House Episode 10

After a year with not so much as a shovel of dirt excavated from our yard I have lost much enthusiasm for the whole house thing. It'll happen, but I'm buggered if I know when or how much it will cost or what colour it will be. Meh.

Anyway, neighbour had a grumble so we're moving a wall 200mm away from their boundary. Of course, if they'd had the good sense to talk to us, when we asked them to talk to us so we could work with them, we may have put a skillion roof on or done one of many other things to lessen their the impact of our renovation upon them. But they didn't, they chose to piss off Sal instead. Not a smart move.

Council are now a stumbling block. They have a bit of a hard-on about stormwater, what with a recent re-classification of our street into one "subject to local overland flooding." AAAARRRggggHHH! We're all going to be swept away! Or not. As far as I can tell "subject to local overland flooding" is council-speak for "hill." We're on the high side of a hill, the bottom of our garden is at the bottom of the hill, from where the bottom of our neighbour's garden rises. Unless our garden floods to a depth of around 12ft our neighbours' properties should be safe from the cascades of doom our renovation may cause. But, of course, there are a whole heap of hoops to jump through. Council listed a load of criteria, a bit beyond our architect's realm and therefore we engaged a hydro-engineer (kerchung!, naturally.) The letter from council was awfully nice, and said if we had any enquiries we should call their engineer.

So, our architect, engineer and I have called the council's enginner. Or tried. Many times. We've left messages. We've emailed him. We've made more phone calls and left more messages. The guy is a fucking shadow. And the kicker is - if we don't get our submission in within a couple of weeks we get penalised. Deep joy. Council can, basically, ignore us and then penalise us. Great. No, really, fucking awesome work. Love it.

Aren't you glad I came out of blog retirement?