Update

This is the last week for our builders to work on their tender pricing.  It's been busy having various builders and their sub-contractors running through our house.  Great that they are taking the time, so hopefully that bodes well for the final prices.  I have a number in my head and I'm just praying that the total price is close to that.

As for the neighbour....her objection was bundled up and sent to the Council as per procedure.  There has been a bit of back and forth with the Council and now we sit back and wait.  Will hopefully have their decision by the end of next week.


Below are some 3D images of what our eventual house will look like externally.

And no, we don't own a Porsche.  Just the architect's sense of humour.

View from the side.  This side faces North.

This would be the view if you were standing in our neighbour's yard (not the objecting one) and there was no fence between us.

And this is the other side.  Again, this doesn't show the fence, although you can see the bit of wall at the front which is the contentious point with our neighbour on this side.  What this does show is our long glass window in the open plan area that also doubles as a splashback.  We will be able to look out onto some lush foliage and a boldly coloured fence.  Just need to pick a colour!

And finally an elevated shot depicting the rear of the house.  You can see our garage door which is accessed via a ROW.

Glass magnetic whiteboard

My architect recently showed me this new whiteboard product.  It's called Chat Board.  It's made of glass and the big news is that it's magnetic.

In our new place we have designed a workstation area in the walk in pantry.  This is a place which will be used for all the messy stuff that normally clutters up the kitchen bench tops such as junk mail, correspondence, kid's school notices and the like.  It will also be a place where we can plug in phones and laptops all the while keeping them tucked away.  My plan is to have a big white board area that I can use for calendar notes, shopping lists and anything else that might normally end up on the fridge.

So I'm quite excited to see that I don't necessarily have to end up with a boring white slab of board but instead can now choose from a range of colours.

At the moment I would love it in bright red just for something nice and bold.  I'm thinking those white markers that write onto glass will be just the ticket for a very functional and good looking work area.  Will wait now to see what the price is like.  Unfortunately, we need a custom size (isn't it always the way!) so I'm not going to get too excited until I see the price.

The inevitable objection

So, just as we thought, the neighbour has submitted an objection to our side wall. The most pleasing thing (if there can be anything) was that the objection was submitted well before the deadline. So from a timing perspective we didn't have to wait the full 3 weeks. Despite the shadow diagrams showing absolutely no impact on the neighbour's window she has used her rights to object to us building it - fair enough. She also went one step further and 'put us on notice' that she refuses to grant permission to us replacing any part of the fence! Not sure why this is. It's not a particularly new or well maintained fence and it would be done at our expense. Anyhoo, I think we can avoid any fence replacement and that might cheer her up a bit. Not sure that we're going to be life long friends. I just hope that we can get through this next approval stage and get building. From here we have to wait up to 3 weeks for the Council to review all of the information and hand down their decision. Seems ridiculous that this couldn't have all been done at the same time as our last submission. In the meantime, the builders have been reviewing our tender and we had one builder come and have a look at the place last Friday. They have 2 more weeks before the resulting prices are due. We are hanging on with our finger nails to an October start.

Tender issued

Last Thursday our tender was formally issued to builders. They have 3 weeks to respond so we're hoping they get to it!

Our neighbour has until 7th September to respond to our request regarding our wall on her boundary. If we hear nothing then we're all good but if she objects we then have to wait up to a further 3 weeks to get a ruling from Council which could then be further appealed. It would seem to us that if she objects we could be in for quite a delay which would really put in doubt whether we would be able to get building this year. We're very conscious of getting to close to the ramp down pre-Xmas so are fervently hoping this doesn't happen.

Just when you thought it was safe....

So it turns out there's another twist in the planning process that we need to go through. Apparently, the building surveyor doesn't review the plans until a Planning Permit has been issued. So, now that we have our permit, the building surveyor has taken a look and informs us that we need to ask the neighbour for permission to build our side wall as it's within 3 metres of her north facing window. Ok, fair enough...I just wish I understood this process a bit more so that we were more aware of what we have to go through. The neighbour gets 14 days in which to object or consent, then Council gets up to 3 weeks to make their decision. Sigh! More time to wait. If there is an objection then there's a possibility of further appeals but I'm not even going to think about that right now.

In the meantime, we've agreed with the architect that we're going to move ahead to tender this week and hopefully by the time the builder's have had their time to price and we've gone through our various iterations and chosen a builder we will hopefully have our permit! Our October start date is looking decidedly shaky but still possible. We are going to stay glass half full on this one for now.

Today we went and did some further selection and research into sanitary ware and appliances. There's a great E&S Trading showroom that has opened in Moorabbin. It has all the major brands of kitchen appliances, tapware, baths, basins, whitegoods, dishwashers. You name it, they've got it. We compiled our massively long list with a sales guy and he's now going to get back to us with their 'best price'. Should be interesting. Our plan is to buy all of this stuff ourselves and avoid the builder mark up.

Planning Permit has arrived!

After a very long wait we finally have our planning permit. We weren't sure whether our neighbour was going to appeal the original decision so had to wait a very long 21 days and then another 2 weeks of further bureaucracy before it was finally issued.

We popped the cork on a bottle of champers last night to celebrate. Nothing can hold up the start of our build now unless it's us taking too long to review documents and make decisions.

Next stop is the tender. The architects have been working furiously to get all of the paperwork together. So after some review time we will be ready to put it out to the 4 builders that we have lined up. Hopefully we have changed or pulled out enough things that the budget will be more in the range we are hoping for. The timeframe also is the other unknown.

Yesterday, I was at the house with the architect to review a few details for the demolition spec. It turns outs we are really only keep about 5 walls of the house (3 external and 2 internal), the rest is getting bull dozed. This house really won't know what hit it. There won't be much left at all to begin with.

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!