Your house is finished and you’re singing it’s praise – we certainly are that’s for sure. Our first free-standing home that we can finally call our own. Despite commuting the distance that we travel each day to work, I wouldn’t trade moving back to our apartment. The space is what we crave, affordability is also the other. So if I had to choose apartment life closer to town or house life with longer commutes (and the price being comparable to each other), a house for us is the way to go.
After moving in to your home, pop a notepad on your kitchen bench table. Continue to add any maintenance requirements you consider a ‘building defect’ to this list. After your Practical Completion stage, when you start to live in your new home, you notice other things such as paint, items not finished to your satisfaction etc. Take a photo of each issue (as you’ll need to submit these in addition to your list) and this will help speed up the process when your 13-week review period comes up.
We had 110 items on our defect list – and all 110 items were approved for review. Prior to approval, Jason (our Maintenance Supervisor) came on-site and did a thorough inspection with us to discuss our identified issues and best solutions moving forward. All identified items were approved to be fixed, however for the noticeable settlement cracks, we agreed to leave these until our two-year review period as the house will continue to settle over the year and additional cracks will more than likely appear during this time.
The majority of our defects included:
- Painting issues – one of our walls were not painted properly so we requested to re-painted the entire wall
- Visible paint drips on the window sills and frames to be cleaned off
- Settlement cracks
- Nail head holes not covered and filled
- Our kitchen rangehood was damaged on installation (with a visible dent) so we requested for a new rangehood
- We had two minor holes in the back walls of our cabinetry (this was not a major issue, we just wanted the holes to be filled)
- Staircase handrail was missing screws
- Plaster deformation in some parts of walls and / or deep gauges in parts of the wall plastering
- Poor ceiling batts installed and not evenly distributed (a whole bag was left in the garage ceiling)
Our garage ceiling with the plaster warping.
Do keep in mind, if you don’t have the flexibility to work from home, you will need to make arrangements to be home to have these issues rectified as maintenance is not actioned on a weekend.
5
Thanks Jacqueline. EBH took 3months before they can make decision on our list. No maintenance supervisor came though?everything was just in email and very frustrating so we’re still back and forth
Hi Mei, I’m sorry to hear you haven’t had someone on-site to inspect. Are you based in Sydney? We had a person by the name of Jason and I recall he was always prompt and responsive with our requests during the first two years of maintenance (post build). Not sure if you’re able to request to speak directly with the maintenance lead – I found via email was difficult to correspond rather than face-to-face?
Hello, do you still remember how long it took them to approve defects and complete all maintenance fixes
Hi Mei,
Depending on if you have the flexibility to be home during the week, and how many items is on your list, it could take a few months.
We had a very long list, but the reason it took us a while to complete was a mixture of coordinating trades and their availability, in addition to then taking time off from work / working from home as trades generally don’t work on weekends. We found not one person fixes everything i.e. if you need a painter, plasterer, carpenter etc. this could be spanned over three different visits (depending on scope of works). Also, the timing is quite broad in terms of arrival time, so it’s more so being home for the entire day, rather than a 1-hour time slot.
Hope that helps.