OK, enough tears, lets cut to the chase....

So, enough already. The story so far. We signed a deal to buy a complete house on a great section. Everything that could go wrong did. The developer was out of his depth. Our contract wasn't worth a dime.

2 1/2 years after signing we got conned into making a progress payment. Over a few weeks, there were guys all over our house. A roof appeared, windows turned up. It all looked like finally we were going to get our dream home. We bought furniture, we picked colours. Our three year old got to choose her own colours and duvet for her bedroom. We wrote a cheque for $20,000......

YOU DID WHAT?! We look back and ask "were we insane?". You have to understand, we had been in this for the long hall and there were builders on site, I mean REAL builders with real tools and they knew what they were doing. We had a great meeting with the developer. He assured us that everything was now sorted and the house would be finished in about 8 weeks. He convinced us that absolutely nothing could go wrong at this stage. I actually questioned his finances and he looked me in the eye and said that "there are no problems whatsoever".

Within a week, the builders disappeared. The plumber disappeared. The developer disappeared. To say that panic set in would be an understatement. We found out that the builders weren't paid. The plumber wasn't paid. Our cheque had long since been cleared. I believe that it probably holds the record for fastest banked cheque.....he must have moved like Superman on his way to the toilet after a particularly bad Kebab from Courtney Place.....

Worse was to come. The plumbing firm applied to have the developers' company put into liquidation. However, this was the least of our worries. The developer had recently refinanced the project with those delightful people at Lombard Finance who had lent him a seriously large amount of money. In fact they had lent him significantly more than you could honestly believe and he had dutifully spent it somewhere else we guess 'cause it sure wasn't anywhere to be seen. We were a bit confused. We couldn't quite reconcile the millions, yep millions, that they had given him to the mess that was our development.

Now this is when it gets interesting and you just will not believe the events that came next. If you thought our developer was a crook, you ain't heard nothing yet......