Design & drawings
A plan comes together
At some point late last year, we noticed that the seemingly abandoned, boarded up night club was for sale. It's a dump, a massive building falling apart, paint peeling, even trees growing out of the walls! An eye sore if
The planning dept pt1
Kate phoned the planning dept up to see what being in a conservation area actually meant. They told her that there would be no way that they would let us knock it down. I couldn't understand this because it's not a liste
Loose plans
Very, very loose plans! We want to restore the frontage of the cinema, drop the back auditorium, and make it into a lovely family home with a big back garden. That's it. Simple... (!?!?)
Measured survey
We got C R PARROTT to do a measured survey of the existing building. They are a local company and were very competitively priced. Here are the drawings.
Our architect
We've appointed Works Architecture to be our architects for our project. How we got there was a bit weird! The only architect we know is a friend of mine that I hadn't seen for years, that I used to go to school with. A
The planning dept pt2
Ok, so yesterday we meet the planning department again and showed them for the first time our plans. Happily, they liked them! There are a number of points they are going to help investigate, and for us to provide more i
The planning application is in!
ok, so we put the planning application in on Friday afternoon. We now have to wait for it to be validated. This means that DMBC planning dept will look at it and tell us if it's complete. This will happen over the next w
Planning model video
This model was used to show the Design Review Panel. We've not seen their official comments yet, but apparently it was received very favourably! They all want to come and see it when it's done anyway!
Planning application is validated, 8 weeks to decision
We've just got notice from the DMBC planning dept that our application has been validated. This just means that they consider our application to be complete, and they now have 8 weeks from today to give us their decision
WooHOOOOO!!!!!
We got it! HulloMail-20111014-130732 by gwynap
The trials and tribulations of getting planning permission
Planning permission takes 'up to' 8 weeks right? That meant we should have got a decision by 19th July right? Well, what happens is you submit your plans and this gets sent off to the various departments. Some come back
There we go!
What are we doing?
Seems like I've been asked this question a MILLION times over the last few days, in all contexts! Right now, there's so many aspects to this answer, and I want to record my thoughts on this now, so we can look back and s
A pause in development
We were hoping to get cracking on the development straight after xmas, but a couple of things happened. We knew the results of the trial pits could affect the structural design, and they did. Because the foundations were
Hydropool!
well, we've literally 'splashed out' here, but I think this is going to make our home amazing. Our family love swimming, and we'd love to have a swimming pool, who wouldn't? But you can only really have an indoor swimmin
All about the Benjamins...
I guess the two questions people have about our project is "how much is it going to cost?" and "when will you be in by?", especially now that we're going to be on Grand Designs, where every project always seems to go ove
All we wanted was a bigger garden...
Yeah... we've said to lots of people that the main reason we wanted to move from our existing house is that we wanted a bigger garden for our kids to run around in, and it's absolutely true! To find ourselves doing what