[Update: 21st October 2013]
Thank you for reading and commenting and being with me on this journey and offering your stories and experiences. I am determined to look at the whole process as an useful, joyous life lesson and also a way to look deep into myself. It is always wonderful to hear different related stories too.
===================================
Where was I?
Ah, the customer service. Yeah... it leaves s lot to be desired for. A lot. Too much in fact.
We are not building the house independently, but though a company which runs the entire project. At first we thought that was perfect for us (single point of contact, no need to chase various tradesmen, rather defined deadines - all in the circumstances where we are not fluent in the language and the customer manager speaks English and her assistant speaks out mother tongue).
Oh man! Every. Single. Stage. Of. The. Process. So. Far. Has. Been. Painful.
I am talking poor communication of the information we ask for, poor communication of the plans and dates (we are normally given a week to make costly decisions), draconic charges for any changes we want and which are outside the standard products. The customer manager is close to useless. How many ways are there to ask her to send us complete information of certain pricing, not just chunks or fragments or stuff we did not ask for? Man!
No, we have no chance to change her. We can only write things down and complain to the superiors when the right time comes. We are blessed that her assistant is both reasonable and shows understanding for the levels of our frustration (and we have learnt in the meantime that we are no different than any other customer, everyone seems to go insane at some point).
And I make detailed calculations of every single change we ask for, because that's the only way to communicate at this point: this is the figure we came up, please explain the differences?
Which, of course, is nothing unusual, you have to have control over the expenses, but somehow the atmosphere in which we have to do it has reached the point of frustration and battling. Not what you expect when you dish out a lot of money for bricks!
Last week I went to bed at 3a.m. two nights in a row because we had to return some info and were given short notice, as we were discussing, making decisions, I was writing emails. Crazy.
Still, there are so many positives. They outweigh even this enormous stress.
When we went to visit the site, all walls were up. Last week the windows were put on, which means that all the internal works may commence and unless the winter is too harsh (preventing drying and proper settling on of the built in components), we are looking at a spring as the time of completion.
Spring 2014!!!
We were in shock when this information came up. Of course, one would expect to know the building plan by now, but why answer 3 or 4 of our emails asking that - just ignore them. So, we were forced to make very conservative estimates of the completing being around October 2014, which seem to be entirely wrong.
This changes a lot of things for us, positively of course. But, I am somehow cautious.
The best of the best is - still - the people. Our son loves his school and we are thrilled. The people we met through school are just lovely.
And our neighbours! Yesterday we had a brunch with the family who'll live next door, this was our second meeting. We are smitten. So nice, kind, warm. Such strong characters too. Knowing we'll have such people nearby is a treasure. It really makes all the annoyances much easier - we simply refocus on the finishing stages and moving in!
It also helps to know they are experiencing the same issues with the customer service as we do. We've exchanged a lot of useful information and plan to move forward probably even together in some points to get the level of service we all expect.
We're also looking into the final offers for our kitchen, which we need to order sometimes soon if we'll be moving next spring. With being so stressed on one hand, I'm not allowing myself to relax fully, but it's looking good. We've designed the space ourselves and were very fortunate to be given useful advice by our friends who recently went through their own house redesign to really consider our lifestyle and what we want, because that calls for some compromises and we should be clear what can go and what must stay. That was useful and timely advice.
- st photo:: entrance hallway leading to the living space.
- nd photo :: guest room.
- rd photo:: a view from the terrace
- th photo:: the windows are on.
(To be continued...)
This post has 4 photos. Photos uploaded by this member are only visible to other logged in members.
If you aren't a member, but would like to participate, please consider signing up. It only takes a minute and we'd love to have you.