Three and a half years into the future............

It's been a huge three and a half years since we have been in and how things have changed. Rooms furnished, lawn and gardens established, more additions to the family and so life continues. Our small semi rural suburb has almost been built out which is great so we can see the back end of trucks and construction noise and being able to just enjoy life.

In terms of our house, there are a few things we would change. We have learnt you can never have enough storage and would have loved to at least doubled the size of all built ins and linen/ laundry cupboards. We managed to purchase some gloss wall cabinets for our laundry but these proved tricky to fit as the wall studs were not evenly spaced so we were forced to sheet the wall in 16mm MDF and then fix to this to support the cabinets which ended up working great.

We have had a LOT of cracking/ splitting/ movement where our door jambs meet the architraves/ skirting to the point where the paint was lifting off the walls ten to fifteen millimetres off to the side of the architraves. Whilst cleaning our shower floor last week I found that there was a plastic tile spacer hidden in between the tiles covered by a smear of grout. It now sticks out like the preverbial!

A lot of the chrome plated radius hinges fitted to our doors have had to have been replaced as they simply leach black dust/ something all over the white door jambs. A few sections of skirting are pulling off the walls and have opened up in the corners where they have been scribed.

In our garage we have had some issue where the roller door meets the slab which has caused the slab to chip away to a few millimetres deep across the entire width of the door. At its worst it forms like a white powder which appears to leach out of the slab.

We had our hot water system fail within 12 months which was luckily repaired by Dux with little fuss. Both mirrors in our ensuite bathroom were replaced as the silvering on the back of the mirror was faulty. This also appears to be happening again, the problem being its a messy repair as the mirrors need to be smashed off as they are glued to the wall.

In regards to these issues I sent a polite email to McDonald Jones after sales service on a Sunday evening and to their credit I received two read receipts within a period of ten minutes. However that's where it all appears to end and I have heard nothing since which is very very disappointing.

A quick browse of the MDJ facebook page revealed a number of people who all seem to be having problems with getting anyone to return their calls post handover. I understand businesses get busy and i'm sure they have many, many clients to deal with but to not even have the courtesy to reply with an email saying "Hi we got your email and will contact you shortly" is really poor form.

I hope I can rectify this before I am pushed to the Department of Fair Trading to get things sorted.