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

Another quick post to let you all know that we have received final drawings and have signed, scanned and sent back to our contract liaison at Burbank. Happy times!

The bank on the other hand, has gotten into their heads that they have already given us a letter of offer for unconditional approval to start building. What they fail to understand though that the letter of approval states only enough funds to pay off the land, and not the build of the house. This is supposed to be an “extension” kind of thing once it was settled as to how much the cost of building the house with Burbank will come to. So I guess that means more phone calls on Monday.

With our finances, we are more than capable of getting the loan for the full amount; it just seems a piece of paper stating so is just too hard for the bank to produce. They’re the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle, and I predicted this was going to happen even before we paid our deposit for our land purchase. Maybe I should consult my crystal ball to try and forsee what other delays we’ll be in for in the future!

We received our building permit today. Our land developers have completed their approval process, but I am still waiting on a receipt for the invoice we paid to them to have the extra network and RF ports in our house.

All that’s required now is for us to sign the final drawings, get the unconditional approval from the bank for the final amount and receive our site start letter and then the real fun begins!

We finally got developer approval!

For those playing at home, we came across another hurdle to overcome in the paperwork precluding the construction of our house. Burbank had a different idea on where RF and data points (and how many) were allowed throughout the house, to which the land developer at the time for developer approval buffed that back saying that there is a standard layout of what’s included “in the price” when it came to optic fibre connectivity, and if the owners (us) wanted extra then we have to foot the bill.

The extra money wasn’t a concern for us, as we really wanted data ports in every bedroom, and we may as well have RF ports in every bedroom too, but the extra time it took to get all the variations sorted and signed, and for the land developer to actually invoice us (stopping Burbank in the meantime to continue on the paperwork process) was frankly agonising. The word on the street was that there’s been a delay in developer approvals as the land developer office is short-staffed, but we finally got there and as soon as we received the invoice we paid it on the spot.

Burbank need the payment receipt before they can proceed with anything, and I hope the developer doesn’t take another 2 weeks to send that out, but for now we’re on the cusp of getting council approval and building permits. After that, it’s just the sign-off on the final drawings, final approval of finances from the bank, site letter sent and off we go!

We have the plans signed off – one step away from the finalised plans. Burbank did soil tests but they haven’t gotten back to us with the final plans that detail slab information. To speed up the process a bit we signed off on the draft for everything else – Burbank made some minor mistakes in Bedroom 1 and we got a chance to add in some minor things that we forgot at our colour appointment (tiled skirtings, some exterior lighting, extra power point).

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As I mentioned in my last post, Burbank were pretty quick in getting us an appointment to The Edge, the studio that is located in the city where you can pick your options for your house build. Maria and I were pretty excited, and frankly we couldn’t wait until the day would come for us to go and have some fun with our available choices.

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So I thought I should elaborate on what Maria and I have optioned for our Ascent 2500 build so far. Burbank have given us an options list that I coded into an Excel worksheet (with list validation, auto-updating calculation formulas and conditional formatting – I’m a computer programmer by trade so I can’t help but do things like this!) and we used this when selecting our structural additions / modifications to the base plan last week.

Since we’re building in the Aurora estate, there are some options that are not included in the base price of the Ascent 2500 as listed on the website. Things like water tanks, 7 star energy efficiency additions (double-glazed windows, for example) and driveway / letterbox additions are added to the base price and raises the price considerably. I suggest for those who are building in the Aurora estate to keep this in mind. The difference in price was so great that we had to question it with the Burbank rep – but what she said to us made sense.

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