about different stages involved during the construction process. See 14 Stages of Building a Home - H & K Ryan & Associates.

Also found this site from another inspector talking about "how to discover the most shocking hidden secret about your new project home", the title is quite attractive, and it provides some scary information about how bad the project home builders can be. Need to go through the long 16 page web site, and hopefully will find something helpful/interesting. click here for the site.

I remembered there used to be a document from AVJennings web site which provides detail step-by-step instruction starting from picking a design, presentation, colour selection, submit to council, ...etc until the construction finished. Unfortunately when I checked their web site last night, couldn't find that information any more.

[Others.002] Andrej's House Construction Site

I always thought that my demolition work was quite difficult as my house was quite close to the neighbour's houses.

But I then found Andrej's site from Homeone.com.au forum, have a look and you will see how difficult his work is. All demolition done by hand! WOW!

Update: The location of that construction is Bratislava, Europe