Contract signed!

Break out the champagne, we have signed the building contract!

We’re now officially in more debt, unless the bank decides not to give us the money.

The signing took about an hour. The builder went through the schedule and explained a few things, which we more or less already knew about. It was all nice and pleasant, and when we got home we opened the champagne.

I found it interesting that the builder’s margin is actually specified in the contract. In this case, it was 25%.

The next steps for the builder are:

1. The working drawings go to engineering for the final cut. This doesn’t mean that we can’t make any changes, but if we do we need to sign off on them.

2. Builder applies for indemnity insurance.

3. Once engineering is done (expected to take a few days, possibly a couple of weeks?), the builders will call in their certifiers to certify the plans (certification is expected to take about 3 days).

4. The certified building permit will then applied for (guaranteed to not be more than 10 days, otherwise council pays a penalty).

5. Siteworks gets booked in (expect a lead time of 2 weeks before they start).

 

The next steps for us are:

1. Make sure demo gets done – should happen this week or next week – expected to take about 2 weeks.

2. Get finance approved and title sorted out (name change required) – mortgage broker has this process under way already, we just need to let her know how much we need to borrow.

 

The first Prestart appointment will be in a couple of weeks and is expected to take 1-2 hours. We’ll go through the plans and make sure everything is OK. Hopefully this will be easier now that we can deal directly with the builder.

We’re not expected to get everything done at this meeting, just what the builder needs in order to get to roof height.

Essentially, this means we need to confirm:

– Roof, gutters, fascia, and window colours

– Where the plumbing goes

In other words: Oh no, I need to commit to colours!!