Lots to update but we still aren't in

Sorry about the lack of updates but things have been a little hectic.  I've hardly been in Melbourne and our new Site Supervisor has been keeping us busy.

We thought that we may have been in the house on Friday 27th May.  We spent Friday 20th May walking through with our independent inspector.  Yes, given that we had so many issues from our previous site supervisor we thought that we had better have a new set of eyes have a look.  On Monday we also got our final invoice which we needed to send to the bank to get them started on processing our final payment.  With the invoice we also needed to send the bank the certificate of occupancy....

Oh yeah the certificate of occupancy......(more on that in a bit)

Our indendent inspector had found a few things that we hadn't noticed, but mostly his extremely good and extensive list included what we already knew.  Here's just a quick snapshot:

• underfloor access door should be painted

• drainage around the house needs to be fixed (something I have been mentioning for far too long)

• insulation not finished

• some down lights too close to timber in the ceiling

Then there were a few minor things that were good to have noticed:

• doors rubbing on carpet
• seals required on doors to garagae
• scratches on benchtops
• tiles out of alignment.

Then there were three reasonably big things:

• Not enough gap under the master bedroom windows

• Tiles in master ensuite shower did not have an appropriate step to stop water coming out of the shower

• And here's the interesting one.  The brick perpends (the vertical bit of mortar between the bricks) are too wide on the alfresco pillars. Including the one that was rebuilt

So we spent the Tuesday morning (within 24 hours of getting the report from the inspector) walking through with the Site Supervisor.  He was really good, everything was to be fixed, painted or repaired, except for a few things.

• Apparently the electrician had already put baffles on the top of the lights and these mean that they can be closer to timber.  He will get the electrician to supply this information to me.
• He wasn't too worried about the lack of the gap on the master bedroom window as there was about a 5mm gap when a 10mm gap is required.  If anything is to go wrong it will present itself as cracks in the master bedroom plaster.  So we may need to revisit this after the 3 months maintenance period.
• The shower was actually our fault.  This is the arrrangement that we wanted so we were going to stick with this.  We didn't want the whole bathroom re-tiled.
• The brick perpends on the alfresco pillars was something that we didn't mind too much about as they matched well to each other and were now quite neat.

Then came the certificate of occupancy.

On the afternoon of our walkthrough with the site supervisor the builders inspector came around to supply the certifcate of occupancy.  We were a bit worried about the following things:

• There were no steps coming out of our laundry door
• Our alfresco decking was over 1m high off the ground and there was no balustrading.

Apparently these can be got around by ensuring that the owner does something about them.  Unfortunately he found two things that we weren't really ready for.

• The first was the front steps that the builder had put in needed a landing.

• The second was the perpends on the alfresco brick pillars.  They needed to be fixed.

To fix the front steps they could build up soil to make the number of steps less.  For the brick perpends Romeo tried to get an engineer to sign off on them (unlikely given that they are outside the limits of the code).  So the engineer offered two solutions.  Rebuild or render (cover up the problem so that no one know?).
So on Saturday down came the pillars, one for the second time.

Oh well more to come.