Category Archives: Council

Building Permit has been Approved!

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I just got an e-mail from the Townsville City Council and I called them on the phone to confirm it, but we have been given approval for all of our plans! So that is very exciting news given that some people told us it would take up to three months for approval to be granted.

The council won’t release the permit for enclosing and building under until we have provided them with an insurance certificate. Since we don’t even have any quotes yet for enclosing and building under the house we don’t have a builder selected yet.

Thankfully it is a separate permit for enclosing and building than it is for raising and restumping the house. Because of that our house lifter should be able to start soon (he previously told us within about three weeks of being approved). That’s pretty exciting because it should mean that we will get that part done quite a bit before the baby is due, rather than a week before, which is what we had originally feared…

This Time It’s 8cm Too Small for a Deck

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In one of my previous posts, 4cm Too Small for a Bathroom, I wrote about how we had to get rid of our built in wardrobe in the master bedroom and put the family bathroom there instead because there was not enough room under the stairs for a bathroom, by 4cm.

Well this time we found out from the Townsville City Council that our house is 8cm too close to the boundary line than the current council regulations allow! This is a problem because we are wanting to put a deck on the back of the house that is in line with the current house…

It was a good experience for us to meet the neighbours on that side of us. The council informed us that we just needed to get their permission for the construction and then it shouldn’t be a problem. They gave us permission quite willingly, which was great, so now town planning is looking into it and they will hopefully give us a verdict soon. If everything comes up good then we should actually be able to move on ahead of schedule with the raise and restump of our house, which would be really good since Tamara (my wife) is now 30.5 weeks pregnant!

At the moment we are at stage 5 on our House Lifting and Restumping Schedule, except so far instead of the builder and architect having to get new things off to council, we are the ones doing it.

Some other good news is that the guy who will be raising and restumping our house will only need us out of the house for a week, instead of the three weeks that we thought we might have to be out for. (See previous article Out of the House for Three Weeks!!! to see when we were told that.)

Plans in to Council

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With the help of the contractor doing the house lifting we have now submitted our preliminary plans to the Townsville City Council for the raise, restump and building in of our house.

Our plans actually have to go through Town Planning despite us pulling our garage under the original roof line, as I wrote about in “New Floorplan for the House“. It seems that the house is less then the regulation 6 metres from the front boundary and even though we are not changing the location of the house Town planning still needs to see and aprove the plans. Bit of a pain but the house lifting contractor thinks that we should be able to have it through some time this week, which would be great.

We are still waiting on the engineering plans to get to us, but City Council doesn’t need that until Town Planning has approved it anyways…

Let’s just wait and see what happens this week.

Renovation Planning Hitch

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I just got off the phone with the house lifting people today and the plan that I had drawn up for under our house has to go through some pretty major revisions.

In the original plan I had pushed the lower level out by about a metre to accommodate a slightly larger garage. Well it turns out that if we want to do that we will be adding about four months to the approval process because we will need to not only apply to the Townsville City Council, but also to Townsville Planning, which processes it seperate from the Townsville City Council.

My original plan brought the left side of the house closer to the boundary line, and also changed the facade of the house, which is why it would require the additional approval. So I have had to modify the plans to keep it all under the original roof line, which pretty much removes all of the storage from the sides of the garage.