Rocky road to a new house

Some of you have been following on the H1 thread have heard me ranting in the last week about a huge building variation which was sent to us on Tuesday.  It was in an email that started with a "Happy Easter" message and an attachment with a whopping $18500 variation (including GST).  

This was a huge shock to us although we were expecting some sort of discussion around the digging of a trench to provide services.  It is something we have known we need to do for a long time.  Even back in December we were in discussions with our site supervisor around who could check the depth and/or rock to be removed as that would be charged to us.

What needs to be done is a trench needs to be dug to drop in services.  The services that would go in this trench would be the power (underground power), gas, conduit for Optus cable (this was something we decided to do ages ago and added $1500 to our Sekisui House contract price) and water as we wanted this re-run.  The water again is an additional amount but we'll be paying the plumber directly for this service.  So services is definitely adding up.  And to some extent for no reason!
One of the reasons we are even more incensed about this whole issue is that we were very confused at demolition.  We were back and forth with our Customer Services person as the demolition diagrams were ambiguous as to what to do with the power poles which were on site.  The ambiguity was about the power poles which were drawn in and not hashed out (to indicate demolition) and there was info on the contract about hand digging around the power poles for the gas installation.  So the assumption is that the power poles would be staying.  However we had been verbally told that the power would go underground.  And when disconnecting our Optus cable we had the cable wound up on the pole closest to the house as it was going to be better for the re-installation...

But after about 6 emails back and forth we were advised by Sekisui House to have the power poles removed.  Mind you these poles were actually very new and worth a decent amount of money.  We weren't able to do anything about it and it was just removed as part of the demolition.  Hopefully someone made some money out of it!

So now we had no power poles and no pole for the Optus cable to hang from.

We asked Sekisui for a price on installing an Optus conduit and that came back at $1500.  Expensive.  But we figured it would be worth it.  And we asked our CSO at the time to ensure we weren't slugged extra and to check what needed to be checked so we can minimise costs.
We had a few items about hand digging altered in a variation so that the 'hand digging' components would be removed from the price.

In late November and early December there was some work to try and get the trench done.  It would be good to have power at the house I'm sure... but as they hit rock they stopped.  Don't get me wrong - They tried!  We have great stories from our neighbours on how the machine was almost sideways they were having so much difficulty getting through.  There is a bit of orange conduit indicating how far they got.  It was only about another 20 metres to go... but they stopped.  And the SS made the call to wait till 'later' as he was concerned that the battleaxe driveway would be affected.

The trench is that still needs to be done is from the orange pipe towards the street (the background in the photo)

So now the time has come.  It's the tail end of the project.  There aren't that many large items to get into the house from their perspective.  And there were murmurings about "has the office discussed the trench with you yet" but nothing.  I still didn't twig on how expensive it could possibly be.  I was thinking 'oooh expensive' and maybe $5000.  Not $18500!!!!

Here is the snippet of what were sent:

One of the extremely annoying things is that bottom line.  The one about All care will be taken ... the rectification works will be the responsibility of the owner.  Seriously??!

So we are currently waiting for our SS to get together with the estimator and the State Manager to discuss our options.  We put a number of our suggested options but not being builders I'm sure we haven't exhausted all of them.  Some of the suggestions we made were:

Options 

1. re-evaluate costs - and itemised for us to understand what could be contributing to these costs. Could there be an error in the calculation? We would like to get our own quotes for the same work to compare.
2. revert back to overhead poles for power - and Sekisui to pay and reinstall these as we removed them on advice from Sekisui as evidenced in email.
3. Use 'existing'  water pipes for provision of water.
4. Us to request gas connection - we believe this will be < $700 based on the information we have rec'd thus far.
5. Remove item in PC-03 6-1 for the Optus conduit as we can just get this overhead if we do option 2 (and reduce costs by $1500).
6. we engage our own contractor to provide the trench to the required specification for services to be installed into with consultation with the site supervisor.
7. If we move the trench to the centre of the driveway, away from neighbouring property, in Sekisui's opinion, could we do without a dilapidation report? Vehicle traffic would also not put any weight on this part of the driveway.

In the meantime we have been doing our own investigations.  From what I can determine we can get 

• gas done for < $1000.  There is a quote being done right now by Origin energy...
• dilapidation reports for $500 each so say $1000
• a trench dug even with rock for somewhere between $1300 and $5000

So in all serious-ness we should just take control of the trench and get it done ourselves for the $1300 - $5000 and then they can drop the services in and fill it as part of the monies already allocated for this work.  

We're waiting for Monday afternoon or Tuesday for when they report back on the options.