Progress – Admin, but moving along

It’s hard writing a blog when there’s not much happening. We’re obviously in an admin queue – our builders have got more clients than their contract administrators and non-gender-specific draughtspersons. We’re officially at stage 2 of 14 Preconstruction stages. We’ve gone from the ‘Sales Admin’ stage to the ‘Contract Admin’ stage. I’m trying to think of an actual progress event that would trigger the transition from stage 1 to stage 2. I suspect it’s just someone ahead of us going from stage 2 to stage 3 as a result of someone else going from stage 3 to stage 4. I’m looking forward to a trigger event that involves a brick or some cement.

BGC are nervous about their customers being nervous. We recently got an email from them saying how much they want to reassure us that the BGC Housing Group is at no risk of failure. Well, we haven’t had a price increase yet, so I guess they’re right so far.

A search of SEEK reveals that there are currently 39 jobs being advertised by BGC, and only one by Plunkett. You can infer what you like from that: Maybe they’re growing, maybe they’ve got turnover from treating staff badly, maybe they can’t fill vacancies because they pay too little, maybe they’re taking on the jobs that other builders have lost or can’t complete. Whatever, we’re still glad we made the switch. One job they are advertising is for a Contracts Administrator – to cover maternity leave. It’s obviously a contract position. I wonder if part of the candidate’s selection process is to get them to create and progress their own employment contract? I would. But maybe it’s like hiring a head brewer that is great at drinking. I don’t ever want to hire a porn star.

We’ve just got back from a holiday in Bali. It was great, but it got me wondering how much a similar house to the one we are building, would cost. I found an online calculator at Bali Construction, and created a ‘luxury spec’. The figure came out to around 3 billion Indonesian Rupiah for a 286 square metre palace. That’s around $290K in Aussie dollars! Mind you, we’ve been to a few hotels over there, and even the so-called ‘luxury’ hotels look hastily put together in places. And you never really own the land on which the house is built – I think you only have the right to own/build/use the land for a total of 80 years. That’ll see me off this planet though. I turned 60 recently, so I’ve already got one foot in the grave.

Stop Press – We’ve recently been informed we have progressed to the ‘Working Drawings’ stage. Progress is happening, but I’m unsure of what happened at the end of the ‘Contract Admin’ stage, because after working drawings, there’s the ‘Contract Preparation’ and ‘Contract Documentation’ stages to follow. At least there’s a plan. We’re actually involved in the current stage, because we’re having to make decisions around the rainwater tank – more on this in a later post!