2012: the story begins

Summer 2012

We received occasional messages via Rosemary that Leigh was anxious to talk to us about his building plans. We passed messages back with phone numbers and email addresses, but heard nothing.

April-May 2012

When we came back to Melbourne, we found that Leigh had finalised his plans and started the process of choosing a builder. One of the builders he had interviewed had pointed out that putting up a new wall on his side of the boundary had two issues – first he couldn’t build his wall up against ours because ours isn’t on the property line, so there would be a triangular gap between the two walls. Second, when footings were dug for his wall, our wall could conceivably collapse. He told us about these concerns and we suggested that we might consider rebuilding our wall, and that we should jointly talk to the builder once he had made his choice. He agreed.

Winter 2012

More messages from Rosemary saying Leigh kept asking when we were getting back from Europe. Again contact details passed on, no response.

August-November 2012

We returned from Europe in mid-August. Whenever we saw Leigh he would tell us there were problems, we would agree and request a meeting with the builder. Finally we stressed that we were about to go to Tasmania for the summer and he had better organise it asap and on the morning of 15 November, the day we were catching the ferry, he finally got us, the architect and the builder together. It was all a bit frantic, but we agreed that we would bring forward planned renovations to our place (which we weren’t really wanting to do for 2-3 more years) and have all the work done as a single project, same builder, same architect. I asked if we could build a single new party wall (effectively extending the existing party wall) rather than two new walls back to back and was surprised when everyone seemed to think it was possible. In retrospect, I think there were too many cross conversations going on and no one realised exactly what I was asking.

It then became an urgent requirement for us to get to planning permission stage asap, so that building works could commence in late January, as Leigh had planned. Anthy was to draw up sketches for our back room with a new wall, new windows and roof, but on the same footprint and with everything in the same place as it is now. We asked for a more interesting and integrated roof line than the existing two part roof with an ugly beam visible inside where the roofline changes.