Progress report

We've just had a visit from an accountant because we need to set up companies over here. I think we'll end up with a company trust, which will be for Michael's business and works as a normal limited company but with a trust attached that can distribute profits. He'll be registered for GST, which is the Australian equivalent of VAT but at the more sensible and easily calculable rate of 10%, and he'll have a company number. And I'll be an employee, getting paid for the behind-the-scenes admin work that I do! Plus I'll have my own sole-tradership for my art-related work. I've had a lot of it explained to me but it will take a while for the information to settle and make complete sense, but I don't have to do anything until I get back from the UK.

Meanwhile, we've been speaking to the estate agent and our solicitor about Lot 31 North Boambee Road. Everything is still on hold, although having spoken to the Rural Fire Service, planners and our architect it does seem probable that we will be able to build on the site. We have been advised, however, to put a clause in the sale agreement which says that while we'll pay the deposit up front, we'll only complete on the sale once we've gained Development Approval (which is not quite the same as planning consent - it refers to the principle of building a house on a particular part of the property and how this relates to things like building and fire regulations, not to exact plans for the actual house which would still require planning consent) within a specified time-frame. If this is accepted by the vendors we would have to spend money on surveys, soil testing and possibly a Bush Fire consultant but if after all of that we found we couldn't build where we want to build then we wouldn't be held to the contract. Presumable we'd forfeit a small part of the deposit and not the whole thing, which is something I want to check! But to begin with, we are establishing whether or not the vendor is prepared to agree to such a clause in the contract. I can't help but feel that it would be in our best interests: we are straightforward people, we're not trying to muck them around, and we're the only interested party at the moment. Plus, of course, all the things that are making the purchase tricky for us will affect any future purchaser, so surely they're better off allowing us to sort out the problems and go ahead. Aren't they?

It's the end of January already!

Blimey - on the one hand I feel as if we've been here for ages, and on the other hand it's only 3 months since we first arrived... very confusing.

Today's a big day for the youngest member of the household: Ella starts school (again!) later this morning. Monday was very exciting when we went to the school to buy her uniform, and I'm aware again of subtle differences between Australia and the UK in these things. When Ella started at St John's in Bristol we went to John Lewis up at the Mall to buy uniform, and Sophie very kindly gave us a couple of dresses. On Monday we went to the school (which is the only place where uniform is available) and bought it from the 'P&C', which I think is the equivalent of a school's PTA (Parent and Teachers' Association) in the UK, although I don't know what the acronym stands for. Anyway, Ella is now kitted out with 4 sage green polo shirts, 2 pairs of dark green culottes, the obligatory school hat, and a HUGE rucksack with a book bag, purse and insulated lunch bag to go with it... So guess what I've been doing this week..? Yes - sewing in and ironing on name tags! And using a fabulous silver-glitter fabric pen (as suggested by the P&C) to write Ella's name on things like the hat and the rucksack where you can't easily put a standard label. Luckily I had the foresight to organise name tags before we left the UK, which has saved me from doing at least one chore over here.

Labels are big: the school's name and logo is in bold on everything apart from Ella's culottes and underwear!











The rucksack is so big I think Ella could climb inside it
















Someone I know hasn't willingly taken her hat off since she got it...









We wanted to give Ella a treat before she starts school so as yesterday was her (our) last day of freedom we took her to the Pet Porpoise Pool again, which she loved when we visited at the end of last year. She's been pestering us to go back ever since. This time she was brave enough to have a seal kiss by herself, and then we watched the dolphin show!

Glimmers of hope

As I mentioned before, Michael and I aren't fans of doom and gloom so we've been ploughing on with finding out if the obstacles facing us with regard to developing a house on Lot 31 North Boambee Road are insurmountable or not, and there seems to be some hope that it might all work after all.

Our vendors had a meeting with a senior planning officer at the Council on Tuesday or Wednesday. They went in demanding to know why, when they had a letter from the Council dated 2001 which states that they do have permission to build a house within the 7A zone we had been told building was impossible on the site except in the far southern part of the block, and were told that the information given to us by that same office was rubbish. In fact, the senior planning officer apparently stood up in the office and asked the person guilty of telling us that to stand up and make themselves known, but I gather no-one volunteered! While nothing came out in writing at that meeting (surprise, surprise), at least there's been a change in heart and it has been suggested that we should have a meeting with the same senior planning officer next week to try and thrash out some of the issues.

That doesn't mean that we're pushing ahead with the purchase because when I speak to the agent tomorrow I am going to say that we will only buy the property contingent on a good result from soil testing and establishment of a continuing Right of Carriageway to the access point of the property. Plus, although we can apparently build in the 7A zone, thus removing the need to re-zone the site at State Government level, we nonetheless have to comply with a whole raft of legislation in terms of building design and situation which we need to understand fully before we go ahead. For example, there is some talk that we would have to have fire-proof screens on all of the windows at the back of the property and that all windows might have to be double-glazed (as you can imagine, in this warm climate double-glazing isn't standard and in fact is extremely expensive!). We already know about some other restrictions such as sealed guttering and enclosed post and beam construction on a slope, but we do need to understand the Fire Regulations properly.

Another issue we need to talk about to the Council is that as part of the 7A zone seems to have been illegally cleared of Priority #1 Koala habitat vegetation, we want to know whether that places an obligation on us to re-plant the destroyed habitat... While I'm a fan of encouraging native trees and flowers I don't particularly want to have to re-plant an acre of forest! But anyway, at least it isn't all negative. We'll just have to see what turns out.

One thing we have done is to identify the architect we might use. His name's Christian Fisher and his website is www.fisherdesign.com.au, if you're interested. He's in his 30's I'd say and has been in the area for a few years although he spent some time in Sydney working for various architectural practices. He likes the property and seems to have some well-thought ideas about it, but he also recognises that he has to compete with local building designers and so his fee structure is very realistic. As so many people build houses over here building design is big business and canny builders have realised that if they equip themselves with some design skills and an in-house draftsman/woman then they can compete with architects. On the one hand it does mean that 'designed' houses are available to almost everyone, but on the other hand some times the designed element seems a bit clumsy. Instead of charging a whopping 10%+ of the total build cost in architects' fees Christian has a staged fee proposal that gives him a lump sum rather than a percentage amount and cover the whole design/consultation process, getting it through the Council planning process, producing the full working drawings plus 3D simulations, and the tendering process. Once a builder's been selected Christian can also come in and trouble shoot on an hourly rate. We'll give him an update this week, but he's certainly the best person we've come across so far, and we really like his existing work.

The thick plottens

It's never simple, is it. After a day of telephone calls, messages and returned calls the situation regarding Lot 31 North Boambee Road may be clearer, or may not, depending on your point of view.

The estate agent knows the person who took aerial photographs in 1994 that formed the basis of the Local Environment Plan (or 'LEP', collated in March 2000 and published in May 2000 - remember those dates!) that delineated the zoning boundaries locally and thus marked the 7A zoning boundary on our plot. It is interesting for two reasons: firstly the Council was working from photographs that were already 6 years old by the time they compiled the LEP. Secondly, the photos from 1994 show that the area within the 7A boundary was covered with eucalyptus trees and was therefore legitimately designated as protected koala habitat. But the same photographer took aerial shots in June 2000 - just a month after the LEP was published - that show the area to have been partially cleared. This suggests that Council have within their possession photographs that clearly show that at or near the time when the LEP was published the zoning of Lot 31 was inaccurate. John Simpson, the estate agent, regards this as useful evidence to put before Council, with the addendum that it's really what the Rural Fire Service (RFS) thinks about things that makes a difference, suggesting that if the RFS agrees that the land clearly isn't koala habitat then the 100m bushfire buffer zone may not apply - and that this would carry a lot of weight with Council.

There's more: John got a call back from the owners who have rather quickly (and mysteriously?) managed to arrange a meeting with the Council tomorrow afternoon to try and bash out the issues on the basis that in 2001 they wrote to the Council to ask for permission to build a house within what is zoned 7A and were given written permission to do so. Now our estate agent was extremely tactful, but even he thought that it might have been useful to have a copy of that correspondence...

It seems that all is not yet lost on the zoning front. If it can be established that the Council and the RFS agree that the zoning has always been inaccurate and the RFS can somehow cast the vote on not/being able to build within the erroneous 7A zone then that issue may just go away without having to go for a full re-zoning appeal at State level, thus saving time, money and probably a lot of stress!

That leaves us with the problem of soil testing, and IF we end up in a situation where the zoning problem has gone away I think we are going to make a case for passing the costs of the soil testing on to the vendors. So any purchase of the land will be contingent on three things: resolving in writing (!) the issues about zoning, getting an all-clear on possible soil contamination, and tidying up the legal loose ends regarding Right of Carriageway on the property, with the help of the surveyor who did the original survey back in 2000/2001. Then, and only then, are we likely to purchase the plot.

On the edge of our seats

Oh bother. Just when you think you're doing all the right things, along come a load of problems... and in this case, the problems are with planning issues on Lot 31 North Boambee Road. Aaargh!

We had a preliminary meeting with our conveyancing solicitor on Monday to examine issues of 'Right of Carriageway' on the property, and in the process the solicitor said we should visit the Council offices to establish whether the property appears on the banana map. So off I trotted to the Council chambers and saw the Duty Planning Officer who showed me the banana map and sure enough, the lower two-thirds of the property were once under bananas. The banana map is an accumulation of lots of documentary sources about banana plantations in the area, and it may not be accurate. The issue with bananas is that 'in the old days' nasty chemicals such as arsenic were used to control weeds and pests, and they stay in the soil for decades. In itself, being located on the banana map isn't a problem. It means we have to do soil tests to establish what, if any contamination exists. Low levels of contamination can be dealt with by vertical mixing. Don't misunderstand me: I am concerned about this! I have no wish to live with my family, or to grow fruit and vegetables, on chemically contaminated soil... but there are apparently ways of dealing with the problem.

A bigger problem - potentially MUCH bigger - is that it seems the upper two thirds of the property is zoned 7A, which indicates environmental protection. We knew that the ridge running along the back of the property is koala habitat; we didn't know that a block in the middle of the property running up to the eucalypts on the ridge is zoned 7A too... The zones are established from aerial photographs and it may well be, as the Council Planning Office suggested, that overgrown camphor laurels and lantana (both of which are considered to be noxious weeds) showed up in the photos as being of the same density as the eucalypt forest at the back and so it was all lumped together in a protected zone. Clearly we would like the zone boundary to change: those of you familiar with Venn diagrams will realise that at some point the banana plantation intersected with the 7A zone, which rather negates the idea that the central block is really koala habitat... But having spoken again to Council and to an independent environmental consultant it seems to be very difficult and expensive and long-winded to get a zone boundary moved as it has to be done by the State government, not local council. Again, aaargh!

Oh, and did I mention that in addition to the 7A zone running right across all three potential house sites, there is adjacent to the 7A zone an additional 100m bushfire buffer zone...? The Council Planning Officer I spoke to this morning suggested that Council would be highly unlikely to grant building consent to any property within these zones (unsurprisingly), leaving the only available building site at the bottom of the property - minus the lovely ocean views and sea breezes... Not what we want at all.

Michael and I don't like doom and gloom, although it all sounds very negative. I've spoken to our solicitor and put the sale 'on hold' for the moment, and I'm waiting to hear back from the real estate agent when he comes back this afternoon. The independent consultant I spoke to did make a helpful suggestion: apparently Council will hold a pre-Building Approval meeting in their offices and if I arranged one with planning officers, an environmental officer, the vendors and us, we could thrash out some of the issues and establish whether there would be any support from Council to get the zone boundaries changed. It would also be an opportunity for us to meet the vendors and establish that we are (potentially! if we can resolve some big issues) serious purchasers - so that when we ask for a reduced price they understand why. That's not to say we're going to be able to buy it, but I still think that the meeting would be a good idea.

I always used to say that my motto was nil desperandum! So I won't despair - yet.

Mmmm, I've got yummy protozae in my tummy!

Yep, I took myself off to the doctor with Ella this afternoon to try and identify why we've been feeling so rough for the last few days and it seems we have Giardia... This is the nasty little water-loving protozoan that I last heard of when I was in India and I was sick. Of course, then I had amoebic dysentery instead which is worse, but this still isn't very nice!

Apparently Ella and I aren't contagious unless y/our personal hygiene isn't up to scratch or we're preparing food, so I'm allowed to resume my residency tomorrow, but Ella's not allowed to swim until next week. Toby has to go to the vet!

Ella and I have vast quantities of antibiotics to consume and we have to follow a restricted diet for two weeks: no caffeine, no alcohol (Ella might not find these difficult restrictions but I will...), no oil, no fat, no dairy produce. Bugger. Hooray! Two contradictory responses governed by the fact that I will definitely be thinner at the end of the process but I shall have been deprived of my nightly gin and tonic AND three cups of tea a day... How will I survive?

Thank you...

... to everyone who sent messages, greetings and presents for Ella on her birthday! She had a lovely time in the end: two friends came to play and they bounced for all they were worth on her bouncy castle, then they had 'party tea' and collapsed in a heap.

It was all a bit of a wash-out for me as I spent the entire event in bed with a stomach bug, which Ella has now come down with as well, hence the fact that Mummy is blogging thank you's rather than picking up the telephone - neither of us is capable of it at the moment!

Sadly this entry will be without photos, because although plenty were taken, our digital camera seems not to have transferred the photos into its memory. Again, I could do some fiddling about and see what I can recover but I'm just not up to it at the moment... maybe tomorrow.

Update

We put in an offer on Lot 31 North Boambee Road and it's been accepted. We had to agree to $5,000 more than we initially offered, but we're still buying it for $9,000 less than asking price and considerably less than it was offered at when it first came to market last year. Property sales here are handled very differently to the UK, and we should be signing papers in about 4 - 6 weeks time at most. By the way, estate agents' percentages are very high! Our vendors will be paying between 3 and 5% of the offer price in commission! Thank goodness we nailed our estate agents down when we sold in Bristol, and paid 1.2%.

We don't have to pay Stamp Duty on the purchase because it's under $500,000 and, by chance, as Michael didn't own any property in Australia before he moved to the UK, we miraculously qualify for a First Time Buyer's grant of around $8,000 towards the purchase price. Hooray! I guess you could say that the First Time Buyer's grant plus the lower offer on the property have together paid for our second (second-hand) car and the first semester's accommodation fees for Patrick at university...

... Which brings me onto my second update, which is that Patrick got into the University of Queendsland at Brisbane! Hooray, again! We still have issues about accommodation, but with a bit of luck they might be resolved. Some of my begging letters received a firm rebuttal from the colleges concerned, but one - an email to St Leo's which is, amusingly, a Catholic college and men only - received a positive response. There are no promises, but Patrick had a good telephone interview with the Rector (Brother Vince Skelly of the Christian Brothers order), and we hope to hear something by the middle of next week. I must say that it would be very amusing and ironic if Patrick does get into St Leo's. The college sounds great, and Brother Vince comes across as a very nice man. But Patrick...? In an all-male Catholic college...? He, he, he!

Cranky in Coffs Harbour

Well I am feeling cranky - certainly a bit saddened. It's Ella's birthday tomorrow and a huge Thank you! to you for sending Ella presents. She obviously hasn't had them yet, but it's great to know that you're thinking of her. I wish I could say the same about some of the people here.

We don't know many people yet, but at the end of the pre-school term, just before Christmas, we invited the two couples we do know through the pre-school plus some children Ella identified as friends to a party tomorrow afternoon. As is the way, few people RSVPed, but I met and was friendly with a woman whose daughter has been at the two-week swimming course Ella has been attending, so I invited her daughter along as well, and she accepted. It turns out her husband works with the another couple we'd invited, who'd said they would be coming to the party with their children and also with their niece. So far, so good.

Then at the beginning of the week the woman from swimming announced that she would be working tomorrow so her daughter couldn't come to Ella's party. I was saddened, then, to phone our other friends, her employers, today to confirm the time, only to find out that they'd decided to hold a birthday party tomorrow afternoon for their son who turned 2 last week, and that this woman was helping them to organise it. I wouldn't have minded so much if someone had told me... a bit of honesty would have gone a long way.

When you don't know people very well and you have few friends where you are, you are walking a tightrope already in that you want to be sociable and meet people, but you have to be sensitive to the fact that they already have a social circle and that you can't muscle in on things; you have to take it slowly. What makes me sad is how it feels for Ella. She loves being here; she loves walking Toby by the ocean and being in the sunshine, and she's looking forward to school. But she's spent more than 3 months with very few people of her own age for company and she would have loved having friends over tomorrow to play with her on her birthday. We will no doubt have a nice day, and perhaps someone who hasn't RSVPed will turn up unannounced and we'll have a party after all, but Ella misses her family andfriends in the UK so much and I think she's going to be a little bit lonely tomorrow and it breaks my heart.

Yikes again

Or more to the point, bugger! As a continuation of my earlier university rant can I please ask, 'Where does it say on any of the state/government/university websites that there is a deadline for applying for first year university accommodation?' The answer is, of course, NOWHERE!

Dunno quite why we picked this afternoon to ring up Patrick's favourite halls of residence from the list given on the University of Queensland's website, but we did, and got the answer that the deadline for applications for accommodation was October 31st 2006. In other words, you are expected to apply for accommodation at a university when you are still almost 4 months away from receiving an offer...

There are alternatives to halls, but in Brisbane the alternatives seem largely to be run by religious organisations such as the Salvation Army and the Uniting Church. Patrick (understandably) doesn't think he'll fit in well into a residential block where swearing is punishable by throwing you out and keeping your deposit. I can see why. I've written a lot of begging emails to put him on the waiting lists for university accommodation, and I'm crossing my fingers that we'll manage to find some viable private alternatives should that process not work. Offers come out this Thursday; I wonder what will happen then?

A Drive on the Wild Side

Oh we had fun yesterday afternoon, in that squirmy 'I'm glad that's behind me' sort of a way! Michael and I took Ella off to see the local butterfly farm, and on the way back we checked in on Lot 31 North Boambee Road to see if it had finally been slashed, and it had! So we drove our new second-hand Kia four-wheel drive up there to have a look. So far, so good.






View from the bottom of the drive, looking up through the (empty) dam, up the gully to the house site which is behind the large camphor laurel tree on the right hand side, top.




The Kia managed the dirt track and the slope up to the house site beautifully; much better than our Subaru. Things began to go slightly wrong, however, as Michael negotiated a drive further up the hill, behind and to the left of the proposed house site. We got to a point where the wheels started to slip even in 4L gearing, so he backed it down the hill and round the corner... only instead of letting gravity take us back down to the flat area of the proposed house site, Michael wanted to reverse up to the flat area above the house site, only the Kia wasn't having any of it, which left us stranded across a narrow piece of track, unable to drive backwards or to either side! Instead, Ella and I got out (wimps!) and Michael drew on years of off-road driving experience on his parents' sheep and cattle stations, and managed to drive forwards and down a very steep incline to the shallower land beyond.

View of the trees just across and to the left of the proposed house site, including some of the tree ferns. Hopefully the Rural Fire Brigade would allow us to thin out the fringes of the wooded area to allow a 30 metre Asset Protection Zone rather than making us fell all the trees because they might be a fire hazard...

Phew! Only this now meant that he was on the other side of the creek bed from the track used to drive up to the house - but at least he wasn't on a vertiginous slope with nowhere much to go... So Ella and I followed him down the slope to near the bottom, when we all realised he was going to have to traverse the lower end of the gully and the side of the dam to get back up to the track! This proved quite tricky with a large boulder and a tree trunk in the way, not to mention the car teetering on the side of a 40 degree slope and almost deciding to topple over...

I think Michael was more worried about his pride should he have to go to the neighbouring house for assistance than anything else, while I was trying not to watch while holding Ella's hand and swearing very inventively under my breath! Luckily Michael couldn't hear Adam's children (in the house just below the property) saying, "Mummy, I think he's stuck!", "Oh no, he's OK", "No, he's stuck again!" at their windows.



This is the gully that runs down the property.






Michael managed to drive out of it, much to my relief because I wouldn't have been able to do so, and when we got to him he was killing himself laughing which meant that my warning to Ella not to make any jokes about the car to Daddy was a bit unecessary... But the final straw for me was discovering that my toes were bleeding because I had a fat Lot 31 leech attached to my foot. They inject an anti-coagulant when they bite, and the bloody toe (ha ha) didn't stop seeping for hours afterwards. Lovely.

Fun at the fun fare

Michael and I took Ella to the fair on Sunday evening, at the Jetty. Co-incidentally Patrick was going too, with a lovely young lady from the office called Nathalie, who looked very nice from the back, at least! We weren't priviledged enough to be introduced...

Yikes!

Ooops - we took our eyes off the ball a bit with regard to Patrick going to university this year, mainly because we've had a hundred and one other things. Anyway, the realisation has suddenly dawned the 'O week' (orientation or freshers' week) starts on February 19th at all the universities Patrick has applied to. I get back from the UK on Saturday 17th February, and the idea was that I would meet Michael in Sydney, we'd stay over one night and then go to his cousin Alysha's wedding on the Sunday. What looks like happening now is that I arrive back at Sydney Airport, if Patrick gets into the University of Queensland in Brisbane I will then hop straight onto a plane to Brisbane, and Michael will have to drive Patrick and Ella and all of Patrick's stuff up to Brisbane to meet me! Then we'll spend Sunday settling him into to a hall of residence - we're assuming he can get into one - before driving home again. All in all, a cool 900 kilometres of driving over the weekend.

This has of course crystalised our thoughts on financing Patrick through university. Here you can only get a student loan for tuition fees - in Patrick's case this should be about $5,000 or so per year. You cannot get loans for living expenses, so we will be footing the cost of all that, by paying the university directly for the hall accommodation and then giving Patrick an allowance which he will have to supplement by working. But the next hurdle is that we can't get the HECS-HELP student loan until Patrick and Michael have their tax file numbers, and since this involves surrender of passports and a lot of mucking around we haven't been able to do that yet. However, since there's a deadline of 31st March for the loan application, we now have an extra incentive to sort it out!

Patrick's biggest practical issue is that he doesn't have a driving licence, having failed to take advantage of the opportunity to get it while in the UK. It turns out that if you want a driver's licence here you have to sit a theory test, then apply for a provisional licence, then do driving lessons AND 50 hours of accompanied (and logged) driving with your parents or very good friends BEFORE you can take your test! Oh that he had done it in the UK: life would have been so much easier for him! Because of the requirement to do 50 hours of accompanied driving it takes ages to rack up enough hours to take your test. Think about it: how many hours a week would you want to spend in a car driven by your child? When you've got other commitments, a job and the family to look after? Even if we managed 5 hours a week it would take 10 weeks in addition to the driving lessons... What it means is that Patrick basically has no chance of getting a driver's licence until the next long holiday (over Christmas), if he's lucky. Or he'll have to wait until he finishes at uni.

Meanwhile, I am crossing my fingers that the remaining boxes we are awaiting dock in Sydney this week. In theory, because the duty payable was calculated on the full inventory and paid when the first lot of boxes came in, our goods should speed their way through Customs this time and proceed straight to Quarantine. I just want to get them before I got to the UK in early February, because they contain lots of stuff we had wanted to donate to Patrick for uni, and I really don't want to have to buy a load of new stuff for him when I have it all coming soon...

New Studio #2

I said it would look different when I'd finished with it... Thanks to Patrick for helping me shift boxes and that bloody Belfast sink! Of course, the Belfast sink was badly chipped: one corner has sheared off and broken into a thousand pieces, as we discovered when we opened the package. It remains to be seen if it is useable.