{Renovation Junkies} The council waiting game...

Once all the relevant papers are lodged with the council comes the agonisingly long wait to see if you get approval.

I get the impression that our DA (Development Application) is fairly straightforward. But who ever really knows what is straightforward to the local council.

According to Luke, the guy at council assigned to our case, we have to go through a check with the Heritage department and a neighbour notification period of one month. All going well with those two things we should get approval.

If there are any major roadblocks to approval it will more than likely be the heritage department, because everything we are requesting to do must be inline with their rules and regulations.

Also, the length of time it takes to get approval will come down the heritage department too - the lady whose job this is only works two days per week and she deals with all heritage issues in the council's area.

Our neighbours recently completed a renovation, and their DA took six months to be approved....four of those months it was sitting in the heritage department.

I am not even sure of the average time to get DA approval - I guess every council varies and every DA varies....it is all a big fat unknown and the wait is killing us. I check up the website every day to see if there has been a change in our application status - there hasn't been!

Have you ever submitted a DA? How long did it take to get approval?

{Renovation Junkies} Our architect Stuart

Our architects name is Stuart. He has been fantastic to deal with and has helped us out immensely - and in fact, continues to do so.

After getting his details from James (at Renovation Junkies) I contacted him to arrange a meeting. He was able to accommodate our work schedule and the kids and came on a Saturday morning.

We talked through what we wanted to achieve from renovating and showed him some of our scribbled drawings about how we thought it might all work....or not work, whatever the case may have been.

(We also learnt that we needed to get some surveying plans of our property done, so I enlisted a surveyor who drew them up for us and forwarded them on to Stuart.)

Stuart walked around the place, asked a stack of questions, measured this and that, and took some photos.

Once he was done, he headed off to do some initial sketches of a couple of ideas to show how we could achieve the dream renovation. He told us that this stage of the process should take the longest. Working with the sketches is the easiest and cheapest time to change your mind on the design of your renovation. Once the plans start and ultimately the construction, you want your design to be set in stone.

Stuart returned a couple of weeks later with two sketch ideas, the one above and the one we didn't choose. Both were great ideas and incorporated things that Hubby and I hadn't thought about. As soon as I saw the light well/courtyard I was pretty much sold on the above design. We did tweak the kitchen a bit, but everything else was a slam dunk.

The next step was for Stuart to create all the DA paperwork and plans that were required to submit to the council to get our renovation underway. These documents consisted of....

• Survey
• Site Plan
• Floor Plans
• Elevations
• Sections
• Statement of Environment Effects
• Waste Management Plan
• Soil and Water Management Plan
• A4 Notification Plans
• Basix report
• Schedule of Materials
• Cost Summary Report
• Heritage Impact Statement

We met with Stuart again to view all the plans, read the reports and sign everything. Then Stuart was able to submit our DA to the council!! Now the waiting game....

Have you been through the DA process?