Final New Home Inspection

We had our final (pre-handover) inspection with New Home Inspections (our private building inspector) this morning. Except for the fly screens and mesh sliding doors, all the small fixing items (eg toilet roll holders, towel rails), the glass splash backs in the kitchen and laundry and the appliance installations, everything inside this house has been completed and was ready to be inspected.

Overall, we're happy to report that our private building inspector was relatively satisfied. His full report will be available to use shortly, however, we thought we'd just run through some of the items identified.

1. lack of articulation joints in our west facing hebel wall
2. scratches to glass in some of our sliding doors
3. some walls and door frames out of plumb; most notable along the first floor gallery passage
4. the biggest issue was the powder room vanity being almost 12mm from horizontal (the plus side of this is that our SS already picked this fault and even before I called him, had contacted his cabinet makers to get them back to rectify this work. That's great preemptive management. We can only hope the rectification works for this vanity are easy and that they don't damage the stone bench top.

Since the kitchen glass splash back is not yet in place, our inspector advised us to ensure that before the splash back goes on, the correct process is to make a cut-out in the wall plaster the width of the stove top (directly above the stove top) (roughly 150mm high) and pack this space with hebel. This has something to do with fire rating, as plaster behind the splash back may not be fire resistant. We called our SS on this too, and happy to report that this will be done and indeed is a requirement for glass splash backs above open stove tops. Good building CG.

The last issue we'll discuss here are the cracks in our garage floor slab. CG are adamant they are only surface cracks. The fact is they don't know this for sure and so we don't either. The concern with these cracks is that, while they are not defects right now (ie greater than 2mm crack would be a defect), they are obvious now and can only get worse over time. We have knowledge that water - say from the wet tyres of  cars parking in the garage after driving in rain - can penetrate these cracks, reach the steel reinforcement within the concrete slab and then oxidise the metal. This would lead to weakening within the slab, further cracking or worsening of existing cracks and reduce the long-term integrity of the slab. We will discuss this with CG next week. At the very least, we have documented the issue now and would hope it never becomes a defect or a problem. We imagine a good builder would want to manage this now and preempt any potential future problems and claims.

Painters are finishing off their works tomorrow. We have our pre-handover walk though with our SS on Monday. Looking forward to this.