Thursday

Thursday was a fairly normal day. Daniel was supposed to be hearing from the builder for an update. When I got home there wasn't much to tell, just that the builder hadn't found out much about the council progress...

That was until we went to Cold Rock for some ice cream. Sitting down with our yummy sundae, Daniel casually pulled out some scrunched up paper, and it was our council approval!!!! That little turd, it was a VERY good surprise.

We had not actually been expecting our approval to come through so soon (even though we we were already in the 7th or 8th week of waiting). Getting approval was the one last hurdle that we have been worried about for various reasons. Our block isn't exactly the most normal block, it's a funny shape, there's only really one spot on it that is suitable for building (trust me, we've checked if there were any other options), it's had some massive water course issues and it has a butt load of trees around the building envelope. For these reasons, we've always been hesitant about whether council would have an issue with something, or just that we wanted to build in general.

About 3 weeks ago we got a letter from the council stating that in order for them to proceed with the application, we needed to provide information about our bushfire management strategy. Needless to say, we freaked the hell out! We spent 2 days compiling a plan for them based on our existing independent bushfire management report. We didn't have to freak out so much, but we wanted to make it clear that unless instructed by council, we would not be taking out any more trees. We have already removed the trees which our builder felt were risky (burnt out etc) and posed a threat to the build, and those that were far too close to the building pad. The plan we provided seemed to go through okay, but it definitely left us stressed about what they would think. No negative feedback or anything at that point, so we just kept hoping.

Then, Wednesday came and we had another epic freakout (we are good at those, hehe). With Moreton Bay Council, you can check the status of development applications online. Daniel checked ours while he was at work and found that it had changed from 'information and referral stage' to 'applicant appeal period'. We immediately freaked out as we weren't sure what applicant appeal period meant, and to be honest, it sounds bad! We already knew the 4 status changes to expect, and that was not one of them. We called our builder, they didn't find anything out for us, but assured us they hadn't heard anything bad.

Then Thursday came, Daniel apparently got feedback that everything was still going okay. He looked online again to check that scary status, it hadn't changed, but down the bottom of the same page they had uploaded a bunch of documents. One of them said 'DA Decision Notice (Approval), and sure enough, it was our approval!!!!!

We haven't heard anything from Coral yet, but hopefully we should have a start date soon and things will go smoothly from here. This really felt like the last big hurdle, and I hope that turns out to be true.