There’s some sort of cliche about man needing a shed, and this one certainly does. My old place had a 8x12m shed, typical rural metal shed with high walls and absolutely no insulation. I found it was pretty unusable for about 3 months of the year after midday, as the whole thing became a hotbox and I’d just sweat all over my tools.
My shiny new BAL restrictions meant I wanted to put the shed in front of the house, but the local planning scheme says:
Outbuildings shall, notwithstanding any other provision of the Scheme, be constructed no closer to the primary street alignment than the front building line of the dwelling on the lot unless, in the opinion of the Shire, the location of the dwelling and/or other constraints on the site make it impractical to locate the outbuilding behind the front building line;
Mundaring LPS4, 5.7.31.1
I can tell I’m going to love the Local Planning Scheme. Here’s some more:
outbuildings shall be located entirely behind the rear of the dwelling on the lot unless constructed in the same materials as and having colours matching those of the dwelling
Mundaring LPS4 5.8.9.2(d)
Happily, I could solve all of these problems with a variation of my original plan – build a strawbale shed to go with my shiny strawbale house. Visited the council and convinced them that this was an awesome idea (surprisingly easy) too. But….let’s have some more LPS:
On land coded R5:
Mundaring LPS4 5.8.9.4(a)
(a) the total area of all outbuildings on the lot shall not exceed 90 m2
Hmm. It’s no 8×12, but it’s not too bad. The nice planning guy at the council had other ideas though. Have a caveat that I missed!
However, for any Residential zoned lot that is smaller than the minimum site area per dwelling in the Residential Design Codes for its density code, the floor area applying to the lowest density code for which that lot would meet or exceed the minimum site area per dwelling in the Residential Design Codes shall apply.
Mundaring LPS4 5.8.9.1
And since my block is under 2000sqm, I get the R10 zoning rules:
On land coded R10:
Mundaring LPS4 5.8.9.3(a)
(a) the total area of all outbuildings on the lot shall not exceed 75 m2
Poop.
The nice council man said I could measure that from the internal walls though – when your walls are half a metre thick, that ends up being a fair bit of space! – so the shed’s external measurements are roughly 90sqm (9x10m) anyway. Everybody wins! (kinda)
In summary: rules are bad.
