No names or places because that’s rude. And if one thing is abundantly clear, these people litigate.
We were contacted to carry out a defect report at short notice in an expert witness case.
Short notice because it was a building dispute and the plaintiff was about to commence rectification works at their property.
The defendant was a local builder. It was within warranty period but he wasn’t doing the rectification work that was about to commence.
Backstory: The builder (defendant) constructed a fabulous sprawling home and used it as a showcase for his construction business. The family photos with his wife in linen and the kids playing in the pool are adorable and aspirational. Which is what it was meant to be.
The opulent home (pool, tennis court, 8 bedrooms) was auctioned off in 2022, purchased by a very wealthy woman.
She was in that house for not even a year before the pool - that was dug into the side of a hill and formed part of the back wall of the house - started leaking.
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When it landed on our desk there had been a lot of water under the bridge. And through the Media Room.
We don’t know what exactly was said between plaintiff and defendant, but the owner had moved out of the property and had refused to give the builder access to rectify the defects causing moisture damage to the house.
We do know a few steps of the dance:
The builder had offered to buy the house back from her.
She had bullied a local building inspector into writing a ridiculously damning and over-the-top defect report.
By the time the local builder got himself a solicitor, she was frothing at the mouth.
Finally, she got the QBCC through - no doubt hoping that they would skin this guy alive for her.
Instead, they identified the leaking pool as a failure in the waterproofing membrane between the pool, earthworks and house which we also found to be so. They identified the defect as AS 4654.2:2012 — Waterproofing Membranes for External Above-Ground Use. We agreed with their assessment of the defect, but ascertained that the defect could also be considered AS 3740:2021 — Waterproofing of Domestic Wet Areas.
The point is, this particular defect falls in between the Australian Standards and the defect should ultimately be assessed against the membrane manufacturer's specifications and accepted industry practice for below-ground waterproofing systems, those being the applicable technical benchmarks in the absence of a codified Australian Standard for this application.
It’s neither here nor there - she was going ahead with her rectifications with a different builder who was busy ripping and cutting into the below ground pipework coming from the pool.
Ultimately we don’t know how it ended up. We were notified to put it on the back burner for now. I hope that they negotiate a settlement and people come to their senses. It’s unfortunate, but in these cases it seems like no one walks away happy with the result. After all, even the state governing body wasn’t respected in it’s assessment of the case.
Such is the nature of conflict, but this one feels like rich people behaving badly.
