Kick off the build – Site Set Out

Summary recommendations from our experience at that point of the build

  • Get multiple quotes to know the pricing of survey site set out.
  • Ask them what the cost of a re-visit is in case you are in a situation like ours
  • Make sure no one knocks off the pegs in the ground so the string-lines are accurate.
  • Very important to verify what the surveyor has done, don’t hesitate to pick up the tape measure, get a friend’s help and check what the surveyor has done.

To kick off the works at your site the most fundamental task is to set the site out, i.e. translate your drawings off the plan and mark the plan and points on the ground.

The land surveyor does that for you!

At the time, I had a recommendation from a close friend that I should speak to a carpenter to do that. I wonder what this friend was on giving us such advice because whilst a carpenter may have the skills to do measurements, the site set out is a complex task and you have to be accurate with it.

Without the necessary tools, skills and experience, this will be one area to easily make a mistake on and is likely to cost you dearly down the road with compliance and design ramifications.

Think about the front, back and side setbacks required by the council. Our front setback required was 6m, a mistake in set out which resulted in front setback of 5.5m would get us in trouble with the law and vice-versa a setback of 6.5M at front will reduce the size of the back garden.

What does a site set out look like?

In the image above, you’d notice there are a bunch of Red dots. For each one of those dots, the surveyor drove a nail in the fence (since the block was fenced) and sprayed with the red colour.

There was one yellow point which it turns out that plumber had marked for himself for his drainage purposes. See below:

How much does a land survey cost in Australia?

The site set out cost us $1250. The surveyor we used was only 5 minutes drive from our construction site. Our house design is reasonably simple so we thought the quote was not too bad at the time.

We don’t know if that was a good price or not because we didn’t get multiple quotes as the surveyor came through a referral.

How was the experience dealing with the surveyor?

By and large the experience was quite reasonable but on the day the plumber started work for drainage, he had difficulty understanding some of the marked points and that one of the survey pegs had been knocked off by the excavator which meant some clarification was required.

The surveyor wanted to charge minimum 3hrs rate to return on site which was just a 5 minute job. It would have been nice to get a little bit of customer service in which case we would have recommended them to our other friends who were building as owner builders.

After spending a little bit of time to understand the markings, we were able to figure things out and get on with the job.

Recommendations at this point

  • Get multiple quotes to know the pricing
  • Ask them what the cost of a re-visit is in case you are in a situation like ours
  • Make sure no one knocks off the pegs in the ground
  • Very important to verify what the surveyor has done, don’t hesitate to pick up the tape measure, get a friend’s help and check what the surveyor has done.

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