Saturday, July 5, 2008

Bureaucracy

Talk about bureaucracy in every country... upon doing all the preliminary paperwork for the permit we found out our lot legally consists of three(!) lots, the smallest one being a whopping 15 square meter(!) front yard (a tiny 3x5m strip). Now after we submitted the plans the town suddenly told us we couldn't have our building protrude over a property line (even if both lots had the same owner) and we needed to officially join the lots. Going to cost roughly €50 and a stamp on the letter... so not that bad.

We also got the official invite to the hearing, it's going to be next Wednesday. We got a pretty good chuckle reading the invite... on the back it lists all the recipients, obviously including everyone who could possibly be related to any construction project... like neighbors (alright, that was to be expected), construction official from Korneuburg (not a surprise either), the gas company, power company (a bit weirder as we stated everything would be connected to the existing service), chimney sweep (we don't have a chimney in our plans), local MD(!) for sanitary affairs, Telekom Austria (phone) and last but most funny ÖBB line management... ÖBB is the federal railway company, and the next railway line is a healthy 10km away... that one left us scratching our heads.

I'm going to travel out next Tuesday and hopefully I'll get to strip, repair and repaint the two front windows (main house). The paint is flaking badly and some of the wood already feels soft in small spots. Note to self: never use acrylic paint outdoors. I bought marine grade oil paint. (we know the PO used acrylic paint because we found the empty cans).

2 comments:

33458 said...

Ah, what in the States is called a 'Homestead' amendment for survey and tax purposes? We had to do that with our two properties, though to what real benefit I'm uncertain...the easements do not match up.

Ragnar said...

Unfortunately my knowledge of the US legal system is close to zero... so I'm afraid I can't answer your question. The only information we got was that a building is not allowed to be built across two properties, not even if the owner is the same. Now the three properties are officially registered as one (no harm in that - the whole lot is so small there's no sense in splitting it up anyway).