Expectation feeds frustration...

To be 100% honest I am posting this for our own benefit, not to belittle our builder or bag people we have been working with along our Mojo journey. My intention for this blog was to document our building process from start to finish so that we can look back upon it to remember this really exciting time of our lives. Needless to say, this will include some negative stuff as, let's face it, you would be a fool to think you are not going to have hiccups along the way. What happened yesterday however was disappointing because our first hiccup has come along so early in our Mojo journey and because we were excited at what potentially could have been.

Yesterday we made the trek up to Baulkham Hills to the Mojo Head Office for our plan presentation meeting and initial colour walk through. We have done this before, not with the Nova 31 but the Havana when we were still with MJH. Given our previous experience at our local "My Choice" studio, the option to travel to Baulkham Hills was very appealing as we really didn't want to be dealing with the same people we had dealt with before. So that's what we did. With our plan presentation with MJH, we had our plans for months ahead of the actual meeting, giving us plenty of time to familiarise ourselves with them. Mojo operate a little differently. Their preference is to present the plans to you over a one hour meeting where the expectation is that at the conclusion of the meeting you sign each plan document to indicate you are happy with them. From this point on, any changes to plans or tender will incur a $1000 charge.

Michelle and I had differing opinions on this in the lead up to yesterday. Michelle was quite anxious about it, feeling that committing to the plans when only seeing them for the first time literally an hour earlier was not right. I on the other hand didn't really see much of an issue with it as we already had the floor plan of the Nova 31 with our changes and we already knew the one or two points we wanted to ensure were included in the final plans. In hindsight, I am not to proud to admit that Michelle was right and I feel today that had this been an absolute first for us, had we not ran into the biggest issue with our plans we may have committed to something without really understanding it all.  What added to the frustration was that a phone call to our Project Manager the afternoon before indicated we would have our plans that night, to at least give us a short window of time to review them. Unfortunately this never happened.

So what happened? Well, we sat with Brett, a consultant from the Canberra office, who to be honest, probably wasn't as familiar with the plans as he should have been. Two reasons for this. Firstly, he was from the MJH side of the business and wasn't too familiar with the Nova 31. The second issue was that he only JUST got the plans! Delays in the drafting department had meant that the plans appeared to have been rushed through to enable us to have our appointment. He knew up front that we were quite anxious about this whole situation and that Michelle was non to happy about signing these plans. To his credit, he did the best he could and he did have a good sense of humour.  With a little toing and froing it was decided that we could have until Monday to send through any changes we needed, without copping the $1000 fee. Great! So we proceeded to work through the rest of the plans and things quickly became a little unstuck when there was talk of stairs up to the back Garage door and a need to drop ceilings to 3 metres in the rear of the house. This just didn't make sense! To our horror it transpired that all of the plans were incorrect and to top it all off, because of one wording error on the tender, it too was all wrong! The drafting team had our block around the wrong way and the entire plan had been designed around a home that was higher in the front than in the rear. Our block is the opposite with the rear pad sitting higher than the front. This was not good!  To their credit, Sharyn our Project Manager and Brett, did their best to appease us but admitted that it was their error. Brett in particular was quite embarrassed by the whole situation. The end result is that it is literally back to the drawing board, with the tender having to be re-written and the plans to be started all over again. We will be required to attend another meeting and again to her credit, Sharyn is meeting with us on Saturday week  to present the correct plans and tender. Here's hoping that they will all be correct.

To top it all off we were an hour late for our initial colour consultation and this meeting ended up feeling very rushed. Again, we have been through our local studio before and kind of know what to expect. Importantly though, we did collect our Mojo "My Choice" folder so that we can prepare for our colours appointment in a few weeks time.

So our next month or so looks like this:

• Plan Presentation - Sat 15/7/17
• Colour Selections Day - Thu 27/7/17
• Contract Signing - Thu 10/7/17
• Electrical Appointment - Thu 24/7/17 

It's all going to happen so fast!

On a side note, I spent some time tonight overlaying the Calderwood Valley map onto Google Maps, to show the general lie of the land and the location of our block. Still noting official from the CV Sales team on when registration will happen but we are tipping sometime over the next 12 weeks...hopefully!

Here is the image:

Calderwood Valley Map overlaid with Google Maps. X marks the spot :)

Next time I will hopefully be sharing scanned copies of our finalised plans!