Day 262... PCI!! PCI PCI PCI!!!

So, today was the day for our completion inspection! We turned up at 9 and met up with our SS John, and another SS (Andrew).

Long story short - PCI went very well!!!

Been quite a while since we've been in the house, and it had been cleaned pretty well inside and out. Almost all the items from our independent inspector's checklist had been addressed, and the ones that weren't done were not major issues for us anyway. Started off inside the house, working out way through the ground floor before tackling upstairs, and finally ending up outside.

We did finish up with a page of defects, but they were all very minor things like paint touchups, scratched handles, a jamming robe sliding door, a bowed ensuite door, checking/painting all internal doors for top & bottom paint sealing (quite a few doors had been adjusted by planing but not repainted afterwards), one articulation joint unsealed, straightening up a crooked downpipe and things like that. All easy to fix, and I can't see any reason why we wouldn't have our keys next... ooo, nearly let slip the handover date there! It's coming real soon!

Apparently, our house went through QA this week and received a score of 98.5%, which sounds good to us and corresponds to the very few defects we found today. Our Certificate of Occupancy was also emailed to us by our CSC, and this is where you've got to love private certifiers - looks like it was approved in 1 day! We also have our statement for the final amount to be paid, so first thing Monday I'll be contacting the bank to sort out a very big cheque to be exchanged for keys at handover.

Not that it's the last big cheque we'll be parting with, there's plenty more trades that we need to employ. We had a stair specialist come in today at the end of our inspection (who does the Metricon display home stairs as well as lots of commercial stairs, including Ikea) to give us a quote on doing our stairs. It'll take quite a few days and isn't cheap, but should last the life of the house. Had to rebook our carpet installation (again) to allow time for the stairs to be done after handover. Still trying to get in touch with our concreter for the new driveway and crossover - it's looking less likely it can be done next week, but if not, it can be done anytime after handover. Plus where has our fence contractor gone? He was meant to fix our fence a month ago!

And the funny thing is, we were so focused on checking out our house that we didn't take any photos today! Here's one we took earlier - our dog Hannah can't wait to move house!


And here's another photo I took earlier - I bought a "power point and earth leakage tester" and plugged it in every socket inside and outside the house to check everything was grounded and connected properly (and everything was!), it also checks that your RCDs work properly. I don't have a need for it anymore, so if anyone wants to buy it ($30 new) I'm selling it for $20 including postage within Australia (Paypal or bank deposit) - first to leave a comment, saying you want it, gets it! Make sure you leave contact details like an email address.

So, right now... feeling pretty exhausted after spending 3 hours at the house this morning, then all afternoon at work. Actually very relieved to be nearly at the end of the house building process - it's been 80% excitement at watching the house spring up from nothing, and 20% stressing about whether our colour selections would work, and whether things were going according to plan or not. But right now, you couldn't wipe the smile off my face with a baseball bat!

T&T