Council Update [Week 3]

Variations to our plan have come back today, however they now need the Landscaping Plan to be re done to match. Our CSO said they should have this done and submitted back to council by the end of the week.

I had our CSO forward me the new plan to have a look at what had been changed, one minor and one major change I saw. And it looks like the porch is staying the same which is a relief!

Upper lounge window had to be made smaller and higher for privacy of our neighbours. It has changed from 1020 x 2629mm to a skinnier window, like the bedrooms, that is 590 x 2629 mm. I highlighted in the pictures.

Picture 1: Original 1020x2629mm

Picture 2: New Window sized 590x2629mm 

The major change for us though, is the landscaping. Previously I showed you a copy of our original landscaping plan, where retaining walls were required only on the sides of the house, and none at the back of the house. However, they've now added retaining walls to go all the way around the sides and back! It's crazy, and I would like to get more information about why council has said that we need this, and why Wisdom Landscapes did not tell us this when we did our plan with them. 

Picture 3: New siting with retaining walls

I've also noticed that they have now put "Retaining wall 450mm from boundary" - I'm guessing this was a council requirement but I'm not sure why that's required. Looks like our sides and back just shrank though.

Fun times.

Cx

Landscaping Appointment

Straight after our colour selection appointment, we met with Wisdom Landscapes to put together a landscaping plan to submit to the Developer.

To be completely honest - we had no idea what to expect, and no idea what we wanted. We were the exact opposite of the colour appointment where we already knew everything we wanted, and going into landscaping just had no idea!

Regardless, we weren't expecting things to be so bad - it turns out we need a retaining wall that is almost the entire length of house. 

You can see in the picture above that because they had to cut so much to comply with the driveway gradient regulations for council, we need a retaining wall to fill it. The Wisdom rep said that it would be around 0.8m high. I'm still a little confused about it at the moment, actually.

He also suggested (and we went with it) that we could fill where the laundry steps are, so that we could eliminate the steps and just walk out onto flat ground, which seems like a good idea, although it still seems expensive to do.

I also reshaped the driveway - there were a lot of corners and edges in the original design, so we kept tweaking it until we got smoother edges around. 

For our driveway we went with

Colour: Bluestone

Fill: Plain (no pattern)

Border: Large Tile

In the plan we also asked for gardens beds across the front, pebbles and pavers on the laundry side (blindside) of the house, letter box (per Macquarie Links specs) and a fold away clothesline.

We are worried about how much this is all going to come to - I found another fellow blogger who went with Wisdom Landscapes, and their plan looks a LOT less complex than ours, and they had come back with a $36,000 price which is not at all within the budget we had allocated to landscaping :(

Anyway, we should receive a copy of the plan next week, and apparently we'll get the estimates and costing in around 3 weeks time. It would have been nice to get it all done in the one hit, but it looks like it may not be possible and we'll just have to do the basics: driveway, retaining wall, letterbox and clothesline.

Cx