Our Burbank Ascent 2500 / 2600Building with Burbank in Aurora Estate

Just a short post today, informing that we have lockup. We received the lockup invoice today in the mail. I asked my liaison about ballpark timelines and she said that fixing stage is 4-6 weeks and final stage 6-8 weeks, assuming there are no other delays. With those timelines, we would hopefully get PCI between the dates of 4th April 2011 and 2nd May 2011.

According to Burbank MyPlace, we also have electrical rough-in completed.

I’ll be visiting the house tomorrow (Australia Day) and start moving some bricks into piles that we can leave at the back of the property. Burbank said that they wouldn’t touch those bricks on site clean up so that we can keep some, but I’m more concerned about brick thieves – on the Homeone forum I have read stories of subcontractors like plumbers just helping themselves (and getting caught in the process!)

Over the past few days we got pipes and temporary fencing. During the pipe phase, more rock was pulled out. Boy was there heaps of it! They placed a pipe near the west-side of the kitchen, and I was racking my brain as to what it could be for – then it dawned on me – we’re getting power to the kitchen island bench, and that has to happen somehow – hence the pipe.

We also got temporary fencing. Not that exciting, but something to note regardless.

Maria swung by the lot after work today and discovered that Burbank has given us a couple of presents – we now officially have electricity connection to the lot, and an outdoor loo and rubbish cage has been left on the lot as well.

I wonder when we will get temporary fencing?

Houston, we have site scrape! I swung past the lot after work and was pleasantly surprised to see that we have been scraped, 1-2 days earlier than stated (our SS said Tuesday or Wednesday). I know you all love some pictures, so here goes.

I swung past the block of land after work today and discovered that we now have taps! Also, someone dumped concrete on our land. I don’t know who it was, or why. Does anyone know if I should be concerned about this and / or report it?

The bank finally provided the correct documentation that Burbank needed to proceed our file on to onsite – so we’re at the Base stage in MyLogin now!

Now that all the paperwork has been completed, the real fun starts. The weather here in Melbourne has been absolutely miserable over the past 5-6 months now – the sun tries so hard to shine through and dry up all the soppy and mushy ground, but the clouds come in and bully it out of sight, bringing with it rain and misery. I’m really over this crummy weather.

Before Burbank starts on our lot, we have to receive a “site start letter” first. I don’t know too much about what this letter entails, but from what I hear it should include the date that they’re going to start doing a site scrape, usually a couple of weeks after the letter has been sent. And from what I hear, it takes about 2 weeks that the letter gets sent in the first place, so hopefully this time next month we will have a site scrape.

We had a look at the estate last weekend and all the site scrapes that had recently been made have all turned into swimming pools. Can you see why I hate this weather now? ;)

Burbank MyLogin has been updated, the home screen has heaps more items listed as pending now, and other information such as supervisor name have also been updated. One annoying thing about MyLogin is that it relies on Microsoft Silverlight, and a message appears when you don’t have it installed (prompting you to install it yourself). Unfortunately on my Mac, despite having Silverlight installed, this message to install it keeps popping up, so I can’t access any of the images that they may have posted (or may post in future). If anyone has a fix for this, please let me know in the comments.

Update (04/07/2010): I went to our lot yesterday and hammered in a sign, and also took some pictures (click on ‘Read more’ to see them).

Land has settled (actually it was yesterday). The land’s officially ours now.

Had a chat with my contact coordinator at Burbank, apparently there is a 2 week delay in doing any building development in my stage due to bad weather. When I went there last week, the roads were absolutely filthy with dirt and it was just this huge mud bowl. I hope the weather dries up a bit so we can at least get a slab down.

I’m heading off to the block on the weekend to hammer in our sign, I’ll bring the camera with me and take some snaps.

Read the rest of this entry »

Update 23/06/2010: Maria contacted VicUrban about the pegs and they said that the area needed to be resurveyed anyway (probably due to the repiping that they did) so we won’t be paying for the resurveying. Having said that, after settlement the land is our responsibility so we’ll try our hardest to keep guard of our lot and make sure no other pegs get “misplaced” (as I’ve heard about so many times before by other builders).

—

Just another quick update, checking the Victorian Government website for the Land Channel showed our land as successfully titled. Maria and I went there yesterday to try and measure the plot (which was very muddy!) and found only 2 of the required 4 pegs. Our south-west and north-east pegs were missing; the NE one is probably buried pretty deep now as there were some large machinery tracks and freshly dug earthworks for the sewer pipes, which is understandable. The SW one on the other hand has vanished, and we couldn’t find it even after digging around a little.

Having said that, the north-west peg was pretty spot on, 30m deep and in line with the south-east peg, 14m wide.

The solicitor had sent us papers for transfer of land but we sent it back in regular mail, which Australia Post promptly lost. We had to go into the city and sign the documents again, which was annoying, but we’re glad now that it’s done. Note to self: use Express Post all the time for important documents.

Hey everyone,

I’ll keep this one short as it’s only a bit of news – Maria called our solicitor today after they left a message to us late Friday afternoon (I reckon they did that on purpose to keep us in suspense for a whole weekend!) and found out that settlement for the land will occur on 2nd July. Can’t wait!

Just a quick note to say that Maria and I have signed our contract with Burbank to build our Ascent 2500 on our plot of land. After the signing of the contract, Gianni (Burbank rep) told us that Burbank will call for the Edge appointment either tomorrow (Friday) or Monday, but on the way home from Altona they called us to book a time in. So next Wednesday we will be at the Edge to pick our colours and speak to our electrical guys etc.

Can’t wait! The turnaround time from Burbank has been amazing — we were told months ago that it’ll take weeks for everything to be ready to the point of signing, yet this has taken only about 4 weeks all up.