Hi Ho! Hi Ho! It's off to Council our plans go!

Finally, after 4 days of continual follow up with Plantation (that was possibly bordering on harassment...) our plans have been lodged with the certifier, who is responsible for approving our building plans and obtaining council approval for the plumbing. It is expected this process will take somewhere between 6-8 weeks (gotta love council red tape!!) during which our final Post Contract Variation will be completed (based on the soil test), and after which our approved plans will be handed over to our site administrator for the allocation of labour and materials. Based on all this going to plan, it is looking like we will be starting our build sometime around mid-late August. However, the little experience I have with the building process so far, tells me to add 4 weeks to that...... However, we are both looking forward to getting home on Monday and to be able to drive up to our block!

We now have a block of dirt!

We have received confirmation from our solicitor that our land settled at 2:30pm today, with no hiccups!! Yay!!

We also received our final soil report back yesterday which confirmed 'M' class soil. Plantation are currently in the process of completing our final drawings, which will then be lodged to council for approval. This is expected to happen before the end of the week.

Once they are lodged with council, then they will start working on the costs for our slab, however this will end up being a credit back to us of approximately $5,000 :)

It is frustrating at how slow the building process is given our land has been registered for 2 weeks and our plans still aren't in council, but I guess we are at the mercy of Plantation now. We now have a new pre-site administrator looking after us as of last Wednesday (as our previous one left Plantation) and communication has definitely been much improved since then (I even got an email reply on a Saturday last week!!) so hopefully things should be a little smoother going forward.

The soil test is in....

And the good news is that it has come back right on the cusp between an 'S' and 'M' class.

Plantation have given us two options:

  1) an 'M' class slab or;

  2) an 'S' class slab with additional pierings.

Although we are still awaiting costings, from my review of material available on the Internet, it appears that the 'M' class slab is the structurally better way to go as it is more than what is required and would mean less 'movement' of the slab overall.

However even with the 'M' class slab, we are still expecting a sizeable credit back of approximately $5,000 as our contract was done based on an 'H1' class slab! This is great because it will cover the majority of upgrades we have done along the way :)

In other updates, settlement is all booked and ready to go for the 18th - hard to believe this is only 4 days away! And our plans are about to be lodged with Logan City Council - it will be interesting to see how long it takes for it to work its way through the red tape!

Our lovely bitumen road!

Just a quick update with a few pictures showing our lovely new bitumen road and footpath or the front of our block.

Only 8 days until settlement day now and our site survey has been done - we are just waiting on the soil test report which is due Monday :)

Settlement date confirmed

Just a very quick update - it has been confirmed that our settlement date for our land will be 18 June 2013. In a very unlikely coincidence of dates, this also happens to be our 2 year wedding anniversary......we can only hope that this coincidence will bring us good luck throughout the building process!

The land has registered!!!

We just received an email that our land registered today (4 June) and settlement will be in 14 days!! So definitely looks like we will return from our overseas adventure in more debt than before we left :)

Not a lot more action at the land, with the footpath boxing now down, but still no bitumen! Can't be far away now (and the below photo was taken on Saturday so it could've changed since then....)

Unfortunately we are still having "communication issues" with Plantation. Not sure if they are taking advantage of the fact that we are overseas and there's nothing we can do other than continuously email, but we have sent 3 emails since last Friday and have not had a single reply.........so who knows if our soil test or site survey has even been done yet.

Update: Just received an email from Plantation.....talk about timing.....informing us that our soil test and site survey has been completed. The survey is due back today and the soil test is due back late next week. I have asked Plantation to fast-track this given our land has now registered - that probably just means it might happen in a semi-realisitc time frame at least :)

If we come across any more pictures whilst we are away, will be sure to post them :)