Schedule becoming clearer
A much anticipated letter from the Council arrived last week. Engineering and Building Services had concluded their review of linking their drainage project with our home development schedule. They put pen to paper and sent us their opinion.
The story so far.
Over the last couple of months, we’ve been involved in an intricate dance with our Council partners – Engineering and Planning.
This wasn’t your standard shuffle around the dance floor. Prepare an application for a Planning Permit, start the music and away we go.
For this performance, everyone involved had some ideas on what to do but hadn’t coordinated their moves with the other partners. Was this going to be a fast or slow dance? Who was going to lead? Would toes get mangled in the process? Would one partner have something better to do for a while and not be available? What should we wear …
Planning could see issues with flooding on our property until a major drainage upgrade drainage project was finished.
Engineering saw that getting access to our block before we started the development provided an opportunity for them to make significant improvements to the existing drainage design.
We saw that helping Engineering improve their project by running another easement through our block was an advantage to the neighbourhood BUT couldn’t wait for years to have the new drains installed.
Schedule becoming clearer.
Which brings us to the arrival of the letter and its contents.
Engineering suggested a way forward that should satisfy all parties – wrapping up a bunch of permit requests into one neat package so everyone concerned has certainty about what will happen.
We have agreed to going ahead with a planning permit application that includes creating the third easement, property development and subdivision. The development can include an option to stage construction of our dwellings if necessary. Engineering will run their 1.5m diameter drainage pipe down the new easement and square off the existing easement at the back of our block where it joins the old drain.
Once the application is approved and new easement registered, the work on our property should be finished within 6 months.
Let the dance begin! Assuming all goes well with our application, everyone knows the steps. Planning can be advised by Engineering about current and future flood levels so they can satisfy their approval requirements. Engineering gets to lay big pipes through an open plot of land. We know the schedule for the Council works which means we can put together a schedule for our development.
What happens next?
Upon our in-principle acceptance, Engineering have commenced the drainage project redesign. It will take them 2-4 weeks to come back to us with the details of exactly where the easement will be on our block, along with information about the flood levels.
In the meantime, David and Ian are finalising the floor plans and elevations in preparation for the planning permit.
The schedule becoming clearer has been a real lift to everyone’s spirits. Up until now, quite a bit of time has been taken up with hypotheticals about what the project schedule might look like. After the letter’s arrival, the focus has shifted. Everyone in our team is keen to get on with the details necessary to make this happen.
Everyone ready to see if this new dance routine is going to work?
And five, six, seven, eight …
