Handover – at long last!

It was around three years ago that we seriously considered building a new home for our family.

It was two years ago when we decided that Eden Brae’s Waldorf 50 was the right home for us and signed on the dotted line.

And it’s been almost a year since we knocked down our much loved, but equally loathed old house that had long since passed its used by date.

But now at long last, the house is finished, the keys were handed over and we can finally get on with our lives.*

* Except that we can’t quite get on with our lives because the house isn’t quite finished. And unlike the period prior to handover when it was the builder’s responsibility to liaise with tradies, this is now my honour.

Three flyscreens in the bathrooms were not installed because they were ordered in the wrong size, not allowing for the tiling around the window reveal. I got a call from the flyscreen people yesterday. They wanted to install them on a day when I usually have to be in the office. I said that this was difficult, requesting any of three other business days when I work from home. Their response was that this would mean they would have to book my job for mid-October. Passive aggressive much?

Two new kitchen cabinet doors that were damaged are still being made, and will be installed whenever a tradie can be bothered to show up for a job that pays him nothing (since he’s already been paid).

The biggest job of all is the replacement of three windows that the cleaner noticed were scratched – something all of us had missed during the PCI. I don’t know when the replacement windows will be ready but I do hope that it will be before we get blinds and curtains installed.

One other thing that we picked up on during PCI that wasn’t a fault per se was that the sink mixer in the galley kitchen is a bathroom mixer and not a kitchen mixer. It was partially our fault as we chose it, but it was the builder’s kitchen and bathroom fixtures supplier who said that this was one of two options we had as our initial choice of a Dorf Jovian mixer did not fix the space.

The other option they gave us looked like it was designed by a visually impaired industrial designer. So we passed on that.

We were so put off by its stunning ugliness that we failed to notice that option 2 was actually a bathroom mixer! Perhaps the silver lining is that after using the toilet, I can wash my hands in the galley kitchen without it feeling weird.

At handover, our case manager asked us for feedback on the entire process. My feedback was basically: Eden Brae good; Eden Brae’s suppliers patchy, with some downright bad. I cited the supplier of our new kitroom (kitchen-bathroom) mixer as an example, along with the oven saga they were also a protagonist in (that you may recall if you’ve read this blog).

Eden Brae are looking into whether they can do anything in rectify the situation. We’ve chosen another mixer, this time a proper kitchen mixer that could be used to wash my hands after using the restroom, but I don’t want it to be weird…