Planning Department - A Law unto Themselves

One of our planning conditions was to achieve Code 4 of Sustainable Homes which I won't knock because the intentions are good but there's no differentiating between the solo builder and the developers, we are all treated the same.
Canterbury City Council have a policy of requiring Code 4 where other neighbouring councils ask for Code 3 and some councils don't ask for any. This all works on a points system divided into categories such as energy efficiency, water usage, materials, waste etc etc. We reach Code 4 on many of these areas but when totalled up just come short and in order for us to get all the points required we would have to spend a whole lot of money that we can't afford on a heat pump so we have applied to the council to vary the condition to allow us to build to Code 3.

The decision should have been made yesterday but can we get an answer from the council? For the last few weeks I have been trying to call the case officer for this application & all I ever get is a recorded message saying that she's on extended leave until April - it's now May! When I speak to anyone else at the council they tell me that she is now back at work but on light duties working only Wednesday & Friday mornings so I call every Wednesday & Friday morning & still only get the recorded message... aaaargh!!!!

We are now a day past decision date & are still none the wiser, how is it that they get away with treating people like this? It is so frustrating & inconsiderate. Phew that's better, I've got that off my chest!!

Elevations of Property

At last I've worked out how to change the format of the architect's images of the the proposed build to put on this blog so here they are .....

South Elevation at top facing the street and North Elevation at the bottom looking out over the back garden and the views to the sea

East and West Elevations

Cross Section showing levels

Planning Permission Granted!!

Check out the link Oh my this put a smile on our faces!!!  And we had no opposition from any local residents so we are very grateful to have such lovely future neighbours!

Click this link to see our conditions (we've been lucky :))

Planning Permission...GRANTED!!!

Updating

I know I've been very bad at keeping up this blog but this last few months have been very tedious....
We had the joy of getting our planning permission passed in January & I naively thought "hey hey here we go"!!! How wrong I was!

It would appear that we need numerous weeks for every kind of report to be done from surface rainwater run off through thermal calculations to our inside leg measurement before we can go anywhere with this thing. So, to start, we had a 8 hour meeting with our architect, yes 8 whole hours with no food and no break. My head was banging by the time I went home!! Friends have asked me, 'what did you talk about?'  and I have to say it's a very difficult question to answer but the honest answer is, every little detail of the build. We probably did an hour on drains..... (I found my mind wandering at this point), they want to know what taps we want, what precise tile we want in the bathroom & so on. This seems far too early to make decisions when all we have is a plot of earth with a shed on it but we're told they need to know all this to prepare the tender documents for the builders. I think my beloved did a good 30 minutes on how he wants the skirting boards to be....(head banging against the table...lol)