All systems go

This morning I received some more stuff from my builder. One item had to be signed and returned to them – namely my agreement that the hole that was dug on Wednesday – the ‘implantatation’ of my house – is in the right place. It’s quite important actually because until they have that, the builder wouldn’t be able to start on the actual house-build, so I made sure that I got that in the post back to them this afternoon.

The other thing was a demand for the first tranche of funds – 15% of the contract build price – and as the banks don’t open on Mondays and are more concerned with dealing with walk-in clients on Saturday mornings, it was important to also get that done today. I know my way around the system much better now and what buttons need to be pressed and sure enough, after setting up the builder as a recipient of transfers from my account myself and emailing the bank to effect the transfer on my behalf (the sum is above my ceiling so normally I couldn’t do it myself), it still hadn’t been done after more than an hour.

So I phoned again to find out what was going on and was told that nothing could be done until they had received my email. So I said that they should look again and Voilà! Next they asked me for the builder’s account number. I said that they didn’t need it as I’d already set them up as a ‘bénéficiaire’ and all that was needed was for them to effect the transfer as it was above my transaction ceiling. So the young lady raised my ceiling – I think they are getting to know me as a client now, and my foibles – and I was able to do it myself.

But why all the urgency, you might ask? Because I note that on the ‘assurance de chantier’ (construction insurance) that the builder furnished me a copy of there’s a date for the ‘ouverture de chantier’ (opening of the site) of 15th March. That’s next Tuesday, and as neither the banks nor the post offices open here on Mondays, if I hadn’t dealt with the transfer and the confirmation of ‘implantation’ today it’s likely that that start date would have been missed. It may still be, but at least it won’t be because of anything that I haven’t done…