A Weekend at Home with the Architect

Sunday last dawned a glorious day.
The sky a perfect cerulean blue, the local wildlife in magnificent display, the live-in felines relatively well behaved. Even Viktoria (not renouned for her domesticity) managed to not screw up lunch - a rolled lamb roast, stuffed with blue-vein cheese with a salad of mixed leaves, chickpeas, fetta, chargrilled capsicum and green beans, if you were wondering.
The Android drove down to the city to pick up our architect, Neal, from his hotel in the morning and brought him up to our home.
As the second meeting with the bushfire consultant had yet to occur, we sadly couldn't force Neal to sketch any designs for us. Neal too, seemed frustrated at the turn of events.
But he did get to experience how and where we live, and see all the furniture and other paraphernalia we plan on taking with us to our, as yet, mythical home in Tasmania.
In short, we had a lovely, relaxing day with Viktoria and the Android happily confirming that they both liked Neal also as a person, and not just for his architectural acumen.
Later in the week, Neal telephoned Viktoria following to much anticipated second meeting with the bushfire consultant and Neal's friend from the Tasmanian Fire Service.
After securing a promise from Viktoria that she wouldn't start doing backflips just yet, Neal advised that the outcome of the meeting was something along the lines of:

• If we would agree to build the house to a BAL-40 level, and
• If we would agree to prepare the land around the building site to a BAL-29, and
• If he was satisfied with yet another proposed site ontop of the escarpment
• THEN the bushfire consultant would be prepared to sign off on the site.

So it's not quite a 'yes' (yet) but nor is it exactly a 'no'.
Neal will accompany the bushfire consultant out to the site again next week, with strict instructions to get the man's written confirmation agreeing with the above points in blood - and it will hopefully be on a site that Neal is happy with (as Viktoria and the Android both know that if Neal is happy, then we most definitely will be too).
All this administrative agony made us wonder how folk with a land mortgage coped - in Australia, most loans taken out on vacant land require the mortgagee to build on that land within either six or 12 months. It's actually written into the contract. We engaged JAWSarchitects in March. Nearly three months later, and we are still unravelling the red tape to get all parties to agree to where we can simply put the house. We don't even have a design, much less be in a position to commence building within three months. How do people do it?
We are very appreciative of the fact that we have something of the luxury of time on our hands, as we don't have any mortgage over the land. So even though these meetings are costing us more, we believe the expense worth it. If we were sitting in our new home a few years from now wondering "what if" we had just pushed a little harder to get the site we really wanted...we know we would have wished then that we had tried just once more. But if a bank won't let you have the time to do that... then what??

TIP: If you can afford the time, it's worth having a second attempt at getting what you want.

We had every intention to zip forward a week to discover outcome of that meeting and thus put ourselves out of the misery of waiting. Unfortunately, the timemachine has a dodgy flux capacitor at the moment, so it seems likely we will just have to wait until we hear back from Neal...