Very disappointed...

Well we went and chose all our colours and fittings at Cosham Interiors two Sundays ago. We had a ball and loved everything! So easy and such good quality! We came away very excited!

The following day, Dave received a phone call from a Henley building supervisor, who was at our block getting the soil test done. In a nut shell, he said the fall of land was too great, none of the Henley houses were suitable to build on it and that they would not proceed. Mass hysteria ensued at home!! Not to mention that fact that Dave was a bit shellshocked during the call, so we couldn't quite understand what it all meant.

After waiting for the past two weeks for an official phone call or letter stating that they definitely weren't going to be our builder, I emailed our Sales Consultant yesterday to see if he had any idea what was going on. Our finance group (who work with Henley) were still proceeding with the pre-approval, so we were a bit confused.

Our main thought was that Henley hadn't realised just how far out Wandin was and were trying to make a quick getaway, but I just received an email back explaining everything and I guess it makes sense. To our naked eye, the fall of our land wasn't too bad (you should have seen our first house!!!!), so to receive their sums was an absolute shock. Here is a cut and paste of the email I received.

"I am sorry Henley cannot build on your block. It is not because of any problem with the area (Wandin North) or the size of the block, but due to the fall on your block. Henley has a policy of not building on sites where the fall over the building envelop is greater than two meters. This is set out in Henley’s Provisional Quotation Document under “Common Land Issues”. The investigation of your block (soil test & survey) has unfortunately revealed a significant fall on your block - six meters. This result translates into a fall of 3 meters over the building envelop of any of our house types, and means Henley cannot build on the above site.

I would suggest your next course of action would be to discuss options with builders who build on “strip footing foundations” (stumps). This type of building is more conducive to dealing with blocks with large falls. This is because strip footings avoid the need to cut a level platform (and resulting issues) on the building site.

Please let me know if you would like any further clarification of Henley policy."

So there you have it! Back to square one. Back to all the research. I must say I can hardly bear the thought of going through all this again. In the meantime, we are going to put up our fences and get the excavating done ourselves so we then know what we are dealing with. If anyone has any comments or advice, please feel free to contact me!

Anyway, a big thankyou to Clive Hearn from Henley who has been our Sales Consultant from the start. He was great to work with and we are very disappointed that we won't be proceeding.

Over and out,
Madmel