Monday, October 20, 2008

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.

2 comments:

BelleBeau said...

Hi,
Site costs are the biggest hoodoo ever. Don't be too stressed about the clay, it depends on how deep they went before hitting it. Our site costs were huge! but that's because we ended up needing over 40m of retaining walls. Our fall was 1.2m over the block and we are building a long single storey.
You can only wait and see what they come up with. Doesn't make the waiting any easier though!
Cheers

smartii said...

Congratulations on your new home. Thank you for sharing your experience. We are currently going throught the building process ourselves so it's nice to see the next stage through someone who has already been there.:)