Category Archives: Planning

Throwing in the Towel – Almost…

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Last week I ended up with bruised nuckles after I punched my car after a rather frustrating meeting with an engineer about some of the “stranger” features of our renovations…

I must admit that this renovation process is a lot more complicated and aggrivating than I had thought it would be. I was looking at the real estate section of the newspaper last weekend and thought about how nice it would be to buy the house down the street that already has four bedrooms, two living areas and a new kitchen.

Now with an extra week behind me I am feeling a bit better about the whole project. This week I met with my original architect and I found out that the strange things in the drawings were actually recommended by our original builders, who we got rid of quite a while ago. The main thing that had been bugging me was that the drawing had required a new joist to be run next to every existing joist. This is a lot of extra work and materials, which means a lot of extra money for me. Now I need to get in touch with the builders who had quoted us already and get them to re-quote the work with the new information from the architect, which was that the extra joists were not needed.

If it all goes how I hope these changes will hopefully mean that we can afford to go ahead with the full renovations, rather than just getting the shell under the house done.

Now we have to out for 4 Day!

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Yep, the plans have changed again.

The story that we are getting seems to be changing daily. Last week we would have to be out for one day this week, now we have to be out for four days next week. We had arranged a place to stay for this week, but then we had to change it to next week, which thankfully after about 24-hours of panick we were able to do.

We were wondering what normal people do when they go about lifing their house? Planning for this is proving to be quite a challenge.

Building Permit has been Approved!

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I just got an e-mail from the Townsville City Council and I called them on the phone to confirm it, but we have been given approval for all of our plans! So that is very exciting news given that some people told us it would take up to three months for approval to be granted.

The council won’t release the permit for enclosing and building under until we have provided them with an insurance certificate. Since we don’t even have any quotes yet for enclosing and building under the house we don’t have a builder selected yet.

Thankfully it is a separate permit for enclosing and building than it is for raising and restumping the house. Because of that our house lifter should be able to start soon (he previously told us within about three weeks of being approved). That’s pretty exciting because it should mean that we will get that part done quite a bit before the baby is due, rather than a week before, which is what we had originally feared…

This Time It’s 8cm Too Small for a Deck

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In one of my previous posts, 4cm Too Small for a Bathroom, I wrote about how we had to get rid of our built in wardrobe in the master bedroom and put the family bathroom there instead because there was not enough room under the stairs for a bathroom, by 4cm.

Well this time we found out from the Townsville City Council that our house is 8cm too close to the boundary line than the current council regulations allow! This is a problem because we are wanting to put a deck on the back of the house that is in line with the current house…

It was a good experience for us to meet the neighbours on that side of us. The council informed us that we just needed to get their permission for the construction and then it shouldn’t be a problem. They gave us permission quite willingly, which was great, so now town planning is looking into it and they will hopefully give us a verdict soon. If everything comes up good then we should actually be able to move on ahead of schedule with the raise and restump of our house, which would be really good since Tamara (my wife) is now 30.5 weeks pregnant!

At the moment we are at stage 5 on our House Lifting and Restumping Schedule, except so far instead of the builder and architect having to get new things off to council, we are the ones doing it.

Some other good news is that the guy who will be raising and restumping our house will only need us out of the house for a week, instead of the three weeks that we thought we might have to be out for. (See previous article Out of the House for Three Weeks!!! to see when we were told that.)