Week 3: drainage work, frame delivered

Mon 26 Aug 13 - Sun 1 Sep 13

Drainage work piping and frame delivered. 

On Saturday, they put the soil back down. 

Week 2: We're SLABBED

Mon 19/08/13 - Sun 25/08/13

We're finally have a slab on our land. Sorry we didn't have a picture of the pods and the guys working on the slab as we're living 1 hour away from it. Regardless it's a progress.

Week 1: Site Piering

Mon 12/08/13 - Sun 18/08/13

Finally site start acknowledgement and site supervisor were assigned to us last week. Today we finally saw the land with piering completed. The slab is scheduled next Wednesday.

The Famous PortaLoo

Finally the day we've been waiting for. Or should I say the day for most of us building our own house. The famous PortaLoo is here.!! YAY!!

The lot has been sitting flat for a year long planning and paperwork. Finally. Since we're living around 1hr away from the site, we cannot visit the site as often as we'd like. Luckily we have a good friend that live very close that send this picture to us today. It was taken on 12:50pm today.

From the picture it appears to be the site cut has started.

Authority to Commence Construction received

Hi all,

It's been a while since I update this blog. Believe it or not. This is how long the bank took us the journey of the most painful part of the process. Hopefully. Practically It takes 2 months just to get Authority to Commence Construction letter from the day we receive the DA approval which we submitted to the bank on the same day. Un-believable!! The bank was very slow in response. We practically hassle our broker almost everyday which I felt sorry for her. Initially we thought it was our broker but as soon as we receive full approval letter and hassling the bank, It was the certifier team at the bank. The excuse was a junior person handling our case. Sigh!

Anyhow it's over now we finally move on to the next stage, ie 15 days cooling period before construction starts. Can't wait to see what everybody are excited about at this stage of the building ie, Portaloo and fencing on our land.  :D  Yipee!!

Still flat.

DA Approval

We finally got a DA approval late last week. YAY!!

This week we received several more paperworks to sort out such as the DA papers to the Lender, glass splashback to be signed etc.

We want to give a big shout out to our CSO who has been nothing less than excellent to deal with, communicative, prompt, accomodating to our needs. Always returning our email as simple as saying 'Thank you' that she received our email.

I even gave a last minute variation that I forgot to signed 2 weeks ago and her response was assuring. It's nice when someone assure you and you know that she is in control.

BAL-19 to BAL-LOW

We got a feedback from Council last week about our land in the Bush Fire Zone and asked for the requirements.

Let's move back when we got the land. We are aware about this when we purchased the land. However there were mixed information about the land. One paper says no BAL at all, one says the land has BAL rating.

Apparently in the contract of land sale the land has 88B instrument that is showing BAL-19. After a discussion we went ahead with the purchase. The reason being that our land is next to a Reserve.

So we had $8K in the tender to be provisioned to comply ourself with this Bush Fire rating.

Now fast forward back to the council stage. I checked out our land in the Council Bush Fire Prone Are Map and found out that our land is actually outside the Buffer Zone (100m). This means No BAL or BAL-LOW. This also means we do not need any extra requirements. To challenge this apparently we possibly need to get a Bush Fire Assessment report.

However, after a short email explaining this with screenshots of the Council Map, this week the council officer finally agree that our land is BAL-LOW and now we have the $8K off the tender ..  YAY!!

So moral of the story, if your land has a Bush Fire Rating, check our your local Council Bush Fire Prone Area map. You might be in a surprise like we are. :-)