House Build - Day 3

We were asked to be on site in Lehningen today at 9am to meet the Allkauf site manager.  We arrived promptly to find the builders were finished and waiting for us to sign off on the house so they could leave.

Here's the house as completed by the Allkauf builders:

Soon after we arrived the site manager turned up and we started to go through the house and check for any issues.  This all seemed to happen quickly and it was all a little hectic as you could tell he didn't have a lot of time. First we looked around the outside of the house and noticed the drainage pipes in the ground laid by the ground workers for the drainpipes (based on the plans from the architect) did not meet the drainpipes in two corners.

We mentioned this to the site manager who basically said it is our problem and we would have to sort it out. We then checked the doors and windows worked and that the roller blinds ran smoothly but not being experts we were not really in a position to know if there were any underlying issues. The project manager said this was no problem and we should just contact him if we find any problems.

Once we had been through each room with the project Manager we were asked to sign that all is OK. The builders and the project manager then left leaving us feeling excited and happy we have a house but a little nervous that we may have just signed off on it with potential problems.

Once they were gone we took the time to look in more detail and did find some problems:

1. The Bay window drainpipe has no drainage in the ground to flow in to. When we looked at the blueprints we could see the architect had completely forgotten to plan this in!

2. There were around 80 roof tiles left on the first floor.

3. There was some missing foam in some of the gaps between the rafters and the wall.

4. There was some damage to the lower wall at the back.

5. There is a rubber sheeting around the base of the house where the patio will be butting up to the house to stop moisture getting in but the earth around the house has been piled too high for it to be correctly laid around the rear bay. We will need to talk to the ground workers about this.

We telephoned our Allkauf representative to talk over the first two points and he told us:

- Point one was an oversight and we should send a quote from our ground workers for the time they will need to lay a drainage pipe (we will have to cover material costs)

- Point two with the tiles is apparently normal and we have to remove them ourselves. We are quite disappointed with Allkauf on this point as for 5 guys it is a 20 minute job but for us it will take hours.

- Points 3 and 4 will be fixed tomorrow by the plasterer who comes to fill any holes and smooth out any bumps and scratches caused during the drive from the factory to the site.

Despite these issues we are generally very happy with the house. The build quality appears to be excellent and it looks and feels great. We still can't quite believe we have a house!