Tamborine Mountain is a beautiful part of the world, nestled in the SE of Queensland, Australia and just inland from the hectic coast that is Surfers Paradise and the City of Gold Coast. Tired of the rat race, it seemed fitting that the family and I should sell up and move to Tamborine Mountain and experience a ‘different way of life ‘.
We sold our house and decided to buy a piece of land on the Mountain and build a home.
Buying the land was easy and getting permission to build a house was easy BUT… where things came unstuck was sewerage. The Mountain does not have ‘town water’ nor does it have ‘mains sewerage’ which means harvesting your rain water for supply and putting in a OSSF (On Site Sewerage Facility) or HSTP (Household Sewerage Treatment Plant) to manage your effluent.
Up steps the SRRC (Scenic Rim Regional Council) and down goes the ‘rule book’ (revised last year). Suddenly the opportunities shrink away, big pieces of land are not big enough anymore, small pieces of land are unusable and everything suddenly becomes ‘very difficult’ and quite possibly very expensive.
Testing the soil for geo-technical stability for your house foundations is no longer as important as testing your soil for permeability and texture, both important in determining just how much space you have to allocate for your OSSF. Finding a ‘Site and Soil Evaluator’ that is both understanding and sympathetic to your plight, will go a long way in helping you submit a Plumbing and Drainage Plan that meets the Queensland state effluent set-back distances and is acceptable to the SRRC.
The final analysis is that small blocks of land (<1000sqm) on Tamborine Mountain can loose up to 50% of their space to these OSSF’s leaving precious little for a house pad.
This forces everybody to have to purchase bigger pieces of land, just to be able to cope with what is otherwise just a sh*t situation. C’est la vie.