JG King modified Heywood - Landscaping

Sounds like you are finally headed in the right direction Bank, hope it keeps going that way and the neighbors play nice

Yes hope so. We have spoken to both neighbours before and they seemed on our side but of course they hadn't seen the plans then. Fingers crossed.

Developer approval came through this morning! Earlier in the week we asked our contact if he had any influence over the design panel to rush it through. We were copied in on some emails between him, his boss and the architect who heads up the panel late yesterday, and within minutes we had an email from the architect telling us to let him know when it was in and he would process it as a priority. This morning we hadn't even got to confirming that it went in Wednesday and it had already come through! I must say that throughout this battle the Developer has bent over backwards for us and Kings have been very patient.

Hopefully admin will get the approved drawings off to the council today and then it will just be another week of waiting for the neighbours to do their bit. We don't understand why the council even needs the developer approved drawings, he never asked for them the first or second time around .

We're so close now!

I have been following your thread for a while now, congratulations on this big step, hopefully the actual build is on the horizon for you now!!

Thanks, we're starting to get our hopes up that it might be sooner than we thought. I probably should calm down a bit or I'll end up disappointed again .

Sounds like you are finally really starting to move forward hopefully you gain speed now like a rock down the fyansford hill.

My husband commented that he thinks we had more happen with the house last week than we have had any other time in the almost 2 years since we purchased the block, this prompted me to come up with a timeline. It's been a hell of a ride with 10 drawing revisions (not including last weeks fixes because they didn't change the drawing rev.), more back and forth with the setback than I'm sure any job has ever seen, and lots of heartache and happy moments. It's fair to say we are more than ready to start!

14/3/2015 – Land contract signed (est. settlement Apr/May 2016)
31/3/2015 – First estimate from JG King
25/5/2015 – Deposit paid with JG King
17/7/2015 – Preliminary plans – with hilarious 25 degree skillion roof! It looked like a garden gnome!
29/7/2015 – Electrical appointment
31/7/2015 – Colours appointment
4/9/2015 – Tile appointment
9/10/2015 – reworked drawings
30/10/2015 – third set of drawings
10/2/2016 – drawings again
April/May 2016 – chase our tails to reselect discontinued tiles only to eventually find out that they were set aside at the time of selection. Update on land, now expected to title in Aug 2016
5/5/2016 – Developer approval application submitted
24/5/2016 – Developer approval failed due to a stack of nit-picky things
25/5/2016 – Road completed
10/6/2016 – colour doc updated with new essa stone
15/6/2016 - Contract drawings including amendments for Developer approval – still a few things to sort out
23/6/2016 – 6[sup]th[/sup] set of drawings back and sent in for Developer approval again
26/6/2016 – Developer comes back with more notes – back to drafting again
28/6/2016 – Land loan approved, pre-approval on construction loan
8/7/2016 – 7[sup]th[/sup] set of drawings back and resubmitted to developer – third time lucky!
19/7/2016 – Developer approval! And floor area fixed on drawings and fly doors added.
2/8/2016 – Statement of compliance on the land
25/8/2016 – Land titled
6/9/2016 – finally stand on our land for the first time! Soil testing done.
9/9/2016 – Land settled
23/9/2016 – Land info added to drawings
29/9/2016 – Applied for report and consent for boundary wall height and height of pier in setback
4/10/2016 – Engineering drawings back
10/10/2016 – Engineering take 2 and Final site costs
13/10/2016 - Contract signed. Find out council won’t process report and consent
31/10/2016 – Construction loan unconditional
1/12/2016 – Council agrees to process report and consent with letters from developer and their lawyers
16/12/2016 – Finally have three support letters for council
21/12/2016 – letters sent to council
24/1/2017 – Council again refuses to process report and consent
2/2/2017 – Make the decision to move the house back – back to drafting!
6/2/2017 – 10[sup]th[/sup] revision of drawings back, sent to council and engineering.
7/2/2017 - Council sends letters to neighbours for comment, due back by the 21st
8/2/2017 – Plans with new setback sent to developer for approval again. Revised engineering back. And drawing errors fixed (for the final time hopefully!)
10/2/2017 – Developer approval!

I've added this to my first post and will try to keep it updated.

Thats a fair timeline hopefully you get to add site start to the list soon.

Unfortunately that won't be happening. Council has refused our boundary wall height consent. Unf*#!king believable! We are beyond gutted this time. We are so close to just giving up and walking away. The reasons don't even seem to make sense, our neighbours garage will hide ours from anyone ever seeing it anyway, and once the site is filled we won't effectively be as high.

They have given us a target height of 3.6m and an average of 3.4m, so no relaxation on the max height at all and 200mm on the average. We have asked for drafting to give us our options. However we both have reasonably good knowledge of design and construction so we pretty much know what they are and there is really only one that we want to consider. It will really come down to what JG King are willing to do and it seems lately that policy changes mean that they are not very flexible anymore.

So sorry to hear this Bank.

This just seems to be going on and on for you.. sorry to hear they have put another road block in your way.

Oh that sucks i can only imagine how you must feel. Hopefully they can come up with a good idea to get you aroumd this.

I wish I had more faith in the drafting department. As you can see by our timeline we have quite a history with them. They have already come back this afternoon saying that dropping the garage wasn't an option. It turned out they were working with the wrong numbers!! Somebody didn't read what the council actually said! We think if they put the parapet back to the way they had it and then drop the garage 240mm we will meet the max height and should just scrape it in on the average height. And if not we can take another brick course out of the internal garage height. They just need to think a bit more creatively. We'll just draw it up ourselves this weekend and hopefully they can sort it out on Monday.

Far out bank, can't believe how much drama you are having with this!! I really hope it all gets sorted soon for you

Neither can we! I'm fluctuating between disbelief and anger.

We expressed our concerns about the height of this wall multiple times but we were assured it was nothing to worry about, getting dispensation was the easiest way and there wouldn't be any issues.

Back when they first changed the roof for the box gutter rule changes we were 96mm too high so admin asked drafting to find a way to reduce it to avoid needing this dispensation (we knew once we had the land survey done it would only get worse but admin had instructed them before we knew about it), it came back from drafting 260mm higher! They improved the design but made the problem worse. Their thinking was that it would change when the land info was added, they only had to look at the land engineering that we had to see that it would get worse not better. If they had just left it alone it might have been within reason enough for council to grant the dispensation.

But then council have had our plans for 5 months and their advice was that we wouldn't have any trouble with this one. I don't know if they're just messing with us or what?!

If you changed the facade to something more traditional would it make the council approval easier?

It should because the parapet wall is causing the height problem. It's not an option though, we probably would have walked away a long lime ago if we weren't in love with our facade. There are lots of similar plans out there but not many facades that we like. We have always had our hearts set on a skillion, we never even considered builders who didn't offer one. Our estate guidelines prefer flat, skillion, or curved roofs and if you go hip or gable it has to be 25 degrees which we're not a fan of. The guidelines were a big part of why we bought in our estate, we really like that they are encouraging non standard and custom design, sadly the council doesn't seem to be on the same page.

I'm not sure kings would allow a change that big at this point anyway, they wouldn't let us change the rear of the house because it meant changes to the roof.

We're stuck between a rock and a hard place at the moment .

We have drawn up a solution that we believe works we just have to see what kings have to say about it.

Drawings are back! Rev 12! There was another one last week that we weren't aware of, looks like they just shaved 40mm off the blob on the right hand side, I haven't noticed any other changes. We always knew this was an issue and pointed it out very early on but they seem to prefer to wait until someone officially tells them to fix things. I suspect this would have been pointed out by the building surveyor the first time it was submitted for approval but I don't know, maybe drafting just worked it out.

The boundary wall height issue has been fixed with the solution that we proposed. Step down the garage 3 brick courses to deal with the max height, and remove 3 brick courses from most of the boundary wall parapet. Hopefully this was the best solution . We are quite happy with it, we will have 2 steps up from the garage to the house and a 2040 door rather than the 2340 door, however the positives are a flatter driveway and more articulation on the facade between the porch and the garage parapet.






The drawings have now been sent back to council and engineering. Fingers crossed we get an answer quickly, and as admin said, it had better be a yes this time . Kings are moving mountains to get this done quickly which we really appreciate, it's been a very stressful time worrying that we may never get to build this house. We have binge watched all 6 seasons of Suits over the last few weeks to distract ourselves, but we're all caught up now, so we need to get this thing moving .

Oh I have everything crossed it gets passed this time! It looks great still I think!
Love suits, I've just watched season 6 Ep 13 after a break from it since season 5 ended! Love it

Yes bring on Thursday night! I need another ep. I assume you've seen Madmen? If you love suits, you'll like Madmen.