My house-build

I’m becoming very concerned about the time being taken to build my new house and the excessive delays, in my view, that are being incurred. Recently the builders sent out a general email to all their clients apologising for what they say are problems arising from the Covid pandemic (the old chestnut), material shortages and problems recruiting labour but I’m not too impressed by this.

Why is that? When I drive around I see other houses being built that were started after mine and are already ahead in terms of completion and in my own case, the materials required to start building the exterior walls have been on site for nearly three months. The builders also said that their contracts are now taking an average of ten months to complete. Mine was started at the beginning of March and should therefore by now be well on the way to completion but in fact they have been on site for little more than ten full working days.

There is no completion date in my contract. Instead there’s a statutory (I think) period of twelve months after which the house must be completed, otherwise the builders must start paying me a daily penalty until it is ready to be handed over. This is based on the cost of the property and in my case works out to about 50€ per day, so depending on whether week-ends are included, this amounts to around 2500€ per month, or 1500€ if not.

Except for the fact that I’d still be in my caravan, I’d be happy to receive such sums as a contribution to the costs I’ll incur in fitting out my kitchen and purchasing other items that I’ll need for the house. But I’d rather not. I’d prefer to be in the house. The builders started work on my house on 9th March of this year, so the twelve month period ends on 8th March next year.

In construction terms given what needs to be done by then, this is not long so I decided to make out a work schedule based on my own experience and judgement. I used a Gantt chart for this, which is a very useful tool for project planning and management and one that I used to use quite a bit when I was a Corporate Planner many years ago.

A Gantt chart is a useful way of showing activities (tasks or events) displayed against time. Along the top of the chart is a suitable time scale. Each activity is represented by a bar and the position and length of each bar reflects the start date, duration and end date of the activity. This allows you to see at a glance what the various activities are, when each activity begins and ends, how long each activity is scheduled to last, where activities overlap with other activities and by how much and the start and end dates of the whole project.

Also, by identifying which activities cannot be started until previous ones have been completed, a Gantt chart allows you to identify the critical path and time line which together define the minimum amount of time that the project will take to complete. The Gantt chart that I created is shown below.

The critical path of my house project is shown along the top of the chart and amounts to 16 weeks and at the time of writing, this is exactly the time left between now and 8th March 2023. I sent a copy of the chart (in French of course) to the builders last week pointing this out, because when I signed the contract with them they said that they never pay completion penalties as they always hand projects over within the twelve month period and waited for a reply.

I suggested that if they disagreed with my estimates they might like to provide me with their own but they didn’t do that. Instead they replied saying that they can assure me of their best possible endeavours and support and that my house will be ready by 22nd April next year. In view of their previous comments about never paying penalties I was rather puzzled by this and sent a message pointing this out along with my choices on tiling etc that they needed.

So far I’ve received no reply. I hope that when the time comes they don’t try to claim ‘force majeur’ for not making the completion date of 8th March 2023 in order to avoid paying completion penlties. In view of the time materials have been standing on site, that could get a bit messy 🙁