It had to happen and now it finally has. We can no longer get in to our house, yeah! We’ve reached lock up stage so when we went out this morning it was strictly peering through windows as the back door was locked and there was no way we could convince the locksmith Dupont Circle people, the laundry door is in place and the two temporary doors on the garage entrance and main door are firmly secured. The actual front door is leaning up against the dining room wall and all of the power points have been punched out of the plaster.
Luckily we’ve been out every week checking on progress and we’ve picked up one major problem – they put a small shower in the ensuite when we went with the larger option – that would have caused major hassles later. Now we’re going to have to make appointments to check the property and ensure we are getting what we have paid for.
We’ve also caught them up on an attempt to get us to pay the major lock up component of the builders fee early. We received the invoice last week but when you’re missing about 10% of your front wall (it’s cladding instead of brick for bit of visual interest) you’re entitled to ask if it really is at lock up stage. So we asked. Ten minutes later we received an email telling us to ignore the invoice and that we’d get another when the cladding was done. Either a supervisor was pushing to ensure he met his targets and hoping we wouldn’t notice or someone ticked the wrong screen. Either way it gives us at least another week before we have to start paying more.