Consent to build (at last)
September 16th, 2008 - Posted in eco-building - by Sarah|
Nine months and ten days ago we submitted the building consent application for our house to Grey District council and today we finally got the phone call to go and collect it. Now, in addition to building the house we just have the fight to get our fees refunded ahead of us.
Councils are supposed to respond to all applications within 20 working days of submission either to give consent or make a request for additional information. Our first request for additional information took 28 weeks, many visits and phone calls to the council and a formal letter of complaint. Until then we hadn’t had so much as an acknowledgement from them so didn’t even have a reference number to put on the complaint! In the 17 weeks since then we have been blatantly lied to, been told that errors were made during the consent for the garage and had to escalate delays once again in order to actually make any progress. At the same time materials costs have gone up across the board and we have had to spend a winter without a house to live in.
The documentation, when we collected it this morning, had been transformed from a neat, bound and usable document into an untidy stack of pages stapled together randomly. Someone in the council office has had to spend half a day putting their official stamp on each page individually instead of just the cover sheet.
It’s no wonder that so many people go for standardised house plans – while all this has been going on some friends have had their house consented and built.
Still, we are very relieved to have ended up making no major compromises – untreated timber, earth floor, lime plaster, timber windows and a composting loo. We’ll do a longer post here soon on the house design and layout.
on September 16th, 2008 at 11:47 am
At last!
Amid all the bad news about at the moment,some good.
You should get better weather for the work,as well
MUM AND DAD
on September 17th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Congratulations. I will be up to have a look as soon as the snow begins to melt.
Simon
on October 14th, 2008 at 8:58 am
looks like a great project. did you get away without treated timber cavity battens?
on October 14th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Hey guys,
Looking great!, Daylight’s getting longer now hope the 150mm rain tonight ain’t gonna bugger ya’s up.
Willy
on October 18th, 2008 at 2:08 am
Ben, we originally had untreated LC cavity battens in the plans but had almost lost the will to live by the time this debate came up with the council and decided to compromise in an effort to get the consent approved. We felt we might have got away with untreated LC if we had been using a proprietary cladding material but the council were just too unsure of the lime plaster so we are using H3.2 pine. cheers, Sarah
on October 18th, 2008 at 2:09 am
Hi Willy, don’t believe everything you hear on the West Coast weather forecast – been sunny here for days