Well we finally moved in. The move in day was chaos, with tradies finishing the caulking, plumbing and cleaning as we tried to manoeuvre our furniture in. The downpipes weren’t completed until weeks later, so we lived in a sea of mud for ages.

We finally got a certificate of occupancy more than a month later, and only after I personally chased the building surveyor.

Now it’s the defects. Of course no newly built house is going to be perfect on day 1, and there’s a 3 month period specified in the contract to resolve any glitches. But now we’re more than 6 months later and there’s still a list of unresolved items, some of which are quite substantial, like missing underfloor panels, and a screen door that just hasn’t been supplied!

The house is a knock-down rebuild, with the plan to make much better use of the block and make some more space for our family. The site is in inner-West Melbourne.

We chose Archiblox to design and build this modular home. We’ve had a pretty mixed experience though, see below!

Now the house is in place there’s a bit of work left to connect the services and finish things off.

According to Archiblox’s website this final stage should take around 5 weeks. We’re at 9 weeks and counting!

This seems to be a weakness in the whole system – once the house is out of the facility, it seems to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Tradies come and go but are largely unsupervised. The site manager is looking after multiple projects over a large area. The site is quite a mess!

Overall the experience with Archiblox has been pretty disappointing.

We started off well, and we’re happy with the design. However most of the reasons we chose this approach have proved to be false:

The timelines seem to be barely faster than a traditional build.

The cost is at least as high, and we’ve been hit with multiple unexpected and substantial costs.

The complexity of managing the process has been huge! We’ve ended up having to manage a lot of the steps ourselves to keep the cost under control, and there seems to be almost no progress unless we constantly keep on the back of the builder.

An exciting day – our new house is delivered!

The Archiblox facility isn’t a factory like Modscape use. It’s just a rather dusty plot of land, with houses in various states of construction. But it was still pretty exciting for the family to get our first view of our new home!