The 20/20 House Part 21
The Gruen Eco Design blog about how to convert your dream from an energy efficient home into a reality.
Protection Work Notice Signed
I thought it’s about time that I touch base to give you an update about where things are at. You might remember that we had massive problems getting the build over easement approved, or I should rather say the build close to the easement.
Once we did receive the approval for the build over from council, we had basically 2 big things left on our list.
• Protection Work Notice
• Report and consent to reduce the front setback (or rather a report and consent that we do want to build the new home with the same setback as the existing house)
Whenever you build against a boundary, no matter if you are building a garage or a part of the house, you need to serve a protection work notice to the affected neighbour.
Meaning you have to officially inform them about what works you are planning to do and how you (the builder) will make sure your works won’t impact negatively on their structure.
We are building a small studio against our boundary, right against the garage from our neighbour to the left.
I did print all our plans, the engineering, the required council forms all with explanations on how the works would be performed. We also went over on the weekend and met with our neighbours. I explained everything and left the documents with them. Luckily, they had no problems with our proposal and signed the next day.
However, the report and consent is not so straight forward. We had to upload plans to the council website and explain why we wanted to reduce the front setback. (of course, there is a fee associated with this) and then council did send the plans to our 2 direct neighbours on either side for their comment. It took over 2 weeks from the time we lodged the plans until our neighbours received them.
Before the plans were sent by council, I also visited those neighbours and explained it all to them. One of them has no problem with where the house will sit, rather the opposite, they prefer to house to be as far forward as possible.
However, the other neighbour was not that supportive, as they are not in favour of a construction in general. So, I hope that this sentiment will not cloud his feedback on the actual report and consent. Because the question is not whether we are allowed to build the house, but where the house will sit. The construction will go forward regardless, even if it means that we had to step back the house further. Which I told our neighbour…
We are currently waiting to hear back from council whether they are supportive of our design.
Wish us luck.
And, as usual life has been really busy and as all other projects are usually a priority over our own house, we still haven’t made all our selections. Still so much to do.
Stay tuned.