Western Sydney Duplex Development Online Diary

I find that Im satisfying my inner control freak.

I also have better contacts on some higher end finishes eg underfloor heating, marble, timbers

 

Yes I’ve done a few over a few different councils and the price varies, Randwick council in Sydney do not miss let me tell you.

 

I believe they are capped at maximum $20k per new additional dwelling, so a duplex is one extra. Waverley council are currently charging 1% of QS which has worked out fantastic for 3 new dwellings.

 

A little too early for that but yeah, I am actually looking forward to it now as well.

Liquidated damages, I usually go for a $100 a day or something. As you may know, its one thing to have it written and it's entirely a different story to try and get it from the builder. It's more of a stick in the contract than anything else but yeah I definitely put it.

 

Thank you, I wouldn't build otherwise if they are not flexible, if I cant get what I want, I will sell it.

In terms of items, I kind of learnt it the hard way when I realized I have selected flooring / tiles about 3 times (actually going into the shop for floorings then the shop for tiles then informing the builder), and the idiot didnt order it until they ran out. We had to repeat this process several times. At one point I fully told my builder off as I had to select a different flooring.

So to idiot-proof my plan, I buy it and have it delivered and get him to install it. An additional bonus is the points you can get on your credit card but don't tell anyone about it

 

*Update*

My title has been produced to LPI Tuesday / Wednesday this week. Property A and B will be sending their title to the LPI by Monday. From there it will be with the LPI to register so that will tell us how long LPI will take.

I have applied for the construction loan which we will find out about in a couple of weeks as well but if all goes well I can borrow the entire amount.

My builder will likely let me know also in the next two weeks if he can do it for the price I want or not.

If I do build, my strategy will be to deliberately leave out certain inclusions such as Kitchen, Landscape and other items which I can decide on later on depending on more recent sales data in the area. This will also offer me more flexibility on spending vs sales closer to the time.

Tenants have been notified to move, they are not very happy but they have been good tenants so I will be lenient with them where I can.

 

*Update*

Firstly I have decided to invest less time posting on here. As I had made a pledge to this topic I will see it to finish but, at least for now, I am going to limit my time just to this topic. This is mainly due to some of the posts made by certain users, the mockery of my project, and more importantly the direction this place has taken and the threats that some of the very senior staff have made. Power to them, I simply dont have time for the drama so I will let them carry on.

Anyway, we have had a registered easement for a while now but what has really caused the delay is the local government and the very complicated number of clauses they have included in my DA and the time they took to issue the active DA after the registration was sent to them (the actual letter is yet to be issued by the council).

So we have everything ready but they have asked me in the DA to directionally drill the storm water, upgrade the pipe into a larger diameter which is more costly and also open up the road for a few meters and connect to their main storm water (rather than being able to drain to kerb once I reach the street level). Without going through too much details they really stuffed up this DA and not much else can be said about the way they treated it.

In any case, I am ready to proceed as soon as I sort out some of the engineerings (both for the storm water and civil assets), the quotes for all the different contractors required and also a booking for all of them.

Hopefully we will be ready to proceed in 5 weeks time or so.

 

After a lot of delays mainly due to the way council has dictated the DA, we have finally started and finished the demolish today.

I will post some photos in the coming days as I will have to focus on this and also the building of the easement storm water through 2 seperate properties one via horizontal boring and the other will be done via a normal plumber and we will then need another contractor to open the street and connect to the main storm water in the middle of the road.

 

Congrats on breaking soil mate. Good luck with the building of that easement. I definitely do not envy the task you have ahead of you. It's gonna be mammoth.

 

Thank you, as you can see in the image this property is fairly flat.

Basically its only at the very end which it falls by about 200 which is the height of a piece of paper.

You can see how easy it was for me to believe this didn't need to have any form of issue in terms of draining storm water when I purchased the land.

And then I got caught up in the bureaucracy of local government which meant about 1.5 years of delays and nearly 200k worth of unnecessary additional costs to buy and build a storm water drainage system which connects about 60 meters of storm water to their main on an entirely different street.

In any case, I just want to go ahead and build it now.

 

**** me! Holy cow....

I wish you all the best buddy. Keep at it. Hope you get a great result in the end.

 

We have managed to complete most of the easement works. This was a monumental job as we had to go through nearly 60 meters through 2 different properties, partly digging and partly horizontaly drill the easement.

A few interesting things happened. I realized I had an idiot for an engineer who had charged me for storm water and slab design that was useless. The levels were incorrect which was discovered while doing the works so I had to engage another engineer altogether and make some immediate calls on the actual work myself to push it along.

I realized for horizontal boring at the depth of 2.5 meters there is a few things you need to have in place, very valuable lessons.

Naturally we had neighbors jumping up and down while doing the works, arborists had to attend the site while we were working near protected trees etc.

The OSD tanks we have had to build are the size of a medium sized swimming pool and we have had to build 2 of them

But all in all I am happy as 80% of the easement work is finished, OSD tanks and storm water plumbing is almost done, slab formed and poured and shortly we will be framing and bricking.

There has also been some very encouraging sales in the area. One duplex selling for just over 1.6 Mil and another next door to it selling 1.55 albeit these are slightly bigger than ours the finishes we are using are on par or partly better than them. But we are not counting any chickens yet.

Although it has taken a long time to get here and a lot of work, this has been a very valuable lesson. I learned on this project what I may have learned if I did 5 other similar projects in terms of many different aspects of the project and thats my biggest profit.

 

Trooper. Hope you kick ass with this PITA project mate.

re OSDs, mine were bloody Olympic pools lol. Freakin waste of money. Its all bs.

 

omg bigger than mine...

I'd make sure council sign off on it before you make the final payment to them if its a PS.