Council Approval

We were a little nervous about this one as the council normally requires a 5m setback, and we had designed the house with only a 4m setback.

The reason for this was the shape of the lot made it difficult to fit a the house we wanted on it, and after playing about with a number of designs decided we would make efforts to minimize the encroachments and prepare a strong argument for the rest.

Initially we had a 4.5m setback, but this meant we were encroaching on the 1.5m easements to the rear of the lot, so during the Covenant approval stage (which has the same setbacks and easements) we put together an argument that justified us moving the house forward to the 4m line.

The crux of our argument was the fact that we are a single lot sandwiched between two corner lots, each of which had a frontage on a side street, with their property side being on our street.

Now, the key point here is that such properties have a 3m side easement from the secondary frontage line, which is effectively the same line as our frontage which has a 5m setback...since they both can build to 3m we felt that it made our request to build to 4m pretty easy.... and evidently it was.

So, all together, we are pretty happy, we get the house we want and a little extra room in the rear garden