Tuesday, August 22, 2006

All praise the (nearly) almight Google.

The main reason I'm writing this post is simply because I can write it using Google's new Writely word processor (all hail the mighty Google!).

Writely (www.writely.com) is a online word processor that allows direct posting to a number of blogs (blogger being on of them) and considering my usual posting habit was to write everything up in MS Word first and then cut and paste into the blogger text field to post, this is much more fun.. if it works.

I already use Gmail (mail.google.com) as my primary mail client, and since it has become available I have been using Google Spreadsheets (spreadsheet.google.com) to store all of my house budget stuff (progress payments, item costs, quotes etc), and its bloody brilliant. I can find out some info while at work, oad up my spread sheet via my web browser, edit it just like I would if I was using MS Excel, save it and then that afternoon when I get home I can load it up again via the web browser on my home computer. Anywhere that I have net access I can access my housing budget spreadsheet and update it at will (it supports complex formulas and multiple sheets per spreadsheet, just like Excel). Bloody. Brilliant.

And Google also has a online calendar app which I use to store and co-ordinate all of the housing stuff, its simple, clean and quick. What more could you need?

And all of this is access thru a web browser, no need to install any software, just log on and its there. wheeeee

Anyways, more on the house. Considering that after the house has gone into the lock-up stage (which mine has) access is meant to be restricted only to those people who need access to complete their work (ie not the house owner), it seems pretty stupid that they leave the front window unlocked doesn't it. So, using this conveniently placed entrance we (as in my wife and myself) took the opportunity to go through the house with a fine tooth comb and produce a list of things that we want looked at. We did this in anticipation of the next on-site meeting we are going to be having with Jeff (our NEW supervisor - I think we scared the other one off - which twit thought that changing supervisors 2 months before the end of the project was a good idea?!).

The list is depressingly substantial :( and it includes (and is not limited too) things such as:
· The laundry trough that has been delivered is 100% genuine plastic, pity really cause we asked for the steel one (as stated in our contract).
· Brick work in the garage has been damaged by a (possibly) blind bobcat driver.
· A Low Wall Vent that was cut into the lounge room wall at an angle of about 25 degrees from the horizontal.
· A retaining wall that has been built about 30cm (1 foot) off the boundary, as apposed to building it on the boundary as shown on plans
· and many more.

Still, on the bight side we have chosen our carpets and tiling, and have narrowed down our paint colours to only a few now, and most importantly the pile of bricks on our block is starting to feel like a home, and its even starting to look like one.

Onthe not so bright side we also had a look at lighting the other day. Ouch. These puppies are expensive, especially when some require electricians to install them. Still we found the most perfect light for our bedroom, its so perfect would appear to have been made with only our bedroom in mind, so the wife is most happy :-)


EDIT: Grrrrr. Ok, after waiting a day and a half for Writely to automatically publish my post (something it reports as having done successfully) and Blogger to display my new post (something ti has no knowledge of it seems), I have had to do the good old cut and paste technique I was trying to avoid... Bugger.... I need to work on this a bit more and figure out why it didn’t post as planned.

Damn you Google, here is me praising your virtues and you go and hand me an omelette to place over my face... and you were doing so well too up to this moment of failure!!
(Still Writely is only in beta at the moment, so it might improve).

Monday, August 14, 2006

6 weeks to go and carpets chosen!

Well the house has been locked up and my supervisor has given me a deadline of approximately 6 weeks until the house is completed. I’m not going to hold my breath, but its looking positive especially since they have a tiler organised.

There are still some issues that need sorting out (surprise surprise!) such as:
1) The dishwasher issue (lack of waste water drain) is still an issue and nothing has been heard from Ventura on this matter (again – surprise, surprise)
2) A wall vent was installed sometime last week in the lounge room on an angle of 25 degrees off the horizontal, very poor workmanship there.
3) The bobcat that was used to level the sand in the garage managed to quite badly and quite noticeably damage several brick in the garage


There are a few more issues, but I start to get far to0 depressed when I talk about them to0 much.

On a far more positive note I took a week of work last week (always a positive thing!) and between myself, my wife, several useless and sometimes downright rude sales staff (and the very rare amazingly helpful sales person – hello Ferguson from WA Carpet Supermarket in Osborne Park!) we managed to purchase the tiles and carpet for our house. Due to a stroke of good fortune the most perfect tile for our house was on sale down from $40 a square metre to $25 a square metre and considering we are tiling about 90 square metres of home this was a great saving, which we then ended up immediately losing by spending about $1000 more on carpet, so it all balanced out in the end and we came in only $40 over our $7000 budget (which includes the tiler).

I must say something about what we went through in choosing the carpet. We started at a place called WA Carpet Supermarket were we met Ferguson who actually took the time to sit down with us and our plans, measure everything out, talk to us about the general carpet types and the different underlay types, and all the pros and cons, unfortunately because it was the first carpet place we went to we left without making a choice. We then went to about 6 other carpet places before we realise that everyone stocks the same carpet brands at pretty much the same price so it didn’t matter really where we went. We ended up at Trevors Carpets because they supply carpet to most of the home builders in Perth and we got a builders discount on the carpet we wanted saving us about 10% and a free upgrade to the premium ‘platinum’ underlay. We almost bought the carpet there and then but we ended up going back to Ferguson to see what he could offer us (since he was so nice we though we would give him the chance for the sale) and it turns out that Trevors Carpets owns WA Carpet Supermarket so he could match the price cent for cent :-) So after every carpet store we went too we ended back at with the first place we saw, only we ended up with a more expensive carpet (15 year stain proof guarantee – oh yeah!).

Fun how things work out isnt it.

Now I have to go and try and talk to Ventura with out getting into an argument with them.

Take care and have fun people.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

And when the music stops..

It seems to be Ventura’s policy to change supervisors at a whim, we have just been informed of the fact that our supervisor that has looked after (I use the term loosely here) the construction has been moved into a different department and we now have a new supervisor I have never met. Oh, and I use the term ‘informed’ in its most generous sense, where we actually only ‘informed’ when I asked for some information from the supervisor.

Same thing happened when my Client Liaison Officer went on four weeks holidays, I rang up and was asked to put me through to her and the front desk (without telling me) put me through to somebody else. It was only then after thinking I had the wrong person that she told me my CLO is on holiday and she was looking after my file. I know things are a little hectic in the building industry at the moment but just how hard is it for a CLO to send a group email to all of the clients he/she is looking after informing them they will be away and to talk to so and so if you have any queries? Seriously how hard is that? Or a quick email telling me that my supervisor has changed, instead of not bothering to tell me and letting me know only when you can no longer get away with NOT telling me, how damn hard is that! (in fact I timed myself doing just that, writing and email and sending it and it took me all of 30 secs – including the time for outlook to open – they are not THAT busy).

But this I fear seems to be currently typical with my builder Ventura Homes. The policy (as it appears to an outsider like myself) is something along the line of “Talk to the client before they sign the contract (to get them to sign), once signed build their house with as little interaction as possible, here by saving time and money by not having to fix things that we muck up”… or perhaps they are just anti-social people with anthropophobia?

Now, onto the house. Remember that dishwasher issue that I mentioned last time (power and mains plumbing supplied to dishwasher cavity but no waste water drain!), well it still has not been fixed and no solution proposed either (in fact it was about this that I wanted to talk to my supervisor about and was then informed he wasn’t my supervisor anymore).
On a more positive note, all of the doors arrived on Friday (28th August), on a not so positive note the glass window in one of the doors (the laundry door) is meant to be obscured glass, its not (par for the course really now isn’t it).
And in a moment of incredibility I discovered that something I asked for to be adjusted on the plan on the 15th of November LAST YEAR has not been done. It managed to slip past me for this long because I foolishly took the word of the person that it was all ok and would be done as I asked. The issue is with the telephone point, initially we had 2 phone lines and a TV point in the house, but then we went with a smartwiring option which removed the need for the builder to supply phone and TV points so I asked for 1 phone line to be removed, the TV line to be removed and the remaining phone line to be moved to the garage (where the smartwiring hub was going). Now silly me figured that since the TV point was removed as asked, as was the second phone point, that the remaining phone point would be in the correct position, instead they have gone and installed it where it was on the original plan.

However I’m not mad at all, in fact I sympathize with them, it really must be hard for the poor little over worked darlings to co-ordinate a house construction when there are so many people involved… To date I have had 7 people involved in the house construction (from designing the floor plan to brick supervisor), 7!! How inefficient can you get? These guys need to attend some seriously hard core Six Sigma training and get their processes fixed, quick time.

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