Silly Jokes

Delays, delays, delays

The closer we get to the end of this whole house process, the more emotionally involved in it I get. When we were six months away from completion, a three month delay was easy to be philosophical about, but when there’s supposed to be only a week or two to go, a three week delay feels like a major blow.

Similarly, each small bit of progress or good news at this end of things elates me, which in turn makes it really hard not to get my hopes up. It’s a bit circular really.

As you might have guessed from this preamble, we’ve had news of another delay with the unit. Last time I wrote about it, we were expecting to hear back any day that title had been registered, flagging the beginning of the 14 day settlement period. Instead, we heard that the ACT Govt assessor didn’t think the driveway was wide enough (despite it being the width approved in the development application) due to a recent legislative change. Unfortunately, the assessor couldn’t tell them how wide it needed to be. In addition, because the driveway is concrete, it can’t easily be widened like bitumen, and has to be ripped up and replaced.

We didn’t get too much more information than that. For example, we don’t know the scope of the changes needed to the driveway. Is it just the part that joins the road, or does the whole length of the internal access road need replacing? We’ve forwarded a series of similar questions on to the agent, but I’m not totally hopeful that we’ll get a comprehensive response. I don’t necessarily blame her for this, I don’t think she gets much information from the developer and I don’t imagine the information that she does get is always that accurate or useful. Plus there’s a third party in this that has proven useless in the past – the ACT Govt.

I like to think I’m usually quite even minded about bureaucracies, what with working in one, but this one really is a waste of space. The combination of excessive and often silly, counterproductive regulation and an inflated self importance has stung us a couple of times already in this build and I fully expect to experience more of it once we are fully fledged home owners.

For example, the washing line that went mysteriously missing. Apparently it had to be taken down or screened because it was visible from the road, which was unsightly. The reason you could see it from the road? Because we’re not allowed to put a full fence along that edge of the property (chain link or hedge only), as they ‘separate homes from the rest of the community’. Never mind that the hedges will grow to obscure it, or that we’ll be growing plants through the chain link that will also shield it!

There is also regulation that mandates that all new houses must have either a washing line or a dryer. Since the line had to be taken down, the developer has installed a dryer in the unit. This rule means that our house becomes massively less energy efficient, which is directly contrary to the ACT Govt’s environmental policy goals. It seems to be a fairly regular occurrence that the tension between competing policy priorities has been ignored completely, with little, or sometimes just misplaced effort to fix them. As someone who works in a policy area, this sort of heavy ineffective regulation makes me cringe!

My self-diagnosis for a lot of these problems comes from the very nature of the ACT Govt, which sits as a hybrid of an oversize local council and an under resourced state government.

I acknowledge that all of this may be unfair to the ACT Govt, and as a first time home builder, I should accept there will always be some issues, and this is the same with authorities everywhere. However, I can only speak to my experiences, and they really do seem to be a cut below the rest.

It’s a good thing that there are some decent perks to living in Canberra that are unaffected by the planning authorities.

Despite the tirade above and my general level of grumpiness about the whole thing, there is also some positive news. We had a nice gent from a landscaping place to measure up our courtyard for a deck this morning, and they’ve already replaced part of the driveway. I don’t know if they need to replace any more – it didn’t look like there had been any work done to rip up any other parts of it at least. If not, then we might actually be able to move to settlement fairly soon (fingers crossed). This small piece of progress was actually enough to cheer me up quite a bit! I’m hoping that we get some more positive news in the next week. Fingers crossed.

Edit: I just realised how whingey that all is. To bring the mood up a bit, here's a video of a guy moonwalking with a shopping trolley:

House update - pics of the garden and fencing

As noted earlier in the week, we're in a bit of a holding pattern at the moment, waiting for the registration of the title. Since we've pretty much planned the interior of the house to death (and we can't really get in there to get started), Dana and I have been turning our attention to the garden and courtyard. This has led me to get out the grid paper again, and start plotting things out. This hasn't really got us too far - as it stands, we've only really agreed on two or three things. It also doesn't help that we don't know the first thing about gardening.

The first is that we want to put a deck in the courtyard. Pictured below, the courtyard is approximately a 6m x 6m square, if you count the space all the way out to the fence line. The recess into the building itself is about 6m on the longest side and 3.5m and 4m on the short sides. This means the deck we're thinking of wold be about 6m x 3m, with a step or two down to the garden (depending on how deep it will be. 

It looks a bit scrappy in there at the moment, with the builders droppings and Canberra's clay-tastic soil, but it will look great once there's a deck in there. The deck will be flush with the top of the bricks at the sliding door - this is the floor height inside the house. Now we just have to get someone to build it for us. If anyone knows someone who can do that sort of thing, don't keep it a secret! I'm getting the feeling that it will be a real challenge to get someone to do this, and will take us ages. 

The next thing that we've agreed on, is that we'll put in a crushed gravel (or is it called deconstructed granite??) pathway in from the gate at the side of the house, through the courtyard and into the little backyard. I think I'll probably end up doing this myself, as it doesn't look super complicated, from what I've seen online. I'm finding the idea of improving the soil to the right level and trying to choose plants a far more daunting task.

Here's two views of where the crushed gravel pathway will be, the first from the gate where it will originate, looking through the courtyard, along the side of the house and out to the backyard, and the other looking up to the gate and the courtyard from the backyard. To give some context, the deck will be to the right in the first pictures, and there will probably be a garden bed of some sort along the fence line at the left. My preference is that the pathway will meander from side to side a bit, swerving away form the wall to avoid the tap, and then coming back in with a small paved area under the clothes line. Speaking of the line, I've just noticed from looking at these pictures that it's gone walkabout. That's a bit concerning, it was there last time we visited the site. I wonder if it's been flogged, or has been removed for some reason. Must look into that.

Anyway, in the last portion of the garden, the backyard (or rather the 3.6m x 8m ish rectangle between the house and the road) is still a bit undecided. Dana wants to put some raised garden beds in there for veggies, and I guess the path will terminate somewhere in it. The picture below shows the backyard, and you can see the baby hedge that was planted a couple of weeks back. This area will have pretty much full sunlight (I think), so I don't know how well the veggies will actually do here. 

What you can also see in the above picture, which was new just today, are the early stages of the chain link fence that is going in behind the hedge. I was actually pretty happy to see this, because I had thought it wasn't going to be put in - we had originally only seen it as part of the landscaping plan, and it wasn't on the final approved landscape plan. It also means that the garden isn't quite so exposed to the the pathway and the road, which you can see next to it. 

Here you can see one of the holes dug for a fence post (Dad, I dug a hole), and the fence next door, which is a little further along. According to the latest update from the real estate agent, the fence isn't actually supposed to go in until after the registration of the title, as it's not actually an approved structure. It doesn't actually need an approval from my understanding, but if it was in already, then it could delay the registration of the title. The sharper readers may have spotted a slight anomaly here - if we don't have registration of the title, and the fences isn't supposed to be in until after the registration of the title, then why is the fence going in? I do not have an answer for this, although Occam's Razor, as advocated by many sci fi movies (e.g. Contact, which I finished watching about an hour ago), dictates that the most obvious answer is probably correct. I'd say the most obvious solution is that there is a breakdown in communication some where between the ACT Govt, the developer/builder, the real estate agent, and us. This is not uncommon. 

Anyway, this has got far more lengthy and wordy than I had intended, so I'll leave you with a picture of the tree at the front door of our house, which is part of the communal landscaped area.

Music that has been stuck in my head - A tale of two tunes.

This morning's tune is from Detroit Grand Pubahs, and is dedicated to my workmate Pauline. Unfortunately, Sony won't let me embed the full clip, so here's a bodgy one that someone else uploaded:


The full clip can be found here, and is very much worth the watch, if only for the midget cowboy and his fake beard.

The second tune is from a couple of weekends ago - I blame Rage in the morning...

This one also suffers from Sony not liking to share all its music on youtube - I can't even see the original video on youtube because it's blocked in AU. I shake my fist at you Sony.

If you can seek out the original, I like it for the Kightrider-esque bike. Plus the chicks on bikes are hawt - makes me want to go for a ride.

House update

It’s probably time for an update on how the house is going. Things are moving quickly these days (although still not quickly enough) and many small milestones seem to be rushing past on the way to settlement. The house is 100 per cent finished! All of the appliances are in, the communal landscaping and fencing is complete, and all the issues we noted in the pre-settlement inspection should now be addressed.

Note that I say addressed, and not fixed. Things being what they are, the builder is entitled to argue that some things don’t need to be fixed. Apparently the best thing for it is just to note every single tiny little thing that could possibly considered wrong with the place at the pre-settlement inspection, because they you will at least get most of the big issues fixed. Having said that, I’m fairly confident that there weren’t any really big issues that wouldn’t be fixed by an extra lick of paint around the place or a clean. Work was already being done to address these things when we measured the place for curtains on 8 October.

Speaking of curtains, we got two quotes in the end and they were interestingly divergent. We have a total of six windows in the place, for which both places quoted us for tracks and the same fabric. We had originally intended to have them quote for exactly the same installations, but one of the companies provided us with more options that will help us save space and make the curtains look better. Their representative was also 100 per cent nicer, had better taste, and was a much better sales man. So much so, that despite the quote being more expensive, and for more fancy things, we’re going to go with them.

This is the fabric that we went with in the end. This picture doesn't really do the colours justice, and the bits that look like light grey are actually silver. Following a trend established early in our housing adventures, it’s going to take a little longer to get hold of than some of the other options – about an extra two or three weeks on what a more standard option might take. Fortunately, it’s a lot cheaper than some other the other options that we had looked at.

The three aspects that really made our choice more expensive was the type of curtain rail, the way the curtains are pleated and additional privacy screens on the three bedroom windows. The privacy screens are actually pretty cool – basically you can see out of them, but people can’t see in. We found them to be a pretty attractive option, given the proximity of our bedroom windows to the edge of the property. In addition, Canberra’s weird property rules mean that you can’t put a decent fence on the part of the property that fronts onto a road. This means until the hedge grows up, our bedrooms are a bit exposed. The screens sit inside the window on a roller blind, beneath the curtains.

The end cost is going to be about $1.2k a window, which burns a bit, but they’re going to look great. I guess some of the burn is reduced by the perceived added value to the house (or at least, that’s what I tell myself).

We’ve also been going through the confusing, annoying, and occasionally erroneous pile of paperwork that goes along with the finances. We’ve got unconditional approval, and it’s all in train. I’m not going to say any more on it, because it’s already eaten up too much of my time and willpower. Suffice to say that it’s not pleasant to commit to such large amounts to debt.

The final 14 day settlement period should be starting any day now – we’ve actually been waiting for the last week or so to hear that it has started, so hopefully we won’t be waiting too much longer. As I keep telling those around me, we kind of have an asymptotic (this is not quite the right concept, but mathematics was never my forte) situation about moving into the house – we get closer and closer to moving in, but we never actually get there.

We’ve also been turning our mind to the garden. We really want to get a deck in there, and we were thinking about trying to get it done before Christmas – but given that’s only two months away, I can’t see it happening. We’ll know more once we start getting quotes.

The funniest thing I have seen today

I have a cold and feel horrible. Yet I am still at work - this does not compute.

projectors and pretty lights

A video of a light show at the Vimeo Festival and Awards afterparty last week. The light show is pretty cool, although the music is a bit crappy quality and doesn't quite sync up.

Amazing Building Mapping - Vimeo Festival from Dan Ilic on Vimeo.

Now get back to work, you slackers!