Nobody talks about the weight of it. Not really.
They talk about the excitement. The display villages. The selections appointments. The Instagram moments where everything looks beautiful and effortless and under control.
They don't talk about what it actually feels like to carry a build. But women who have done it - they know.
There's something that comes up every single time I talk to a woman who has built.
Every. Single. Time. It's not the delays. It's not the budget blowouts. It's not even the defects.
It's the way they were treated.
The slow responses when they asked questions. The over-explaining of things they already understood. The moment the Site Supervisor turned to their partner instead of them. The phone calls that never got returned until someone else made them. The feeling of walking into a meeting and knowing, before a word was spoken, that they weren't being taken seriously.
Nobody said it out loud. Nobody had to.
It was in the tone. The body language. The assumption that she was just tagging along or had no idea about construction.
And the worst part? Even with couples building, it’s the women who are the ones running the whole show.
The women who read the contract cover to cover. Who actively seek out answers to questions, who go and study building codes, standards and tolerances. All while holding down a career, raising kids, managing a household and showing up for everyone around them without dropping a single ball.
I know this because it happened to me.
I was the one on site for most of our build. My husband worked away, so it was me asking the questions, following up on defects, arriving to the site inspections having done the research the night before. I knew what I was looking at. I had read the Australian Standards. I could back every single concern I raised with something concrete (pardon the pun).
It didn't matter though. None of what I had to say was taken seriously.
When my husband raised a concern on site, he was heard. He was respected and taken seriously. Man to man, tradie to tradie, no questions asked.
When I raised the exact same concern, sometimes word for word, the response was almost always a version of the same thing.
"That's standard." "That's just how it looks at this stage." "That's common practice."
Delivered with a polite, dismissive tone. This occurred through the entire building journey.
I was just a woman on a build site (her own mind you) and that was enough for some people to decide I wasn't worth listening to.
That only created a fire in me. The fire to create Abeaud.
Not just to give you building information, but to make sure you walk into every conversation, every inspection, every site meeting knowing your stuff - that being dismissed stops being an option.
You deserve to be taken seriously. And you will be.
