Through Council.

We are through council. It took about a month, with some complications...

The soil we are building on is high in salinity, which means we needed to include special concrete to stop corrosion etc. McDonald Jones sent the plans back to drafting, and with a 2.7K variation later, the plans were accepted by the council.

The next step is a construction certificate. That should take about 5 days, then about 20 days to start construction!! - Our bank has given the all-clear to commence construction.

There is still a bit of paperwork to be done, but we should have all that cleared up by next week.

McDonald Jones also notified us that our contract time is over time by two months. We had approximately 6 months to start builder or fall into a price increase. Luckily they decided not to pursue the extra change, which is fair enough because we are now ready to roll.

So much news!

Well its been a very fast-moving two weeks.

Aside from the house, I organised a surprise holiday for my girlfriend and I. A few days into it, I proposed to her on the top of a snow-capped mountain, and she said yes! so now we are engaged, very exciting.

Now on to the house:

The day before we left, we got a reply from the Kalina council saying that our plans were not accepted and we had to amend a couple of things. We did not include the required amount of tree's in the backyard which was easy to fix up on the landscape plan. The other point, is that they did not understand to what extent our 'bag and paint' feature wall was going to look like, just from the plans. So McDonald Jones added some extra information to the plans, and extended the feature to wrap around the entire wall.

With that, they approved our plans, and McDonald Jones submitted our plans to council about on Monday. So now its a bit of a waiting game. In the meantime, we are organising our finances and preparing for our first mortgage payment, I'm not sure if thats supposed to be exciting or not :-)

We also had a surprise variation of $1000 for Sydney water to come out and peg out the storm water drain. I hope we dont have any more of these little surprises, as they all add up very fast....