3rd May 2013
On 3rd May 2013, we officially exchanged contracts. I attended MJH head office and signed several pages, legally binding us to the the Havana 3. I was a little nervous as it was explained that any extra changes would now incur admin fees of $1000 per change! Yikes! I hope we got everything right! For first home builders, it was at this stage a bit daunting as no one really sat down with us to explain what we should think about to make sure our house was perfect.
We then received our drafts with all the sides and elevations of the house. I must have looked at these plans a hundred times and even then it wasn't until the 110th time I found little things that I though would be better if changed. For example the location of the external gas point in the alfresco, the location of our external water taps, a recess near the bathroom that would better as a linen cupboard, etc. Our CLO said that small changes would be fine and would not incur additional fees, so i raised these points with her and they were happy to change them without any extra cost! Over the next 5 weeks, we had several tender variations going back and forth, including a mistake on placing the house within the correct measurements of the building envelope. Our water and electrical connections were first drawn up on the wrong side of the house, so another tender needed to be sent to have plans changed. We also received a credit back for our slab as we were down graded to M class! Woo hoo, that saved us 3.5k! This part in our whole process seemed to take the longest, as each time a new variation needed to be written it would take 1.5weeks to have it sent out to me and have it corrected. Things were starting to get frustrating as time was ticking on by. We were very conscious of the possibility of incurring fines for building late, if we did not have everything sorted, done, dusted and approved by all the powers that be by early August!
