The Illusion of Progress

So its been about 4 or 5 weeks since we settled on this property and could actually access it, make applications on its behalf as the owners, and get the various surveys etc done as part of the building permit process. That doesn't sound like a long time but  we had spent most of the previous two months readying ourselves to hit the ground running. Except red tape is oblivious to our intentions.

A few days ago I drove by the house and caught out of the corner of my eye that little pile of broken tiles on the front "lawn" - and I was happy. I hastily u-turned, snapped a pic and emailed off to Jason. He was just as happy as me. 

Its a very strange thing to be so pleased that something resulting in us having less than when we started should be considered progress - but we'll take it.

Just a few rows of tiles off, some discarded coffee cups strewn on the lawn by the mysterious workers who came and went on a baking hot day. When will they be back? Who can say. Work is currently being held up by the continuing wait for the demolition permit to come through. Its really just a piece of paper, but the local council has taken about 4 weeks so far just to meditate on that.

Meanwhile, we've been finishing off the review of the preliminary plans and preparing notes etc to send back to The Very Nice Building Company - that took us a week - see how time slides by? Now we need to wait on revised preliminary drawings that we can use to (a) meet with the Vicar of the neighbouring church in the hope he will agree that 300mm between friends is no big deal (our 2 metre setback from the church side boundary actually needs to be 2.30) and then (b) apply to council for special permission to keep that setback to 2 metres. Apparently that could take a month to come through - and then and only then can we either submit our actual building permit application or - frustratingly - change our preliminary plans again to  meet whatever the council might require.

So in the space of a week we have gone from thinking we were about to submit our building application to seeing that this could still take another couple of months before we have the go ahead to begin construction. Patience? Its overrated.