JG King modified Heywood - Landscaping

Woohoo!! I know that feeling. Congrats on finally getting going, you've had a tough haul.

Congrats, what an effort. You've got 400 posts too and they haven't even hit site.

For invoicing, we got our base invoice soon after our slab was laid and never got a deposit invoice. We just paid both together at base stage. I wouldn't chase them for the deposit invoice right now as you'll only pay interest on it.

Interesting! We were told it had to be paid before we start onsite. Well I won't be mentioning that again. Thanks

Wow that is such good news. It's great that you will be starting next week. Fingers crossed that you are all in and settled by Christmas.

FANTASTIC NEWS!!!! YAY Slab soon and youll fly along. Very excited to watch it come together.

Hi Bank,
Thanks for taking the time to start this thread, I have been following it for some time now as we are also building in Fyansford (stage1)
I am wanting to know if you can offer us any clarity or advice as we are now going through a similar drama regarding our setback and facade height. It is coming up a week since we were delivered the bad news. Communication with our bc is almost impossible as she doesn't return phone calls and her emails are not providing and clear answers and always arrive at the end of the day on Fridays.

I've been making phone calls to our surveyor and the developer whom are yet to call me back (i am not holding my breath) but at this stage from my own investigating and also from studying your thread I am led to believe that there has been a change to the MCP since we signed our contract of sale for our land that does not match up with the developer guidelines in regard to encroachment.The MCP that we have in our contract is different to the MCP that the builder emailed me. Am I on the right track?

We are being told that we need to move our house back and also cut it in length of our house to fit our portico into the building envelope.From the siting of our plan we seem to meet all of the design guidelines in regard to 1.5m encroachment, however like yourselves our portico pillar is attached to the house and i am assuming (as I can't get a straight answer from our builder) that they are taking the measurement from this pillar and not the wall of the house.

If this is the case I cannot understand how this was not picked up during our tender process. I am beyond frustrated considering we were initially promised a Feb start and now we are faced with a problem like this.

I have been really feeling for you all this time that i've been reading your thread and cannot believe that we now seem to be going through the same ordeal.

Hi Zehunted,

Firstly, I feel terrible that you are where we were a month ago, it's a really sucky place to be .

I'm not sure if I can offer any clarity, it's all very grey and murky . However your interpretation of the situation seems correct to me, the MCP was changed last June and is now different to what was in the contracts. My basic understanding is that the MCP trumps pretty much everything and can't be changed. I will pm you a document that we were given that explains the hierarchy of all these things. We were told that the wording used in the MCP doesn't allow anything at all (even eaves) into the setback, or out of the building envelope (which we don't have but sounds like you do). If I'm understanding it correctly the problem is the MCP doesn't mention that porches etc are excluded from this, it just says 'the building'.

The developer completely didn't agree with this which is why they tried to help us. Their take was that the MCP change was intended to be less restrictive and follow intent of rescode and to reduce the restriction placed by the old MCP, but it actually had the opposite effect. As you know, the developer spoke to our surveyor and the council and convinced them that the intention of the document was different, so with the appropriate legal letters the council said they would process our report and consent (for height above 3.6m) and our surveyor was fine to issue the building permit as long as we had the report and consent from council. And you know how that turned out... council are full of it! I don't know if the council guy just said what the developer wanted to hear or what happened but it's clear now that we were never going to get by them.

Is your porch above 3.6m? If it isn't, you might have a slight hope if the developer can convince your building surveyor that their intentions weren't to prevent porches encroaching. In regards to the pier being attached it seems to be up to the determination of the building surveyor if they consider it part of the house or the porch. Unfortunately if you are above 3.6m my advise is to move on now and save yourself anymore heartache because you won't get by the council.

Keep pushing to speak to your building surveyor to get their take on it. If you are getting a flat out 'never going to happen' from them then again just move on.

The only other option is to go to planning to seek a change to your building envelope. But to be honest the guy at the council didn't sound very positive about our chances and after we found out that the developer had tried to change the MCP for future releases and the council refused to allow any provision for anything over 3.6m we knew we had no hope. I think if you went down that path there's a fair chance you would be wasting a lot of time and money.

If you decide to fight it, there is a house going up on Littlewood drv (release D I believe) that has it's porch slab about 3.6m from the front (approximated with my husbands arm span, I haven't got out the tape measure), it's only at frame stage if you want to look for it. I have no idea how it got by the building surveyor but there is a precedent for you! And there is another one that we confirmed with a tape measure also on littlewood, however it was in release B so it might have a different MCP.

It is enormously frustrating that this doesn't get picked up earlier, I think the problem is that no one looks at the MCP until you get to the building permit stage. I can sympathise on the Friday afternoon emails, it must be a trick they all use so they don't have to deal with us .

I'll pm you some names of who we dealt with and that document now.

If I can offer you some hope, we were able to turn this around pretty quickly and went from our last knock back to being onsite in a month, so you could still be starting soon. Our builder really pulled out all stops to get our job moving!

Thanks so much for replying Bank. I cannot understand why on earth it was the developer that changed the MCP to exclude encroachment when there own design design guidelines allow for it. Any info and contacts you could provide me would be absolutely awesome as I am feeling a little lost right now as to who exactly I can get some straight answers out of.
I spoke to a council guy today who was very understanding but really didn't answer my questions as thoroughly as I'd hoped (I guess because he didn't tell me what I wanted hear) but he was very clear that if encroachment is not stated on the MCP then it is not allowed.

Our porch is higher than 3.6 however even when I suggested to our builder to lower the height or even just choose a different facade they are still of the opinion that we will have to move the house so it is all in the envelope, eaves include. I really don't want to go down the council planning route as like you said it will be a lot of time and money and highly doubtful we will get approval.

Your suggestion to move on gave me a bit of a reality check. The last couple of days we have said if we could sell the block tomorrow we would seriously consider it. It's a pretty heartbreaking thought. This has been roughly a two year process from our initial deposit on our land and we have been through all the same excitement as you have with watching the stages of the development, to getting title, to fences coming down and being allowed on our block.

I am trying to stay positive as I am sure that there is a reasonable solution but the communication (or lack thereof) from our builder is just so damn frustrating.

If there is a facade with a porch lower than 3.6 that you would be happy to live with, talk to the developer and your building surveyor to see if there is any chance that you can get it through with the encroachment. Keep in mind that it is 3.6 from existing ground level so if you slope the same way as us and you're doing cut and fill, that makes it even harder.

I only say move on because of what we have just been through. If someone had told the same thing 6 months ago I wouldn't have listened lol! I am glad that we tried to fight it, I would have died wondering if we didn't, however I can see now that it was fruitless and I wouldn't advise anyone else to bother after all the heartache we went through.

We had our 'sell the block' moments too, but don't, there must be a solution! It would have broke my heart if it came to selling.

How much length do you need to cut out of the house? Can you see a way to do it? Send me your plan if you want another pair of eyes, I have an architecture degree I don't use.

As far as the builder is concerned, ask for a meeting so that you can sit down and go through all of your options, it might need to be with someone higher up. Sitting around waiting for responses to emails and phone calls is frustrating.

Thank you so much for the information. I'll have to wait until later when it is a bit quieter around here to pour over it all. Good news is that the names of contacts you gave are the exact ones I have been trying to contact so at least my relentless investigating have not been a total waste of time.

We are building with Porter Davis and it's not that they haven't given us any options it's more that they are not clearly explaining what the actual problem is to begin with.
There is another facade that I'm pretty sure will meet the MCP however it is the "included" facade and so so plain compared to what we have chosen. The bright side though, as it is included we would save a substantial amount of money.

Thank you for reminding me of the existing ground level measurement. One of my suggestions to our builder was a more aggressive cut to our block to bring the height down. Their response was that it will blow costs out...no mention at all that this still would not pass approval.

Thanks for your offer to look over our plans, that is very kind. I will send them through to later when I sit down down read up on what you have sent me

Hey do you have developer approval? And if you do, when did you get it? I'm curious if they are still approving them when they don't meet the MCP after our debacle.

It would be a shame to compromise on your facade . It wasn't something we were willing to do. Fortunately our earthworks just missed the easement, trimming the length of ours would have been tricky on the kitchen/family side of the house.

Porter Davis have quite a number of houses in Fyansford, probably the most out of anyone, I'm surprised they didn't know about the issue before now?

Do you have to have screw piles? I've noticed some porter davis have them and some don't, I've always wondered why. Sorry twenty questions!

We have a fence! Woo hoo! It's feeling very real now!

You already have the driveway crossover? Did the developer do that with the footpath?

and a portaloo

Cleanest it will ever be! And a bin!

Yes crossovers came with the blocks.

We were going to go down on the weekend and clean up all the tradie takeaway rubbish and take the last empty site photo for a time-lapse but they beat us!

Woohoo!! Slab party soon

Good to see they provide a proper bin.

Ours was this stupid wire mesh cage with an ill-fitting lid.
Had so much rubbish blow all around our block and onto the neighbours back yard.

Woohoo I remember how exciting that was and it finally begins to become real. Got to love some physical changes you land.