Wednesday, August 31, 2016

A New Hope

Well given this is the 5th time i've written this, its been hard to continue with this blog.

The last 6 months have been trying to say the least, and the short of it is that the builder went under and we got another one to continue. The long of it was that we had to:
  • get lawyers
  • building inspectors
  • police involved
  • 5 different quotes (and over 12x shut doors to lots of builders who wouldn't touch it), 
  • months and i mean MONTHS of delays with the bank, 
  • just under 100k of remedial work, 
  • second building contract
and still thousands spent in the wrong direction.

From the fallout though, we got away lightly, some contractors have lost their homes. Almost 3million dollars owed to them and many other families like mine affected directly and more severely than ours. We still had a place to live and we had each others support.

Cafe in Central Market Arcade shuts after two months amid bitter owner split
https://www.insolvencynotices.com.au

Endeavour Homes is no more, and given it was management and namely the one person at the top is to blame. He dodged paying trades, dodged proper work ethic and insisted it was the clients fault for the company to fail. Right about the same time i wrote the last post; i found out later that he had opened a sandwich shop with the money that i and other people had given him; in good faith for works "somewhat " completed. Unfortunately the money didn't go to the hard working trades doing the actual job and buying the actual materials.

With the communication faults we had and numerous issues not being resolved my wife and i saw to take action. We first contacted HIA and received no assistance in resolving the said issues with workmanship and lack of updates; they suggested we speak to lawyer. (so yes let that be a lesson, if you need help in the building industry, and your a client you are on your own)
After sourcing a FANTASTIC lawyer in Adelaide (whom only deals with the construction industry) they suggested we get a snapshot of the house and get the building inspected properly. Note there is building inspectors in Adelaide for pre-sales and actual inspectors whom do work for lawyers - you get what you pay for.
We were astounded to find that we had over 11 pages of defects, and some extremely expensive to fix and structurally related. Gobsmacked to say the words.. could not understand how we had just gone through all this drama and found more things to not only fix but how could happen under our noses.
We then used the information we had to start the HIA legal process as part of the contract you sign, there is a dispute process.

The response we got from our builder was again astounding, they believed that the inspector was wrong, our complaints were premature, their management was not negligent and so on. (if you put in writing a report like this the builder MUST answer it as part of the contract you sign, they cant just ignore it) To add insult to injury, they used it as a excuse not to do anymore work until we pay for works not even started! - bah illegal!

Endeavour went under whilst this was underway, and it would seam that the other clients must have been calling lawyers like i was. We then went through a huge period of uncertainty; with things disappearing from our site front fence, down pipes, ladders and constant issues with vandals we had no one to turn to. Our house now wasn't even at lock up, pages of things to fix and we couldn't find a builder to take it on.

Lucky we were to find Desyn Homes they were within 10k of the other 3 quotes we had for the remedial and remainder of the build. So far we have now all the structural issues resolved, cosmetic issues with the render sorted, electrical almost re-ran! and now past the lock up stage into 2nd fix finally.

so there's my rant gone, we now move into the fun stuff

Insulation went in (Han Solo called and said stop shaving chewie)


Gyprock

The light at the end is getting brighter.... :)


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