Disaster Strikes

Those of you who have been following this renovation for a while might remember that we have had a few issues along the way that have caused me to do this.

sourced from Cheri Pryor

More specifically, we've had issues with possessed machinery, power companies refusing to reconnect power to the house, and worst of all, having to raise the house twice because it wasn't high enough the first time, in what was the epic-est of  EPIC FAILs.

Needless to say, we've had our share of troubles. And as I recall, after that succession of troubles in the early stages of this renovation I promised that if anyone else messed with me, they would get this.

sourced from CFO America

Well, that day has arrived. We have been well and truly messed with. And unless we plan on suing, we have to grin and bear it. And fork over the cash.

Here's what's happened.

A year and a half ago (ish), when we discovered that our first house-raising process didn't leave us with enough space below the upper floor to have legal height ceilings downstairs for the extra rooms we planned on building, we were obviously devastated. And very keen to find a solution. So when we mentioned our dilemma to our structural engineer and he said that he had access to more recent research that could prove that we could have a lower legal floor height downstairs, therefore giving us legal height ceilings, we rejoiced.

He gave us a report (at cost, of course!) to confirm our new floor heights, which we gave to our building certifier, who then (at cost, of course), amended our building approval to reflect new proposed floor and ceiling heights. And we rejoiced.

So, we forged on. We laid a big concrete slab under the house at the new floor height, we framed up all of the walls, got the plumbing and electrical installed, the windows and doorways are all in at the ordinary heights, and the walls are all plastered.

In the meantime, we've known since we bought this property that it's zoned to allow development, and we've planned on building two townhouses in the backyard almost from the start. Earlier this year, before we really ramped up the downstairs renovations, we hired a new building drafter and a town planner to submit an application for the townhouse development to council.

Right around when we reached plastered stage downstairs, we got some very bad news. The council would not accept the lower floor heights downstairs as legal. Bad bad bad bad bad. Even though we have a legal building approval. And that approval would be fine if that's all we wanted to do with the property. But it's not. Since we really want to go ahead with building the townhouses in the backyard eventually, the whole property has to get assessed anew. And apparently our structural engineer's assessment that we relied on for the floor heights was completely wrong. Completely. Wrong.

We've spent weeks going back and forth with the town planner, who has in turn gone back and forth with the council, to see if there is a way we can deal with this problem that doesn't involve undoing a whole bunch of the work that we've just paid a fortune to have done.

Nope. Not a chance. No budging. Council have said that if we want the town houses, our floor height in the living areas downstairs needs to rise by 35cm. Full stop. No negotiating. That's it. So, this means that all of the doors and windows need to rise (and therefore the weatherboards around them on the outside need to move as well), the floor needs to be built up, the plumbing and electrical need to go up, the waterproofing in the bathroom needs to go up higher, a new floor needs to go in, and what's worst, the lovely newly plastered ceilings and cornices have to come out and be re-done higher.

Needless to say, we're devastated. And angry. But mostly devastated.


The one tiny silver lining to this very dark thundercloud is the fact that we will still be able to manage to get legal height ceilings downstairs even though the floor has to rise, because we can box the ceiling around the steel beams that support upstairs. Thankfully, as long as two thirds of the ceiling in each "habitable" room is at least 2.4m high, we're still going to be ok.

Still, we're looking at thousands and thousands of dollars down the drain, in wasted work that we've already paid for, and work that now needs to be done to get us back to 'plastered' stage again. Wouldn't it be nice if we'd never met that dodgy idiot of a structural engineer in the first place?