A Trip to Council

Having had some feed back from the Building Inspector on the progress of our plans , we also got a contact number for the Plans Examiner-Thapelo. Trying to get hold of Thapelo prooved to be a rather difficult task but eventually Chris managed and got some information.

Basicaly, he told us we needed to apply for a building line relaxtion in front of the garages. This means signatures from all neighbours who would touch your property where the line is to be relaxed = more forms and another +4 weeks delay in approval. We also need signatures from our direct neighbours for the "subsiduary dwelling" (studio). Everything else seemed to be in order!

So, on Friday afternoon we took ourselves into town to apply for A) zone certificate B) locality map C)building line relaxation application form. Now you would expect chaos at the relevant departments. Besides very lax security, where your hand bag gets x-rayed on leaving the building and even though the metal detector beeps - you get waved through, Chris and I were most impressed by the friendly and efficient sytem. Do not forget that this is also due to how you treat the staff!!! Anyway, within 30mins ,armed with all the relevant documents and information we dashed back to the house to double check the building line....

According to the zone certificate the building restrictions are as follows :
building line on all roads = 6m, 3 storeys with a 50% floor ratio for double story.

According to our plans ,the garage has been detailed with a 5m line. We got the tape measure out and re-measured 3 times (just to be sure) and to our relief we have 6m exactly and our floor ratio is 40% - What a spot of luck!This means no building line relaxtion is needed - all we need to do is make the changes on the plans and resign the changes. Clive, as the architect, will also need to sign the change. However we DO still need our direct neighbours to sign the "subsiduary dwelling" issue - Hope they won't be a problem.....

I can't tell you what a relief this is as we have a rather nosy old duck over the road who seems the type of person who will make a problem just because she can..... when explaining to her about needing neighbour consent I said to her "you won't have a problem will you?" so she replied "can I make it a problem?"and then when we saw her yesterday ,we said "looks nice with the wall complete?" Her response was "NO, I don't like it, its too high and I can't see what's going on" - THAT IS EXACTLY WHY WE HAVE AN 8FT WALL!