Further update on the renno front. The Town Planning submission is coming along should be completed by next week for early the week after. We now need to talk with the neighbours to let them know what we are planning on doing and see if we get any comments. The plans really don't impact anyone at all other than a few points where we're building out to the boundary. So fingers crossed that we don't get any objections. Once the submission is into Council the big yellow sign will go up and neighbours will have a formal opportunity to object or comment.

The architect also gave us a massive checklist that provides room by room all of the things that we now need to start considering. Everything from what sort of lock on the front door to where all of the power points will go. It's going to be a big job...but fun!

Moving forward

A quick meeting with the architect this week. Getting down to just a few details concerning the exterior of the house. We’re not still not sure where to put the pool. We were presented with another plan which provided more of a free flow between the various areas of the backyard but it would require a number of other compromise and it would really dominate the backyard (even more than the previous designs). So I think we’re going to stay with the current designs for now. Still thinking….

The good news is that we’re moving forward into Town Planning! Yay! This involves preparing a range of plans, elevations etc to describe our design and completing the appropriate documentation. Not sure how long this will take, forgot to ask that directly. But hopefully we’ll be able to push forward to Council soon and then get onto the internal detail.

Further refinement

Another Thursday another session with the architect. This time we went through the plans that had been further refined based on our feedback. We talked about 2 possible roof types for the rear of the house – a flat roof or pitched roof. As always, the one we liked, the pitched is likely to more pricey. We’re going to go with it for now and see how things go once we go out to tender.

Still debating on where we’ll put the pool. The latest round of plans has it turned 90 degrees to the way it was before. It still means that you have to go through the pool area to get to the grassed area. Not ideal. We’ll keep plugging away on it though and hope that we can land on the most elegant option sometime soon.

On the weekend we went to have a look at some pools. Firstly, to get some idea of sizes and secondly to see whether the fibreglass pools look any good. We have agreed now that 7 x 4m is the way to go. The extra width is important, especially with the kids wanting to jump in. From a materials perspective the fibreglass looked ok. Ballpark price is about $40K though. Given I thought that concrete would be around $60K then the savings aren’t as big as what we had thought they might be.