Laying out the house

Last weekend we took a massive step in the process of building our dream home in Tasmania.  We had the block resurveyed on Friday and on Saturday we went out onto the land with our designer, Nigel Jones, and  marked out the house on the block.

It was really strange to stand there and have a first conceptual image of how the house will sit on the land.  We were going to scan in the floorplan and put it with the post, but as we were working things out we made a few minor changes, so we decided to wait.

This week we will be having a soil classification done on the block, and from there it should only take about a fortnight to get the development application into Council.  They have about 6 weeks to give it the thumbs up and then it's a building surveyor and then submitting a planning application. Once the development application is approved though we can start preparing the site (excavation) for the build and Derek and start trying to cost the project (the really scary bit).

Nigel has given us a building figure which is above what we had hoped it would come in at, but we need to qualify some of this.  The big thing is that if we owner build then it should be cheaper, although Derek is a little freaked out about it all at the moment :-)

So we'll get the floorplan up as soon as we have an amended copy, but barring any unforeseen changes in the plans it is very likely we will be starting the build before the end of the year at this stage.