Not quite there yet

Our final invoice was emailed through within an hour of our walk through.

Must admit that we were both rather nervous about that final bill!

However there were no unexpected costs that hadn't been revealed to us. Provincial Homes actually credited us part of the Storm Water Provisional Sum and a couple other things as well. 

This will greatly help towards the cost of our driveway :-)

No our nasty surprise was about to come from the Certifier.

We have our loan with The National Bank. Apparently some banks will pay the final sum to the builder before gaining an Occupancy Certificate. 

Well NAB will not. So keys are out of the question until the Occupancy Certificate has been processed. 

The Certifier carried out his inspection on Thursday the 21st of August and proclaimed that an Occupancy Certificate would not be possible before the driveway and landscaping has been completed. 

This is not uncommon or unexpected and in situations like this you can apply for an Interim Occupation Certificate. 

To get the Interim Certificate a stack of certificates need to be sent to the Certifier and some works need to be completed by Owner that would have been much easier to do after handover.

•  A privacy screen 
• The number of the house displayed on the brickwork (LOL)
• Balustrade to be completed to the front porch by owner (This is the pain in the butt we don't even have power on yet!! ... For some reason Provincial Homes wasn't interested in doing this as part of our contract)

P.S. Provincial Homes does not cover the cost of the Interim Certificate either so we are looking at an additional cost of $366.

Final Walkthrough

We finally got our walk through out of the way!
There were more delays then expected in the last couple of months getting trades to return for finishing touches on the Garage, getting the concreting of the back stairs done and in particular waiting for Castle Railing to install our balcony balustrade.
At the time of our walk through some things still weren't done:

• Painters needed to paint the garage, complete the external façade & the stair rails
• Electricians needed to connect the power & finish the external lights
• Silicon needed doing in all the bathrooms
• Water Tank was not yet delivered or installed

Besides these few things the house was looking fantastic and only a few painting touch-ups were noted during our walk through.

We booked our Handover feeling very excited that we would finally be picking up our keys. However, there is still one setback to overcome...

It wasn't the painters - They turned up and completed the painting.
Photo of our beautiful façade below:

It wasn't the silicon on the sinks - That was done on Saturday.
The water tank has been delivered (though we are waiting for a gas pipe to be moved that is in the way)

Still waiting on the electrician but that was no surprise LOL (We have been trying to get the power connected all month...)