Construction

Just recently, I got into drinking dandelion coffee. I know, I’m weird, but you should see me on real coffee !!! Not good. Not nice.

So here I am with a dandy coffee and laptop, and today’s theme is construction.

Renovating 3 houses in a row, including a subdivision each time, has in many ways been a lot simpler than organizing the construction of a very small, very energy efficient house on our block of land.

It seems that even just getting permits to plan and build have been fraught with small and big lessons of how to deal with those desk- people, who continually change faces, and therefore criteria to actually get signed off.

How about the planner, who I paid good money to in order to submit our plans but who failed to make sure that council acknowledged the fact that he submitted them. Six weeks later, when I asked him how the application is proceeding I find out that they have been sitting in reception at the planning department because they wanted one extra bit of paper: proof of title- which is also ridiculous, because they had just issued it!

After that, because of staff issues it took council from May to the very end of October to give permission to plan the building.

(to be fair, one mistake I had made was to ‘forget’ that the land surveyor had said in the beginning that because of an overlay, I would have to have another planning application to the application to subdivide, if I didn’t include the plan of the dwelling initially.)

Next the building permit.

Says one building surveyor: it’s all good, we’ll send you out the permit in the mail after I satisfied lists and lists of documents they needed—next thing you know –he’s left the office that he’s worked in for many years and in his footsteps is some dude who needs more and more information, proof and utter detailed nonsense to actually let me build a structure that’s been built hundreds of times before!

Just today I had to make the building company understand, that I won’t get a building permit if they don’t give me engineering drawings. But they only give them out normally if the initial 25% construction deposit has been paid- which I can only pay once the contract is in place-which they haven’t sent me because I don’t’ have a building permit! AHHHHH…

There are a lot of chicken and egg situations in the building and construction sector.

And you are probably going to ask me: Why isn’t the building company doing the permit? Apparently they are not a registered building company, – and that’s why I had to become an owner-builder. Another 13 different documents and fees to pay.

Even after all this, I’m still confident that once we get the paper work sorted, we will end up with a good product- cost effective and energy efficient- which was my main concern.

Am I going to use the same construction company in our next construction?

Ask me in 6 months. Or could be 6 years. Contingency plan.