The Height Issue and how it was Resolved

So, back in July I left this blog with the news that our house had grown too high, not in fact by 400mm as I said in the last post but by well over a metre. If our house stood in splendid isolation you would never know but unfortunately it's very near it's neighbours and so the error was glaringly obvious!
As I said previously, we decided that the most simple solution would be to alter the pitch of the roof so our architect provided us with new drawings to submit to the council as a non material amendment which should only take 2 weeks to go through. This was not the right thing to do!! After a week we received yet another call from the council to say that the change in pitch altered the look of the house too much and so they needed a complete new full application which would take another 2 months to be dealt with.... aaargh!! Back to the stomach churning! This would obviously cost us lots more and keep the build on hold for way longer plus the costs and practical conundrums of making the alterations.
After much discussion and worry and more phone calls to the council we decided instead to submit a new full application at the new higher height and hope that we wouldn't receive objections. This was not totally straight forward because at the very same time we learnt that our architect had gone in to administration - it all happens on this build :(((
We took the project to another local architect to make the new drawings and swiftly submit to the council - even more cost and talk of the builder taking away the scaffolding, portaloo etc because of the ongoing hire costs. After a few weeks we made the difficult decision to instruct the builder to pick up tools again and carry on as we'd had no signs of any objections being submitted. This was a particularly horrid few weeks though as the thought of paying for the roof construction with the chance of being made to take it down again was just so scary. Luckily it was the right decision and the relief was enormous when the application was passed - with NO objections too so what was that all about?!!!