Construction Certification and other boring stuff December 2011 – May 2012

With our DA approval we thought things would speed along but there seemed to be a few herdles to jump yet. One major problem with our house that I didn’t mention was damp, well actually a swimming pool under our house, why it’s there no one knows but it causes all our clothes to be mouldy and our paint actually peels off the wall. The end goal was not just to have a great house, but one with no rising damp or pooling under the house, so this required a Hydraulic Engineer report which took a while to get as it’s not easy to get rid of water. The agreed plan was to have a retention pit under the deck (for the pooling under the hosue), an absorption pit in the backyard (for the lower level roof) and a rainwater tank (for the 1^st floor roof) – a lot of work and money but we needed to make sure the issue would be resolved. This report and the many others required took quite a while to get and so this stage seemed pretty slow.
On the plus side, whilst all this was going on Trevor was working on our detailed drawings. Most people don’t seem to get this level but we notice if things don’t look right. We wanted Trevor to get rid of as many of the niggly things as possible (within the time allowed, given that our job is probably pretty little and not going to make him a millionaire) and so a lot of time was spend on floor levels, wall and metal junctions and other exciting things that make a house look really well finished (or so we hope).