Aerial Tour

In a silent flurry of publicity, and with absent paparazzi, I am releasing the latest videos of the house build. The brickies have been busy, and most of the outside and inside walls are complete. I took the drone (or UAV as we professionals call it) up to the block the other day for a shoot. It was gusty, so please forgive the shake, but anyway here’s the results…

As you know, I’m an expert flyer, even though I do say so myself and I’m the only one who says it. I’ve only crashed a handful of times. The following video shows courage, skill, resilience, and fortitude, amongst other personal qualities that are usually raised at tedious job interviews. The risk of hitting an internal wall would have been extremely high were I not walking it through the house, instead of actually flying it. But it looks perilously good, eh?

BGC (and therefore implicitly our builder, Smart Homes) have decided not to take on any extra work because of the labour shortage in WA. That is great news for us. Although it’s tempting to think that this announcement will mean our house will be built faster, logically it means that it shouldn’t be built any slower.

It has been implied that this is a generous and big-hearted decision by BGC. But let’s analyse that. Over the next year, the company is at capacity, and will still deliver houses in stages and will still get paid for that delivery. The company can’t grow any further, because it can’t deliver more houses – there are no more people to build the houses. So, even if it did take on more work, it couldn’t increase its revenue stream in the short term. It can’t grow, but it won’t be losing money. It will be earning the most money it possibly can. And in fact, it could save money – in the form of commissions to sales staff, and even salaries for sales staff, if it decides to ‘re-engineer’ or ‘re-org’ (i.e., terminate) selected units of its workforce. And it can always grow again, once the current building crisis is over.

But that aside, good on BGC for admitting they are experiencing delivery difficulties in this crisis, and for doing something about it. It beats the head-in-the-sand approach I’ve seen in many companies, especially the American ones I’ve worked for.

We met our new neighbours the other day, on the west side of our block. It was a West Side Story, without the songs, death, romance, and without the plagiarism of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. They were inspecting the progress of their house build, which is more advanced than ours. They’re nice people, and it got me thinking about how many nice people we’ve met along this journey, and how accurate the Bushmead Estate’s tagline of ‘Creating Communities’ was. I say was, because it now seems to be ‘Modern Living, Shaped by Nature’. I don’t know when this change happened, but maybe the transition is designed to reflect the sad but inevitable transition of neighbour to stranger that often happens in nascent neighbourhoods. Anyway, I’m going to try to keep l’esprit de corps’ happening in my little patch, despite being told that our neighbours had nine loud grandchildren and a squawking, swearing parrot. I think the latter nugget was a joke. I hope so. Besides, wait until they hear our kids/grandkids, one in particular could be mistaken for a sonic boom.