We are in! Handover Day retrospective

It's been a little over a week since handover.  So there is a fair amount to catch up on.
But since we left a lot to 'after handover', as you can imagine we've been super busy.

I'll try and break up the blog posts a bit otherwise it will be way too long.

This post will cover the handover day and process...

Keep the eye on the prize... the keys!!!

The day started relatively normally with a dog walk. The usual questions from the MIL. The gathering of items to take with us and checking of lists so we would have tools to paint and stain and grout seal as well as landscaping tools. We also triple checked we had the bank cheque and the inspection report.

We headed out about 840am and made it by 9am. John was there. Not our site supervisor but another guy. We knew beforehand it wouldn't be the SS but it did seem weird that our SS wouldn't be doing the presentation. He was there in a Sekisui House ute.

We find out later that he has been there the night before planning the house presentation and checking for last minute things.

In addition to John there was also a guy doing final checking and servicing of the ducted air conditioning.  It was a lot of back and forth with him fixing stuff.  

Each room was presented to us as all the doors were closed. John made sure to check if we had built before. We had... but it was a custom build with a local builder in a rural area... So it wasn't comparable.

One thing I saw was the new stained/oiled door threshold.

He started off by leading us to the kitchen and go through the pack of info including how to raise defects. Although it was only a 3 month warranty specified apparently we can raise them later on...  Most of the pack was manuals and information about maintenance stuff.

We then started at the guest room... And then the laundry and bathroom. When I mentioned sealing the grout, John said warranty wise they never get asked about the grout and I shouldn't worry about it.  

We wandered around the kitchen and checked about the ducting in the rangehood. It's ducted to under eaves. We noticed the cook top switch was on. And it's stuck on the 'on' position. So that will need to be fixed. 

We also noticed the dishwasher was dented. Bummer.  That will be fixed and possibly the door replaced but for now it's fine to use.  

The rest of the house followed and the ensuite's heated floor system is still a hole in the wall.  Really disappointing.  You would think our SS would at least let us know to organise it.  But apparently since we organised that through Di Lorenzo we have to deal with them.  (As yet they haven't organised for anyone to fix it despite numerous calls out).  

We went outside to make sure everything was in order including the mortar join thing that the building inspector found which needed to be fixed (everything else was very minor things which were either rectified or marked as non standard Sekisui).  

What they don't do is seal up/silicon up the top of tiles (or the bottom of mirrors I've since noticed).  It's just not something they do.  So if we want to seal it from condensations or moisture we'll have to do it ourselves.  

When checking the garage we were shown the garage controller and how it's just the one button (we only have the one door).  It has a 'soft close' sort of action where it slows down towards the end which is nice.  Although it does close a lot slower than what I'm use to.

The front door and the laundry door are very 'tight' in that they take a bit of effort to open due to the seal.  Apparently the laundry door is too tight according to John.  So he'll get someone to look at it.  

After about 1 hour 15 minutes we're all in agreeance that we want to take the house/handover on the day and so we exchange the bank cheque with the keys.  It's at that point we notice the lovely gift box on the bench (how we missed it I'm not sure!!)

Inside was a set of gorgeous towels!

We also check the builder's keys so that their ones don't work after we put our ones in.  We get 6 keys, 2 sets of 3 keys.  (Why 3 sets I have no idea!)  We also get a set of French door keys and lots of stacking door and window keys.  

The keys were sealed in a cardboard envelope with instructions on how our keys once inserted will invalidate the builders keys.

After about 1 and a half hours we're done.  John leaves and we potter away (and wait for the Air cond guy to finish up whatever he's doing).  We get a quick run through of the air cond system and also get to determine what each zone is called so it's nice and neat.  It does look good.

OK some other photos taken after John left for those of you who are still reading or scrolling!

The problem with the non openable cupboard above the rangehood  has been adjusted to be push to open mechanisms:

There is a list of suppliers so we can contact them directly if we can't get in touch with Sekisui House.  Btw there isn't a clear set of instructions on what we do with any defects we find.  Do we wait till 3 months?  Do we continue asking our SS?  Do we call Customer services?  Ah well.  Our long suffering SS will be our point of contact!

The light streaming in from the courtyard is wonderful to see.  We opened up all the stacking doors to let in the warm air!

And yep I got a coat of paint in before we went back to grab some more boxes and tools.   It was just the one home theatre wall.  Not bad in 1.5 hours I think!

The colour is Colorbond Monument in case you are wondering.  And we didn't get Sekisui to do it because we didn't think of it!

I managed to get the second coat on in the evening at around 9pm so finished up at around 10.30pm.  It was definitely more difficult to see late at night so I would probably advise against doing it so late.

Driveway is sorely needed :(

The main drama of the day was the fridge.  After going to IKEA on Monday to purchase the fridge (another long drama!) the delivery guy sees this:

And says he can't do the delivery.  Noooooo!  So we decide that he can deliver it to the top of the driveway to the left of the pic there is a bit of grass which belongs to our neighbour.  He's OK for us to leave it there and then we use our neighour's ute and trolley to get it onto the ute (on it's back which is not so good for the gas in the fridge and means 24 hours before we can turn it on) so we can back it in and manouver it into the house.  

Confirmed these are bolted shut.  Dang!  But at least the view is pretty amazing.

 The afternoon light is pretty nice even from the western side.  We certainly can't complain!

As you can see we made our benchtop pretty messy as it's the only real surface around...

Other than making the bed up we also manage to get the rail up temporarily and hang a curtain up!  The good news is that the curtain works quite well and straightens right up after being hung up for a couple of days.  My distaste for ironing wins again!  No need to grab the iron or ironing board :)

Writing this post over a week after handover I'm sure I've forgotten things but you get the gist.  So far so good (well relatively!)  Except for the cold showers as we still don't have gas!