The Pre Pre Application Meeting

Today we visited the Richmond Town Hall. This is the HQ of the City of Yarra Council and it is very pretty inside. It also smells very old.

Why?

To do building renovations to your house, you need to submit an application for a planning or building permit, or both. The changes to your site must adhere to a set of standards and rules based on your particular council and block. Before you can knock down, build or install a helipad, the council has to approve these plans. Most people would use an architect to design the building and write the planning/building application, but in the interest of saving a  bajillion dollars, we are doing it ourselves. (Note 1: Gary has a lot of technical knowledge that I don't think we could do this without. Note 2: Gary is for hire.)

We have done most of our planning permit application already (more on that to come), but went in to have a chat basically about what our plan was for the renovation and to double check we had identified all the rules that apply to our house. We just rocked up and asked for someone to talk to about planning permits, and were referred to a helpful and very knowledgeable man named David Cameron who made the time to chat with us about our planning application. It appears he moonlights as a Town Planner in addition to running England.

What happened:

First we told him our address and he used a fancy councilly program to bring up deets on our house and showed us the rules that apply to it. For example, our house has heritage overlays which affect the changes we can make to it because it is of great historical importance.

We talked through our draft planning application with him to find out what we needed to work on to submit at the pre application meeting. We also talked about the things that we were concerned about (such as the way our upstairs windows will be creepily overlooking the neighbours' yards) and he was able to give us some advice about the requirements of the council.

We found out:

We basically found out that we have been planning our house very carefully to fit the requirements that are specified by the council, and apparently this is not the norm. It seems as though some rules are a little more flexible than others and not all of them have to be met. Some rules simply cannot apply to terrace houses in particular as they would not be reasonable.

We also found out that for us to build an onsite temporary bathroom addition while we are in the process of renovating, we won't need a permit for that as it is a building solely for the purpose of assisting in the renovation (like a site office would). This is a bit of a victory for us as we have been really stressed about knocking down the current bathroom and having nowhere to pee for a year or two.

Vote:

On an unrelated note, one of our new suburb friends has been kind enough to add some graffiti to our house. I put it to you to decide, is it a letter of the alphabet as Gary chooses to believe, is it some sort of vegetable, or have they just drawn balls on our house?


What did they graffiti?

W
Some sort of vegetable
Balls. Big ones.

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