Progress!

We're back in for another submission for BASIX... Why?  Well they got our flooring spec wrong.  Oh yes.  Why don't they check these things before hand?

We are doing the floors ourselves but we are paying a premium (only a couple of hundred dollars from memory) to have tacked on skirting for most rooms except for the Master, Guest and Home Theatre rooms.  They haven't asked us what floors we're putting in... so when they submitted to council they made an assumption that most of it would be hard floors and the 'bedrooms' including study would be carpet.  Who doesn't carpet their home theatre??  Anyway when we saw the drawings with the floor covering marked up we told them it was wrong.  So they now have to resubmit for BASIX.

Not only were they wrong there were STILL problems with the drawings including the awning windows which we must sound like a broken record about.  This was all submitted to BAS IX that way.  Surely that would make a difference?

Anyhoo, as of yesterday 27 May 2014, we finally have APPROVED the drawings!  YAY!

The two bits which were wrong even yesterday morning that we really cared about were the alfresco slab/garage rear door and the home theatre power point.

Garage Rear Door

We asked Sekisui to raise the door level by one course of bricks from the garage (ie so you would step over the brick level to get out).  There were two reasons for this.  Firstly because we didn't want water running into the garage and also because we want to pave the outdoor alfresco and since the doors opened outwards we had to have it at a higher level.  This is the before elevation as per what we sent them:

Rather than raise the door by that one course of bricks (I would have thought that was quite easy?) they decided to lower the whole slab down.  I asked to lower the slab down previously as I wanted to use Recycled Bricks... but that was going to cost a $1000 contract variation fee so I decided against it.  However in previous comments I've mentioned the door and I was told that it was all going to be OK.  So I suppose this is a bit of a compromise.  I still don't think I can get recycled bricks in as paving though... ah well.

This is what my CSO first came back with:

"The rear door cannot be changed from where it is. I was told you would have to pave to suit the door."

This is the copy I used to finally get them to agree on the door/alfresco thing:

"The one thing I am concerned about is the 'rear' door from the garage.  As long as it's raised 1 brick course from the concrete slab we should be able to work with it, but if it's sitting 'on' the slab we cannot.  The diagram seems to indicate there will be some space but whilst it's still 'just' a picture we want to get it right rather than have issues with water and the paving afterwards.  Is this something you can help us with?  (or maybe it's 'always' done so there is protection from water so it's not an issue?)

So we got there in the end but still so hard!!!

Home Theatre Power point

The other major issue is that we've been asking for an inceiling powerpoint for our projector.  But in the drawings they always seem to have "on ceiling".  Finally even after them arguing that it would be confusing and insisting it be 'on ceiling', Will had to say this:

"Just to clarify the power point, we do actually want the power 'in' the ceiling and not accessible or visible from the room. The home theatre will have a ceiling mounted projector, where all the cables including power will go through a ceiling mount into the roof space. Inside the roof space, the power lead will plug into the power supplied power point, so just needs to be accessible when in the roof space.

Hope this clarifies the intent of the power point in the home theatre."

Maybe Sekisui just doesn't understand Home Theatres?  They had it with floorboards!  I means seriously!  Who does that?  Esp without checking first??

Let's hope we get to certification stage soon!

Btw they haven't done any cost variation stuff for us even with the extended garage/room (maybe there isn't a cost?)