It’s been a long time between posts… probably because I didn’t really have anything good to say. But life seems to be taking a turn in direction.
I haven’t posted anything since August ’16 because we found out at the beginning of September that our builder (Ashford Homes) indeed went insolvent. Explains the lack of communication and delays! I guess I just didn’t know what to say.
If you’ve been reading my previous posts you will know what drama we had in selling our 11 year old house to start this building project. Then it took forever to get to site start (a fence & dunny mind you), and now for this to happen… my husband & I wondered which one of us broke the mirror at some time.
It is now March 2017. A new year.. A new builder.. and a new outlook on life!
Thank goodness for building insurance. Thank goodness that Ashford Homes actually covered us with insurance seeing they were so bad at their jobs and with paperwork!
Once we found out about the insolvency, we did a lot of reading and a lot of chatting to other Ashford customers via a Facebook group. We put in a claim with VMIA who is the company that deals with insolvency matters. Because we only have concrete piers poured into our land, we were a lot better off than many other Ashford customers. Some poor families had 1/2 build homes with their frames being exposed to the elements, going grey and bowing before their eyes. Others are 3/4 through and paying rent on top of their partial mortgages due to the draw down of loan funds for their build. Some of these families are probably still waiting for their file to be looked at, let alone finished.
In hindsight we had nothing to cry over other than 2016 being a year of nothing for us. A year of waiting, nothing to show for it. We were in a crummy rental going insane.
So, we decided seeing we had another year ahead of us before we had our new home, the best thing to do was to move to a new rental in Greenvale so I could get my daughter settled in at kinder and we could at least get closer to work, which was the main reason for the building of this home in the first place.
So in October we became citizens of Greenvale, I started a new job, we found a builder to take on our project and things have been looking up ever since.
In fact I’m going to say that in our case, Ashford Homes going broke was the best thing that could’ve happened! If Ashford Homes had of completed our home, we would be living in an average built home, probably cracking all around us or worse.
We have found a new builder, Dean Homes, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ll talk more about them in my next blog.
thebuildingjourney 