ON TO CONSTRUCTION!!! Well, in about a week

So, first let's catch you up on the latest happenings before we get to the good stuff. From our previous post, we had mentioned that our old administrator had said that despite our folder being handed over to the construction department, our site supervisor had noticed some inconsistencies that needed to be re-drawn and sent to us to sign. We received those, signed them, but also noticed that one of the things we had originally asked for hadn't been implemented in the drawings. We checked with our admin and indeed this was the case, though she was very reluctant to just have the change made, almost as if she thought we may have been trying to pull a fast one, by 'suddenly changing our minds' and then saying that it was something we had wanted a long time ago. The houses original plans have two openings in two of the walls, one on the Theater Room wall and one between the Study and the Living Room. We had asked for both of these to be closed up and in our drawings, the Theater Room wall had been done, but not the Study. We chased an answer (well, really the paperwork) for this with our admin for two or three days and were only told that "management is looking into it." The wife then decided to drive the paperwork we had already signed down to Henley and called our administrator on the way there. When she asked about the opening in the wall being re-drawn on the plan, she said, "yeah, well you can't have that...management has determined that it was supposed to be in your Tender and because it wasn't you will just have to have the opening in the wall because materials have already been ordered." My wife was NOT happy with that and said so and reiterated that despite the fact that it was Henley's fault for not putting it in at Tender even though we had requested it during our Tender appointment (and had proof of this), we were just going to have to live with it? To which she responded, "well pretty much, yes" The wife then reiterated that she wasn't happy with that and the response was "Yes, well I'll be sure to voice your concern with management and someone will get back to you."
Needless to say, my wife arrived at Henley's office about 15 minutes later with our other paperwork and asked for Melanie, who was conveniently unavailable. She had to take our son to the restroom and when she returned, in walked the Customer Service Team Leader (essentially our admin's boss), called her out by name and had the documents with the wall the way we wanted in his hand and ready to go. Problem suddenly solved! She has no idea what happened between her phone call and turning in the other papers, but he came out with the pages already re-printed and was quite nice about it, no questions asked and that was enough to satisfy us.

Got a call from the new administrator yesterday to introduce herself and to let me know that she'd be with us until the settlement stage. She informed me of who our site supervisor was, said she'd be sending out an introduction letter that day with her card in it. She also informed me that site supervisors are in the office on Wednesday's and part of the time on Friday's and they catch up with them on Wednesday's to find out about the sites they are looking after. She says that each week she will call me Wednesday afternoon (sometimes Thursday if she doesn't get to all her calls) to inform me what will be happening on site for the next week. She said she'd call tomorrow (which was today) to let me know when the start date would be etc. She called again this afternoon and informed us that the start date will be August 2nd (excavation of the site) and that they were hoping to have the foundation (slab) poured by August 14th! She said she'd be sending out an official site start letter either late this week or early next week and will speak with us again soon. All great and FINALLY we can get going with this project. I think we've abandoned any hope of getting in before Christmas, but should be in by February/March '08. Introduction letter from the Construction Administrator arrived today, so all very positive. Next post will have pictures from the newly excavated site on August 2nd, so watch this space!