Demolition begins

Demolition started Monday this week and is supposed to finish Wednesday. I will upload some pics when I get them.
We are hoping that our builder will be lodging the Construction certificate this week, but are waiting on the engineers to update the hydraulic plan with some extra detail as per councils condition.
Another condition from council is that we have to build retaining walls as soon possible after excavation. 
The only other condition that really affects us was we needed tree protection for the Gum tree out the front so I had to organise a fence guy to place a fence around the tree for the duration of the build.
We are using an accredited certifier for the construction certificate so hopefully it won’t take as long as council to get approved.

DA Approval Granted

Finally, after 13 weeks we have been told that approval consent has been granted.

After the neighbour submissions and the months it spent in the engineering dept at council we starting to think it would never get approved. The assessing officer mentioned we will have a few special conditions such as tree protection for the Gum trees on the block. We will find out more details about these from the builder next week. Hopefully nothing major.

Demolition is booked in for next month so now I can start ebaying the appliances from around the house.

Getting sick of waiting

We'll it's been a little over six weeks since we submitted our DA now and we are still waiting on approval. We found out last week neighbour notification had concluded however they had received 2 letters. One neighbour has concerns about trees. The other neighbour has problems with runoff. Bugger.
The Accessing officer will be looking into these at the end of the week.

Kitchen Design

I thought I would post the 3D design we received from the kitchen company. We are pretty happy with the layout.
The island will be filled mostly drawers and the microwave. We will also have a few drawers in the pantry too to give us better access to items near the back. The right most cupboard next to the dishwasher will contain pull out bins so we no longer need ugly bins standing on the floor.

Plans back in council

We finally got a new drainage plan from the engineers so our plans are going back to council today. It took us a while to find a solution with rainwater tanks sizes that would fit along one side of the property leaving a clear path down the other. Hopefully council won’t send the plans back this time.

Otherwise we are looking forward to receiving a 3D kitchen design from the kitchen company shortly.

What a mess

We have been instructed that we need to change the drainage design and instead of a charged system we now need to increase our water tanks to 10,000L and the overflow from this can be disposed to an absorption trench in the rear yard. The problem is the engineer has updated the design and placed another 2 massive water tanks down the other side of the house where we planned to have a clear pathway. I have had no luck contacting the engineer to try and either move the tank or change it dimension to be higher but a little thinner so we have more room down the side of the house.
To top it off our Contracts Co-ordinator resigned and had her last day is today. The role is officially vacant for a week and half. I don’t have too much hope of us getting back into council in the next few weeks.

Plans rejected due to stormwater design!!

Here we go. Starting to get problems.

As we are downslope the councils preferred option is to flow stormwater with the level of the land to a downslope easement. However as we don't have an easement on our property we need to contact our downslope neighbours to request access to theirs. If they reject access to an easement then we can look at an alternate design for stormwater like the charged system we currently have a hydraulic design for. However they said the hydraulic design didn't cut it anyway.

So back to the drawing board.