The Survey says...

Almost got a nasty surprise the other day. The builder advised that they had to perform surveying works on site. Due to construction on an old site, there is a requirement to perform proper boundary survey. I guess this is to confirm that boundary are set properly and to lay out the position of the house relative to the boundary. The builder advised us that as a gesture of good will (probably admitting they had done wrong by us) they will waive the costs of the surveying. I work as a project manager, and to me this has been overlooked, this should have been factored in, since this builder is not foreign to building in old areas before, and to have this done this late into the build smells funny.
Well, at least their ears and pricked and now we can move forward with the build. All the paper work has been approved, and forwarded through. Shouldn't need to be hassling them anymore. They should be on top of the building process. Hopefully calling in solid favours from favourite contractors, that are trust worthy enough to look after us from this point on. Who knows... will wait and see if all these promises come true. Oh, during the week, we finally have building approval (albeit a bit late).

Had a good old chat with the neighbour today, while surveying the work. It turns out he used to be involved in the building game, many years ago. He says he used to build one storey houses in a month. From the time the slab goes down to handing over the keys... wow, that's incredible. Don't worry about a month, we'd be lucky to be in 12months after we bought the place.