Design Council Approvals

Building in The Ponds means that you have to agree to build within some very strict guidelines - most of which Clarendon take care of. Some of the things that we had to keep in mind were:
* 3 different textures at the front of the house
* 1 large tree in the backyard and 2 medium size trees in the front yard
* a substantial letter box - specially no "box on a stick" - yes it really says that in the guidelines!
* mostly native plants
* percentage of hard vs soft landscaped areas
* boundary distances from sides, front and back of land
and the list goes on.

All of this must be approved by The Ponds Design Council before we can submit to Blacktown Council to ensure that we are keeping in line with "a great street." Along with submitting for the house we also had to create a landscape plan (something that is apparently common practice in the UK, but a surprise for Lauren - How on earth do you put together a landscape plan for a block of land you haven't even walked on yet - a landscape plan where you have to specify exactly which plants you are going to place where!)

Clarendon offered to do this for us, but we had a lot of ideas in our head of how we would like to put it together and decided that we could undertake this task ourselves - this came with the risk of the Design Council not liking our plans.

Doug was able to turn my sketches into a professional-looking landscape plan, drawn to scale and using a great colour key. He spent a lot of time looking through various sites finding fantastic natives to put in along with some great plants that have multiple uses.

Plants we have included are:
Little Gem Magnolia (large tree)
Olive Tree (small tree)
Tibouchina (small tree)
Crinium Pendunculatum
Kangaroo Paw
Gymea Lilly
Templetonia Retusa
Lilly Pilly
Cuphea
Cordyline Australias
Agave Gemini Flora
Poligara Myrtifolia
Lobularia Snow Princess
Bird of Paradise

I spent a lot of time looking around a different blogs, reading the Home One Forum and talking to people who had submitted their own plans and what it took for them to be approved and learning from the pitfalls they experienced. Before submitting the plan I then went through the Design Guidelines with a fine tooth comb and ticked everything off to confirm that we had complied. We really didn't want to get held up by having to make changes to the plans submitted.

All of the extra checking really did pay off because only one week after submitting to the council we got the message from Clarendon that our plans had been approved! We were expecting 2-6 weeks, so in only 7 days this was definitely a nice surprise.

Now we are getting everything ready to be submitted to Council - the land was registered on the 11th September (4 months after original expections) so as soon as Council gives us the go-ahead we are ready to get the slab laid.