It’s Finished

It’s been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened since then. It hasn’t happened quickly, as there have been almost 12 months since the doors were put on the house. Yes, I’ve not posted for a year, how time has flown. The main reason for not posting has been a steadily declining motivation. A gradual wearing down of enthusiasm. I drafted a few posts, but every post I read back to myself became more downbeat, more rancorous, and I didn’t have the heart to publish them. Below is a chart that sums this whole sorry tale up:

We are finally finished. The place looks OK but it’s not as decent quality as we were led to believe it would be. The Practical Completion Inspection picked up numerous defects, which are now being fixed (at the usual snail’s pace) before we get the keys. The disappointment continues, the motivation to move flatlines, and this post is in danger of not getting published like its downbeat predecessors.

Ultimately, we have decided not to move into this house. We walk into the house, and we just don’t feel it. There’s been too much water under the bridge that leads to the front door. If we did move in, I don’t think we could move on with a positive frame of mind. There would always be that bitterness, that doglip-curling revulsion for the company that built the walls within which we stood. It would be much harder to move on, than stay where we are. So, stay, we will.

Another reason we are so reluctant to move, is that when we started this project, what with more modern materials and techniques, we were expecting that the new house would be better quality than our existing house. Our expectations of a more modern era and a younger generation of ‘tradesmen’ were too high. We have found the products ubiquitous in today’s marketplace to be of poorer quality, unless you spend a fortune. We have found the workmanship endemic in today’s building industry to be inferior to that within the industry 20 years ago. Taking pride in one’s work is an absent concept these days.

I know I’m starting to sound like a whining old git, but where we live now, we can see better brickwork, plastering, painting, tiling, cabinetry- and everything just seems to be finished better in our 20-plus-year-old home. The new house is obviously newer, but is it better? Will it be as maintenance-free as our current home, five years down the track? Will it ever be a home? We can weigh up pros and cons all day, but at the end of the day – we are just over it.

Based on what we’ve experienced personally, and the experiences of others on numerous ‘client support’ and review web sites, we have more confidence in shuffling off this mortal coil in a care-free manner by staying put. Granted, the support and review sites do seem to be a cathartic vent for people, but so many people? Where are the reviews saying how fabulous BGC is? They are conspicuously absent.

Moving home would have made more financial sense. We are being financially thick selling the house, to be honest. There’s that nasty little smiling bastard called Capital Gains Tax, a reward from the government for doing well. If we sell our current home, it is exempt from CGT – and so we can just take the equity out of this house when we sell it and put it in the bank. That’s a fair few cruises around the world, right there. Or a holiday in New South Wales. Or gifts to kids, so they can buy their own houses. And if we were to move into the new house, that would become our primary residence, and so (after a while) we could sell that too, and just pocket the equity. It’s the sensible thing to do. But we will sell what will now be deemed as an ‘Investment Property’, and so we will pay CGT.

Mind you, having to pay CGT is a nice problem to have, as luckily the prices have skyrocketed in Bushmead. And the amount of gain is proportional to the length of the construction delay. We were hoping to break even and put the whole thing behind us, but it seems that we will actually come out of it OK. At least we’ve got something to pay the taxman and the real estate agent! We might fill the car!

So this blog will change direction before it shuffles off the immortal internet. It will move into the trials and tribulations of selling the place – getting it ready and journeying through the whole grubby sales process. I’ll try to keep it light!