The First Bump in The Road

Nothing is without its fair share of hiccups and with any big project, there is bound to be a few. We hit our first bump in the road (or ripple in the pool!) after the private certifier said we could not build the pool 1m from the fence line due to our street being in a heritage conservation area. Actually it wasn't even the entire street, just our side of the street. This meant that a new rule now applied to us that neither us or the build saw coming. 

The rule was that the pool had to be in line with the house. As the house is 1.5m from the fence line and coping is around 400mm, the private certifier said the pool had to be 1.9m away from the fence. We needed every centimetre in order to not obstruct the first shed roller door so simply moving the pool over wasn't going to work. 

I spoke to Dianne from Narellan Pools to see if anything could be done. She suggested to put the DA through to Hawkesbury Council and see if they would approve it. I rang the council who initially said 1m was all we need. Hooray! However, it turned out he misread the policy and later said it must be in line with the house. Damn! This was before Christmas so there was nothing that could be done until everyone was back on deck in January. That gave us a bit of thinking time to see if we could come up with any other solutions.

We contacted Ivan to give us advice on what we should do. He came to see us after Christmas and he could sense we were anxious about the location of the pool. Ivan was amazing. He was patient and really invested a lot of time to try and find a solution that we would be happy with.

We knocked on the neighbour's door as they had a pool and we wanted to see if they also had to comply with the 1.5m rule. We found out that they did. However, the rule was not 1.5m plus coping for them. It was 1.5m including coping. This meant we potentially had another 400mm to play with. As long as the private certified accepted this, we would take every centimetre we could get. 

We also decided to move the pool from going lengthways along the boundary fence to lengthways along the pergola. Now the pool would become the focal point of the backyard rather than being tucked away in the corner. We both liked this area better but again we needed to get this approved. 

Within the next few days we got the good news that 1.5m from the fence line would be accepted from the private certifier. We now had approval to start excavation. We locked in a date of March 3 to have the pool delivered. Excavation would start a could of days before. It was all finally coming together.