Council Approval!!

Well after my first post thought that I might go back a few steps and explain some of the delays that we had.

Once we put the deposit on our block of land in September, the next few months flew by in a breeze of appointments, colour picking & driving around and around new estates to have a look at other houses and their colour combinations & also looking at the different versions of our own house at the different display villages (I strongly recommend doing this as the difference a colour scheme makes is incredible - if I had of viewed one display home in particular first I probably never would have built the Saville)

Just before Christmas we hit a bump in the road when council requested some changes to our plans. As our land is adjacent to a pathway, when our land was registered there was a covenant placed on our block noting that the house must orient the street and also the pathway meaning that the side of the house facing the pathway must be a bit more decorative than a brick wall and a bit more like the front of the house. This is being done a lot around our area on corner blocks in addition to a restriction on the length you are permitted to erect a 1.8m fence (in our case only 50% of the length of boundary adjoing the pathway can be 1.8m & it MUST be either decorative or open style fencing). They had also requested a drop edge beam be added to the rear left hand corner of the house rather than fill as we were exceeding the amount of fill allowed - yep our land is also slightly sloped.

So after 2 months of phone calls and waiting we finally resubmitted to council in late Feb. The changes? Well an open style pergola was added to front left hand corner of the house with a return that runs down the left hand side of the house along the main bedroom. The pergola has 2 brick piers that are pretty much on the boundary of our land which it seems you are allowed to do. A window was also added to our main bedroom to break the wall up a bit. Below are the revised elevations of the house.

Front of the House

You can see the brick pillar on the left hand side of the house.


Pathway Side of the House

You can see the 2 brick pillars in this one and the addition of the window in the main bedroom

So after resubmitting these plans along with a additional plan showing the side of the house that faces the pathway showing the open style fencing we got a call late Friday afternoon from the council with a few queries about the fence style. We confirmed that we intended to use the open style fencing with a tall hedge behind it for privacy. Council confirmed that they were happy with the changes and not only had they approved the plans but that they were also going to allow us to build the 1.8m portion of fence for a "few extra metres" so that it covered the window in the
2nd bedroom. Yipee!! He also said that if we decided to go with the decorative style fencing (brick piers with lap n cap in between) that this would be ok.

So even though such a small part in the whole process, getting the council approval is such a big deal for us!! If we were to build again, I would definately be making a time to sit down with council prior to DA submission to go over what we intend to build and to get their thoughts, it definately would have saved not only a lot of time but also the worry & the demotivation that you go through in the process.

April
xxoo