Admin Adventures & The Contracts

Well a lot has happened in the past week to catch you up on. After securing our place etc. it was time to start to plan the 'shift over' from our current house to the new unit. We pick the Key's up for the rental on Tuesday, May 1st and will slowly begin moving things over during the week, with the big move and full clear out Friday night and Saturday morning, so this time next weekend, we expect to be fully moved in and for this place to be vacant.

I organized for the phone and internet to be disconnected from the cuurent house and reconnected to the rental for Friday, May 4th. The other half organized for the power and gas to be shut off on the 7th of May (incase we needed power while moving over the weekend) and for the new place to have it's power turned on Friday the 4th. If all goes well, it should be a fairly smooth transition and we'll hardly miss a beat. Fingers crossed!!!

Before demolition of the current house can begin, we need to have the electricity (which is currently an overhead supply), and gas meters abolished. We faxed in a form to do this during the Public Holiday this past Wednesday (ANZAC Day) for both Gas & Electric to be abolished. The catch is that the house must be vacant for the G&E companies to provide this service and even then (because they outsource it to seperate companies), it can take up to 20 days for it to happen from when the job is raised. We had a very nice customer service person who called us to confirm that we needed this service done and she said that she'd try to have the abolishment happen the same day as our disconnect, which would be the 7th of May. That would be the IDEAL situation, as we could then have demolition begin right away. If however it takes up to 20 days for them to come out and do the abolishments, then demo has to wait until it's done to start. Again, fingers crossed it's done the same day as the disconnection of these services (or very soon after)!

We also need to have the Electric company come out and install an underground power supply (commonly referred to as a power pit) as new dwellings are now supplied this way as opposed to the old overhead supply that we currently have. I also faxed the paperwork for this on ANZAC Day and called the power company that owns the pole and will do the work (AGL) on Thursday to follow up. All the paperwork was filled out correctly and we should have the power pit installed in about 2 weeks (again fingers crossed). That is not as pressing as the other services previously mentioned, as the power pit needs to be ready prior to Henley pouring the foundation. We anticipate it will be another 4-6 weeks before we are at the stage where the foundation will be poured. We'll keep you posted on how this all goes, so watch this space.

Also on Wednesday (ANZAC Day), we moved about 3 carloads of boxed and packed belongings over to the Inlaws house for a long winters nap! Today the father in law and I will be moving a couple larger items for storage and reviewing the contract.

Ahhhh the contract. Well, I had mentioned in a previous post that our newly assigned Administrative person that will be our liaison until we reach the build stage (which thankfully, rapidly approaching). Our Admin. has been the only downside of our experience with Henley to date. As far as an Administrative assistant goes it is our belief that this person either needs some more training, the workload reduced, an assistant, or all three! We have had to chase our Admin. for any and everything that is supposed be looked after by them and the latest item we've had to push was our contract. Our contract appointment is for Monday, April 30th at 9:00 AM. Henley's general process is to sign your tender, have your contract signing scheduled for approximately 1 month later and a copy of your contract will be sent to you 1 week prior to your contract signing date. It dawned on me on ANZAC Day that we had not received our contract yet and it wasn't going to arrive on a public holiday, leaving us the weekend to review it, if and only if it had already been sent by our aforementioned Admin. (not likely), or I called, asked the Admin. where it was and have them express post it! So, Thursday morning before I knew the Admin. would be in, I left a message, asking where our contract was and if they had it, they needed to express post it to us so that we could review it before our meeting on Monday, otherwise, we weren't going to be signing a legally binding document without the chance to review it! The Admin. called me back later that morning with some excuse (no matter what we have had to chase this person for in the past, there is always some excuse), about Engineering having a query about our slab (foundation) and that it was nothing or a non-issue. The Admin. would have our contract later that day and express post it to us so that we would have it by Friday! I could tell they were covering their tracks and probably wouldn't have realized they needed to send it to us without my reminding them that we existed and had our signing on Monday morning! Contract arrived early Friday morning and I told the wife that she'd better review our payment schedule because our Admin. had filled it out by hand and I didn't trust them as far as I could throw them. Of course, (without surprise) the wife found calculation errors that she had to call and make them aware of it. Our Admin. had put down that we had only paid a 'normal' $550 initial deposit, but had 'fogotten' that we were a demolition site and because of that had actually paid a $1000 initial deposit. This of course, affected every single calculation on the payment schedule after that, because it's based off of percentages of what has been paid already in relation to the total (we're talking pretty simple math here folks).

So, we are picking through the contract with a fine tooth comb (already discovering that some of our site costs have been reduced due to the engineer's revised calculations) but were not taken out of the contract paperwork, nor off the overall price. This however could change again after demolition, as we will have a second soil test done to make sure nothing significant has changed. We will be going over our contract with our Admin. on Monday (pray for us) and then will have to 'rely' on this person to be timely in securing the building contract and ordering the second soil test. Either we'll get a replacement to finish off this process or will be forced to be the Admin's worst nightmare to 'motivate' them to get things done as quickly as possible. As much as we don't want it to, stay tuned, things could be VERY interesting over the next few days!