The planning officer who picked up our application for pre-planning advice got back to us today a month after we submitted a fairly comprehensive brochure detailing the site, aspect, design, size and materials of the house we hope to build on the piece of land we bought (at auction without planning permission).

Kevin, the architect we are using from Greenspace Architects in Ellesmere, did a huge amount of work to submit with the pre-planning advice application forms in the hope that the planning officers would not be left wondering what this weird and unusual proposal was for. He explained to us that if their response was favourable at this stage much of the work for the actual submission of a planning application would already have been done.

Today’s written response had lots of comments – much of which said that our house was either sufficiently tucked away or not too dissimilar from the surrounding buildings that they would be fine with it in principle. The only gripes they had are the current proposed height of 10 metres making it significantly taller than surrounding houses (yes that is quite tall – partly because it is a house on wooden stilts and partly because the design submitted was really a maximum scale for us which we anticipated scaling down when the actual precise design is worked on) and east facing bedroom windows would over look neighbouring gardens.

We are extremely happy and relieved with this news as had mentally parked the potential project awaiting this response to work out whether we were having to shelve the idea, literally go back to the drawing board with Kevin to put together a proposal that would be acceptable to the planning office or sell the land on.

The only thing which has surprised us is the mention of a 15 metre easement zone surrounding the pumping station which now neighbours the portion of land we bought from Severn Trent. Apparently previous applications to gain permission to build on this land have been withdrawn when people heard about this easement but neither we, our architect nor our conveyancing solicitors have seen any mention of such an easement in the documents. So tomorrow I’ll start investigating where and how the planning officer has found out about such an easement zone which we the land owners did not know of and how the agreement is worded…