The first meeting with the planning department went quite well. Our neighbour in France, Adrian, attended on our behalf. They had four or five points that they raised, namely with the windows and the roof. It seems in the Charente you can only have a maximum of three different rectangular window sizes and we had four. Plus they have to be at least 20 cm taller than they are wide. This was a relatively easy fix. The biggest blow came when they described how to determine the roof pitch and the new pitch is low, very very low, which means that we no longer have a loft or a place to put my lovely cheap ebay round window.
There were a couple of other small issues but on the whole it seemed quite positive and easily fixed. The next couple of days after the meeting were spent in a whirl of organising, translating and changing. We have had to put a proposal forward for our sewage system which was pretty involved and we also decided to put forward a proposal to keep the existing pitch on the roof.
I got all the translating done but hadn't finished getting it checked before we set out on holiday so left Murray with everything which he got finished and sent off. Once he had made all his changes I also emailed the planning department to go with the hard copies we had sent to our local mayor's office (the mayor's office being the first point of contact on all planning issues). It was just as well I emailed the planning department with our changes and proposals as they had not received anything from the mayor's office and the second meeting was done with little A4 printouts of all our changes.
Everything seemed fine in the second meeting except the roof pitch was once again a bit of a contentious issue. It seems that we still did not fully understand how to determine the pitch but after the latest meeting I think that has been resolved and we are going to redo the roof once again. Not as steep as we would like but not as shallow as first feared. I will put the exact details of how to determine roof pitch in the Charente when I finally understand them completely.
We still haven't sent our sewage proposal to the right place but will get to that this week.
On the whole the outlook is very good (oh we can't have a tin roof either and will have to go with local tiles which is not necessarily a bad thing but will require more preparation to make them adequate for water harvesting). We are now looking toward the finishing line - we hope - of the planning process! All I can say is yay :)
