We've just built a house with Celebration and were overall very happy with our builder. We had a street party yesterday and were talking to 3 other couples who were also very happy overall with their builders; one other Celebration, one Dale Alcock and a Content Living.

We did have an issue at the beginning with shoddy bricklaying, but I took photos, asked for independent opinions from brickies on here and took copies of both the photos and comments to our building supervisor. He was very happy to rectify the problem. Bricklayer was obviously spoken to since the workmanship improved 100%.

I thought I will throw in something I learned from building my house. The builder will try to convince you that doing lot of things yourself (whether you do it yourself or arrange trades ppl to do it), such as organising soakwells, window treatments, reticulation, pavings , floor coverings, paint, etc is cheaper/easier. I can tell you it is not. My house was completed by builder but it took me another six months to make it liveable/rentable, it was so difficult to find tades ppl and they were not cheaper at all.

I suggest, if you can, go with a well reputed builder and make sure you opt for a turn-key project, i.e. your house is given to you totally complete. It might seem expensive at the beginning, but I assure you it will turn out so cheaper and will save you lots of stress at the end.

Good luck....it can be very stressful experience.

Regards

We are currently building with APG, who are part of the ABN Group which includes Dale Alcock, Webb Brown-Neaves, and the Home Buyers Centre.

We are very happy with how our build is going so far. Like Dorothy we had some brick-laying issues at the start, which were sorted very promptly and fully to our satisfaction.

We are building a two-storey house. They started laying the slab in April and we are now very nearly at lock-up (it will be early in January).

We hired an independent inspector for piece of mind who has donw two inspections along the way. Workmanship so far has been excellent.

It's great that some people have a good time building a new home in Perth. The ABN Group is obviously a major group with a good reputation for building and customer service, although they also had some quality issues during the building boom of a couple of years ago.

However, there is another major group that treats its customers like excrement. How about this: we were left with no cooking equipment for 9 weeks at the beginning of winter, with 2 small kids. They got the kitchen benchtop wrong and instead of fixing it, they tried to bully me into having the gas cooktop installed when it would have been a fire risk. I stuck to my guns and in the meantime bought an electric frypan and survived with that and the microwave. The oven and cooktop were stuck in the middle of the kitchen for 9 weeks, until eventually someone at the building company saw sense.

Always interesting that BE and mods are happy to have names of companies published when it is positive and yet are completely sh*t scared of the truly useful information about which companies to avoid. And use the pretence of 'protecting the poster' from defamation and litigation to justify the unjustifiable.

I'm sure Internet Brands would be happy to discuss it with you - if you'd like to start a thread in SIte Feedback I'll ask someone to respond. As far as the Mods are concerned though we are asked not to allow posts where someone has posted to "name and shame" a company or individual, and most if not all of us are aware of cases where posts have ben removed altogether under threats of legal action from the companies named therein.

We have no control over pms or emails and have no idea of course whether details are exchanged that way.....