Council Update [Week 2]

This week we had a lovely surprise of receiving a notice of payment for the Section 94A Contributions Plan. Yay.

I spoke with our CSO this afternoon for an update, and I misunderstood what she said last week.

So our file is actually with Wisdom Compliance at the moment, and they are making variations to our building plans and landscape plans, and won't be able to get it back to council until that's done.

I am having a little bit of a freakout about what variations they will be making to our balcony. That was such a huge issue for us when it came up, and we did our homework and got written approval from our Developer to say that it was compliant with their guidelines, and now we are having problems and aren't being told what variations they are actually making.

I really hope I don't see that balcony in our master suite when it's done.

I'm going to be thinking about this all weekend!

Cx

Council Update [Week 1]

Thus far we have had a site inspection which has been completed and passed.

We had a call from Wisdom today to tell us that we are having a couple of compliance problems, which were a little vague to me, but these were

• Upper lounge window needs to be smaller for neighbour privacy
• Retaining walls on the landscaping plan - not sure what they were, but sounded like they were confused why we needed so many when we are doing dropped edge beams all around the house
• Front porch issue - probably with the distance from the main body of the house because we had extended it, this balcony is going to be the death of me!!

Apparently they are working on it and aim to get it all resolved as soon as possible. Will be good to get more clarification on the last two issues.

Hoping for a stress-free weekend!

Cx

Plans Lodged With Council

We've made a little more progress over the past week - on Friday we were notified by Wisdom to say that they had now lodged our file with council! I would say that was a week ahead of schedule - definitely a pleasant surprise! 

So now the long wait begins! We were told it would take 4-6 weeks to receive approval, which would make it the end of October or beginning of November, so there is a good chance we'll get started by the end of the year yay!

A couple of issues we've come across have been:

• The front portico pier brick colour we chose was incorrect in our Developer Approval. Wisdom have since fixed this, and said we don't need reapproval from the developer so should be fine. (They had "Choc Tan" down, but we had asked for "Brown")

• We got an email about Additional Waterboard requirements for our Waterboard Approval, which involve additional costs for the following and possibly more depending on the report
• Sewer peg out report to determine location of sewer including pier inspection and stamping
• Survey boundary pegs

This is going to be the longest 4-6 weeks of our lives!

Cx

Flooring Quote Completed

It was a couple of weeks ago now, but we revisited Di Lorenzo at Bella Vista and had a last look at our tile selection before we signed the quote.

On top of the normal stuff, we also signed off on the following upgrades (as I think I mentioned in a previous post):

• Tiling to alfresco (tiles + labour)
• Tiling to staircase storage (tiles + labour)
• Increased feature tiles to one whole wall for powder room, bathroom, ensuite (standard is one feature strip in showers)
• Floor to ceiling tiling to complete shower in bathroom, ensuite

I have a few photos from when we were taking a look at them, hope you can see them. I really enjoyed selecting tiles, it has probably been the most fun part so far and I can't wait to see how they look in our house!

Main Floor Tile: Glazed Porcelain "Stone White" next to Kitchen Cupboards "Avignon Walnut" and our Bristol wall colour "Satellite"

Bathroom Feature Tile: This is my favourite!

Bathroom Tiles: Normal wall tile against the feature. The bottom RHS is our floor tile.

Feature Tile against the Bathroom Cabinet (Smokey Sapelle) and our paint colour 

External Floor Tile: Initially we chose Pewter, but have now changed to "Charcoal Grip" it shimmers in the sunlight

Laundry Wall Tile in Off White

Hope you like our choices too!

Cx

Kitchen Drawings and Developer Approval

Kitchen Drawings

We received our kitchen drawings from Timpelle Kitchens this week - they are great, no changes needed to be made.

One thing that was surprising was we thought that the kitchen bench with the waterfall was 40mm caesarstone, and the rest 20mm. However, they clarified for us that we will be getting 40mm caesarstone benchtops for the whole kitchen, and 20mm for the laundry and bathrooms. Love it!!

Here's a birds eye view of our kitchen :)

Birds Eye View - Kitchen

Developer Approval

Our Wisdom rep has informed us that our submission was approved by Macquarie Links, however she is still awaiting receipt of the paperwork before they can start on our DA pack, which will take 10 days to prepare. Hopefully she gets it today so we can get things moving and submit to council.

Slow progress..!

Cx