Where do I start…

Apologies for the delay in posting. I was holding out until we received the final kitchen layouts, and possibly Council Approval, however neither has turned up. Yep, Council have had our plans since early January and are still yet to give us a green light. What’s more, our neighbours called hassling about when we will start building so we can have a fence installed and when we explained that we are still waiting for Council approval, they then let us know that they had asked Council to reject our plans. Lovely. Rather than coming to us with their issue, they’ve potentially held us up and cost us time and money. They feel that one of our bedroom windows will look into their ensuite bathroom, which has frosted glass anyway, however we triple-checked the drawings before submission so that we don’t look into anyone’s house. We don’t want to be looking into their bathroom any more than they want us looking in! We’re just disappointed that they went about things in an under-handed way. If they had come to us first we could have showed them the plans relative to their house, and had they been nice but still unhappy about the window, we would have changed it to a highlight window (an option we considered anyway). It would have been less drama and more amicable. We’re still paying for a temporary fence though as it is the fair thing to do.

Edit: Council finally got back to our builder this week, and have requested that more engineering drawings be drafted and a new site survey be ordered as they have changed the slab classifications since our plans were drafted. So, we’re looking at another $500 and two weeks for plans to be drawn, then more waiting while Council deliberate. This is how I feel about that:

&^*^*&&%^$Q*#!!@#$%^&*+(@)*&!@!@(@&!%$!+!&!%^@%#$!$#@!$%#&!*@#@)#@!!!

On the bright side, no mention of the bedroom window or neighbour complaint was made, so it looks like that isn’t an issue.

Anyway, our kitchen plans are coming along nicely, and I would have been able to show you but our kitchen contact decided to make more changes than requested, which we don’t like, and so we have asked him to change it to the exact specifications we gave. I’ll post them as soon as I get them.

Bathroom selections are also nearly finalised. Our poor builder has been asking for them for weeks now, but it’s tough when you can’t see the space or have weekdays off to visit showrooms, assuming they even have the items you want to look at on display! I will post more on these soon.

In the meantime, we ordered those pendant lights for the kitchen and they turned up today. We quickly took one out of the box and it looks great! I will take pics when we take the other two out to check them later.

Sorry for the sparse post but I have just started a new job and Mick is swamped at his, so we have been spending our time working with the spare moments taken up by house planning, weddings and other such things. This weekend we’re heading up to Newcastle to visit family (with a possible quick stop at Reece to look at toilets) and on the way back we’re seeing a very dear friend who is losing a family member. It is sad moments like these that make you realise that work and house plans, whilst important, aren’t what really matter in the grand scheme of things...