About the Land

Where is this land?  It is at The Ponds, Sydney newest suburb in the North West region.


As mentioned in my previous post, we got the last block of land for sale out of the 21 new land releases that day.  We did wonder why wasn't this one sold already as it wasn't a corner block.  As I was saying there were still a group of people left in the sales office when we walked in and one of the group who was in front of us asking about the block that was still available for sale (which was soon to be ours :)).

We had a look at the contour diagram / development plan and  I believe it was the restrictions on the land itself that probably puts people off from buying it.  The land comes with, let's just say, a few issues.

At the frontage side, there is a restriction on the use of the left hand side.  This is due to an electricity substation box located on the neighboring block.  Although this box is not located on our land itself, however we still need to comply with the usage of this area.  We were advised that it is still possible to build on this area but it will need to have different materials that has a certain fire rating or in other words, fire retardant material.

On the back of this land, there is couple of issues:

1.  An underground sewer line run through the back.  This is still fine as the design guideline states that for a single storey house we need to have a 4.5m setback and 5m for a double storey.  Looking at the diagram, it would seem that we will miss this completely.  However this would mean that we can't build a pool on this block at all.  Not that we are planning to have one anyway but nevertheless, within our contract of purchase it says that we can't build a pool on the back of this land. lol.  (news flash Landcom, you ain't gonna see anyone, if not rarely, build a pool at the front of the house.... duhh!)

2.  Whilst we don't mind about having a pool-less block, the sewer line itself present another issue.  The line had a couple of turns through the side of the land and out, rendering it to have two maintenance holes on top of it.  This is due to the regulations of Sydney Water that on every turn corner of the sewer, a manhole must be created.  We were told if Sydney Water was to ever need to access the hole, they will come from the side of the house.  I'm not exactly sure how often they would need access to the sewer.  I checked with a few people that I know that has the same kind of problem and they said for as long as they can remember... never.  We're kind of relieved to hear that to be honest.  But the problem still remains, a friend of ours, who also works as a salesman in a home building company, advised us that we can't build too close to the manholes.  If we were going to utilise the area, it needs to be 2m away from the edge of the manhole.

Well in summary, I think the issues above can be summed up into one single problem: more money for our site costs :(.  I just hoped that it won't blow our budget when we start building.

Oh well, I guess that although we can dream but life is also full of challenges.  We decided to accept the land as it is and work around the issues so that we can build a house that we can call "home".

Below are some pictures overlooking our land on the horizon.  Practically there is no road leading there from the sales office just yet but hopefully sometime in the future, there will be.

Future Waterfall area on the horizonTaken from the fence behind the Sales Office

One of the future main road of The Ponds