this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
106 points (99.1% liked)
Australia
3620 readers
119 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not sure how new the house she was looking at is, but the quality of construction in Australia is so terrible.
Old mate here cosplays as a SWAT member, but the inspections he does and the stuff he finds is still eye opening as heck:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN7bItdG-Yw
Its crazy that people sell themselves as experts in a particular area and yet they don't even know the standards they should be following. More importantly is when the work is super substandard yet gets handed over and an invoice presented despite it being obviously poor quality work. Not just missing a minor clause in the standard, but being categorically a bad job by any metric.
I suspect the construction quality is so bad because our building warranties are so laughably short compared to the expected life of the home. Iirc most states, the builder is only expected to warranty homes against major problems for up to 6 years, and it's up to the homeowner to chase down the builder (who may have gone out of business in a meantime).
If your typical family home is meant to last 30 years, the warranty should last 30 years.
and those warranties aren't transferable, so even if the house is "in warranty" if you sell it the warranty is forfeited and the new buyer is SOL if anything goes wrong due to a construction issue.
Warranties are expensive and housing is already far too expensive in Australia. We don't need longer warranties.
What we need is workers who actually do their job properly. There's a distinct lack of those in recent years... my advice is don't buy or build a new home. Get an old one and pay for it to be renovated. Supervise the renovation work very closely, and avoid letting them do anything too major.
The expectation is 60 years. 100 if it's "well built".
However, that isn't 100 years with zero maintenance. You will have to repair things... and that's where the warranty cost becomes an issue.
There will be arguments over what is covered under warranty. Those arguments might be free for the home owner, but they are not free for the builder. Your (or whoever buys the house off you) will complain the gutter rusted out, and the builder will have to hire a scaffold for a few thousand dollars to safely get up to the roof and inspect the gutter, and then tell you it's because you allowed tree to grow over the roof and didn't clean the leaves out of the gutter. They will have to take time off their normal paid work to do all of that and they absolutely will charge upfront on the assumption that they'll be coming back to your house occasionally for the next 30 years.
If you're wiling to pay... then I'm sure you can find an insurance company who will cover it. Won't be cheap though.
It's the cost of materials and labour that is the biggest contributing factor in driving building prices up. Any solution to the shit build problem would drive prices up. More stringent licencing and better enforcement would still drive prices up as it will reduce the labour pool. There's no two ways around it. We as a society seem to have forgotten that you get what you pay for.
Your work is good from far…..but far from good.
That box gutter is.... non compliant.
Thankyou for the link. I now love this guy. He's goofy, he seems to care and he constantly overlays relevant Australian Standard excerpts. Rambles a bit in some videos but that's the worst I can complain about.