Shattered Dreams

Had a phone call today from my broker today and the bank has come back saying the value of the house and land is $20,000 lower than what we are paying .

Most of it is the house that is short with the land being 4k and the rest the house.

This leaves us looking for that $20,000 to get the finance which of course I don’t have.

I managed to come across the list of houses sold they compared our house to. (Don't ask how I got this cos I'm not saying)

It appears the house's they used are all 2km away ( with undeveloped land between us and them) and they have not used any house sales to the Nth of as where all sell for more than it is costing for us to build. Here is a picture of what I'm going on about:
The areas circled in red are where the Bank found houses to compare ours with.
The blue dot is where our house will be.
And the green area is where I think they should get some valuations from to to an estimate of what our house market value will be.

Also looking at the houses they cocmpared our to they are all nearly 50mSq smaller but for one double story witch is 2mSq bigger and sold 70k more than hey evaluated ours..... WTF and the land is the same size. I dont think that it being a double story so they have a little more backyard would add 70k to the value.

All in all Im not very happy at the moment as you could imagine but Im not giving up without a fight and will ask for the valuation to be redone with the facts I have and will try to get some sales data of the houses just across the road to the north of us.

Contract signed

A well over due update:

We had our tender appointment three weeks ago and luckily our site costs came in well under the 9k we had budgeted for at just over 5k. sweet

As we had saved a little on the sites costs we decided to spend the money on some more pot draws in the kitchen and a few more power points( We probably would have added these anyway but it felt good adding them in and still coming in under budget)

On Wednesday we had our contract appointment and all went very well except we had to add another $1200 to the house due to increasing the ceiling bats from R2.5 to R3.5 to meet 5 star energy requirements and we also increased the size of the kick boards for the bathroom and ensuite vanities from 703mm to 803mm. The standard height is 900mm but PD make them lower when you select the fish bowl above counter type sinks. While we think 900mm would be to high as the taps would be at chest level, a 200mm reduction was to much and would be unpractical (especially when T has a makeup and hair marathon before we go out).

At the end that cost us $74.

Today we received a phone call from our CSC and she told us that we had received developer approval on our plans and colours.

So all that needs to happen now is for a the bank to come to the party and formally approve the loan and we can sign our next 20-30years away.

I will post plans of the house soon.

Colour Selection

A sample of the colors chosen for the house, I could not get samples for everything so have included a list at the bottom of this post.
BathroomsVanities : Laminex Natural Milkwood with kickboards in Laminex Flint charcoal.
Floor tiles and wall tiles in showers : Agra Charcoal with silver white mortar.
The showers will have a Pebble Tan 10 cm vertical feature running down one wall.

External

The bricks are Boral Jarrah with an offwhite mortar that has an ironed finish.
Windows are white.
Gutters, downpipes and garage door are colourbond Ironstone.
The front rendering on portico and projection will be colorbond Surf Mist.
The roof tiles are Boral Gunmetal.

Landry
Agra Charcoal tiles to the floor. Minima Avor (light beige) tiles for the splashback.
Sink and benchtop are Formica Silver Strata, again with charcoal kickers.

Kitchen

Floor is Truloc Spotted Gum which will also feature in the entrance, living/dining and the rumpus room. The glass splashback will be Dulux Sapphire Stone. The kick boards are Laminex Natural Zinc Works (looks like stainless steel).

One of our major upgrades was to put Vinyl Wrap for the kitchen cupboards including the wrap around the front. This enabled us to have a gloss finish. We decided to go with a new colour to the Laminex range called Pearl Frost which has subtle silver sparkles through it. This should match the stainless steel oven, rangehood and dishwasher(and the fridge one day when we can afford to upgrade it). The benchtop will be Quantum Quartz New Diamond White. This has the least amount of fleck.


A closeup of the Pearl Frost Vinyl Wrap. Photo still doesn't do it justice, but trust me it looks really nice :)

Others not listed

Carpet - Godfrey Hirst Forget me not (Dark Grey)
Internal Paint - Wattle Flokati (Off white) - Used throughout the house as it is neutral and we can paint feature walls once we are finished. PD charge way to much to change a color of a room or for a feature wall.
Timber front door and sidelights - Wattyl Dark Oak Stain
Laundry door - Wattyl Dark Oak Stain with clear glass
French doors to Lounge/Courtyard - Wattyl Dark Oak Stain
Bi-Fold door to Rumpus/Alfresco - Wattyl Dark Oak Stain

Fear of the unknown

Good news is that we now have our Tender and Contract appointments booked on the 3rd Nov and 26th Nov respectively. Bad news is they wont tell us the site costs over the phone and we have to wait for the tender appointment to find out so they can "explain the breakdown of what the site costs are made out of." I can understand why they do this as the sites costs can be a large part of the overall build and can vary a lot. This is where the fear c0mes in, if the site costs blow out to 15 or 20k we will seriously need to cut back on some of our modifications (I will post these soon) maybe even losing the alfresco which to me was the main reason of getting the house (along with the rumpus room that opens onto the alfresco) .

The worst thing I did after seeing that there was some clay that came up from the holes that were drilled by the Porter Davis soil engineers was look up building on clay soil. Yep the information I found was all doom and gloom. Clay is one of the worst soils to build on because it expands and contracts with the weather, obviously not good for the foundations of the house.

I have included a link to a quick video that gives some basic information about building on different soil types. (It is American but i guess they have dirt as well :) )
Soil Video Click Here - /www.hgtvpro.com

Anyway figures crossed, no need to loose any sleep over it, just may have to think of some options before we go the tender appointment for if the site costs do blow out.

The Hole

Some action from the block... we found three holes just like this one which hopefully means the builders have been able to get onto the block and do the soil survey.

We have been waiting for 8 weeks for the developer to let Porter onto the block which we were told would only be when the land is ready to title. Now with any luck we will get the figure for the site costs that wont blow us away. We were unable to get Porter to fix the site costs as the block did not meet their criteria which of course they wouldn't tell what the criteria is.

With an estimate from the Porter Davis Sales Rep we budgeted 10k for sites costs as the block has less than 700mm of fall(fingers crossed).

Land

We have put a deposit on a block of land in Melbourne's South East called Eve just next to Berwick Springs. Settlement is in Feb 2009. We were quite excited when we had a look at the block the other day as they had finished the road and put our driveway in.
The soil is great and seems like it will grow just about anything, which will be good when we try to establish a garden down the track.

So it begins

After viewing every display home this side of Texas, it finally happened after walking into a Porter Davis Heywood 29, T started to nest straight away and we knew it was exactly what we were looking for. A few visits with the Sales rep. negotiating a basic quote to see how much this was going to cost us and we were away.