Planning approval

Yay! Finally heard back from the Council (after repeated phone calls and follow ups). They have issued a Notice of Decision with a whole bunch of conditions. Took us a few read throughs before we finally understood it all. So, basically they are planning to give us a permit so long as we remove the widened driveway and the skylights (we'll appeal on this later in the process). We now have to wait a further 20 days to see if there are any appeals lodged to VCAT about the decision.

I called our neighbour a couple of days ago to see if she would get together with and discuss her objection letter. She said that as the Council had made their decision she didn't see the need. Which leaves us in a bit of limbo as we're not sure whether she plans to lodge an appeal or not. In any case, even if she does, her objection has no Heritage grounds so it would be thrown out. Problem is we would have to wait 4 weeks for a time slot at VCAT for them to tell her that. We're hoping that she is smart enough not to pursue things any further.

So it's a tentative celebration. We haven't broken out the bubbly but we are very close.

Design has continued. Last week we saw the first of the concepts around colour, floor coverings, tiles etc. It's all looking great. We weren't much of a fan of the initial concepts provided around the kitchen but I'm sure with a few more iterations we'll be getting close.

Our architect says that we're still looking good for the documentation to be completed by the end of July. I'd say we're probably pushing this a bit. There's still quite a lot to got through. Haven't even started talking about electricals and there are a billion and one little things that we need to be sure of.

Today we went and visited friends of ours who have just moved in after a big reno on their place. It looks fantastic and we got a lot of ideas that we might use for ourselves. We also got the names of the 2 builders that they used (and highly recommend). I'll ring them next week and fingers crossed we may be able to add them to our tender roster.

We're still trying to work out what material to use on our kitchen benchtop. With the benchtop being 3.6m there really aren't many choices that wouldn't require some sort of join. We really don't want to have to deal with trying to join something like Caserstone after our experiences in the warehouse. As much as we love the surface I really think that could be problematic. So the options are to redesign the bench to design for two smaller pieces of Caeserstone (maybe a two level bench somehow) or go with Corian. What we really need is to be able to see some decent installations of Corian rather than just a small sample. We were discussing this with our friends today and they remarked 'Don't they use Corian at McCafe's?' We reckon they do, but unfortunately after a trip to the nearest McDonalds and a strawberry thickshake for the kids we found only Caeserstone. We will continue to visit Micky D's till we find something!