Soil investigation and other stuff

Today was a busy day at the house. The soil investigation was done. Nothing of great note was found other than the house it built on rubble. Don't really know if that's a good or a bad thing, doesn't sound brilliant does it?

The structural engineer also came through and had a good look at all of our cracks and our rollercoaster floor. On the whole though he thought the place was pretty solid which we were very happy to hear.

Finally, we have had a couple of builders providing order of magnitude costs for us based on a high level spec supplied to them by the architect. We just want to make sure the project is feasible and to provide us with some guidance for the next round of design. One of the builders wanted to have a look around the house so we headed over for another visit. Glad we live close by!

Sign is up

Yesterday, I went to the Council and picked up our advertising board. After quite a bit of mucking around I managed to wire it quite securely to our front fence. 11 properties are also going to get a letter in the mail to let them know what we are doing.

The sign stays up for 14 days. Fingers crossed that there are no objectors. Really we aren't doing anything that would cause any of our neighbours any concern so we are quietly hopeful that we can zip through this stage. Only time will tell.

We're really starting to get anxious to move on with the internal design of the house. Based on our very broad calculations we need to have all of the house spec'd and design by the start of July to stay on track for a move in next April. (I know...it takes a long time this house renovating stuff!).

This Friday we have someone coming to do the soil investigation and the first onsite meeting with the structural engineer.

Town Planning is submitted

The Town Planning submission has been sent to Council. This will provide all of the details to get approval for the Heritage-related changes that we're making to the house. We're not doing really much that requires approval. Widening of the front gate so we can a car off street more easily and gates on either side of the house. We're hoping that it will be a straight forward process, but you never can tell with these kind of things.

Next step is to get some preliminary costings from a couple of builders. The architect has put together a list of the all of the things that will affect cost as well as supplying a range of prices for items such as the pool etc. It will be very interesting to see what comes back.

The architect says they'd prefer to wait for the Town Planning permission to come back before moving on to the internal design. Not sure why we can't get started with some things now but in the meantime we're visiting lots of showrooms and compiling pictures of all sorts of things.

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.

Let's talk money

Met with the architect today where we reviewed our feedback and had a look at some potential changes to the designs. The most significant decision was to take the 2 storey option off the table and move forward with the 1 storey design. Based on some back of the envelope costs the 2 storey options would have blown our budget to smithereens. Even the 1 storey option is beyond it but with some further iterations hopefully we can work on that.

It’s still going to be a big house. About 270sqm of undercover area. In thinking about it more, I’m quite happy not to have to be traipsing up and down stairs. We’ve done enough of that in our time.