Sunbury sits in the City of Hume, on the north-western edge of Melbourne where the basalt plain meets the Jacksons Creek and Emu Creek valleys. We work across Sunbury every week: one registered building surveyor from permit to sign-off, and inspections are easy to schedule.
Where the work is
Most new-home permits in Sunbury come out of the estates on the town’s edges: Redstone on Redstone Hill off Sunbury Road, Kingsfield off Lancefield Road, Rosenthal off Vineyard Road on the western side of town, and Sunbury Fields on Racecourse Road around its grassland reserve. Each lot comes with a building envelope and developer design guidelines that fix side setbacks, garage position behind the front facade, and what the facade must do. The estate’s design panel signs off first, then we assess the permit against the Building Regulations 2018 and the NCC. The two are not the same test. An approved building envelope recorded on the title through the subdivision permit displaces the Part 5 siting rules only for the matters it covers; design guidelines that are not recorded that way displace nothing. So a garage or porch the guidelines allow can still need a report and consent from council under the siting provisions. We check that before the drawings are finalised, and again for the verandahs, decks and carports that go in after handover: there is no permit exemption for a deck attached to the house, inside the envelope or not.
The older town is a different job. Goonawarra, Jacksons Hill, Canterbury Hills and the streets around the station have larger blocks and houses mostly from the seventies onward. There we see knock-down rebuilds, extensions, second dwellings and big sheds and workshops. The demolition permit and Section 29A consent run alongside the new-home permit so the timing works. The same goes for the commercial side of town: shop fit-outs in the town centre, a change of use for a tenancy, and warehouses and offices on Sunbury’s industrial land all get the same permit and inspection service as the houses.
Soil, slabs and footings
Much of Sunbury sits on a cap of Newer Volcanic basalt, and the clay that weathers out of it is reactive. The creek valleys and the older hills cut down into the sediments underneath, so the ground changes across town. Reactive clay is common, with more reactive pockets where the clay runs deep. The soil report sets the class, and the slab and footings are designed to it. The valley edges toward Jacksons Creek add slope. Lots are cut and filled to get a level pad, and the retaining walls that result are often a metre or more high, holding up a neighbour’s land or driveway, or tied into the house works. Those need their own permit and an engineer’s design; only a wall under a metre that stands on its own is exempt. How height is measured and where the line falls is in our guide on when a retaining wall needs a permit.
Land on the rural fringe can sit in a designated bushfire prone area or a Bushfire Management Overlay, and lots near the creeks may carry flood controls, which can add a council report and consent to the permit. Both change the construction standard, so give us the address early.
Nearby
We cover the whole northern growth corridor: Diggers Rest, Bulla, Gisborne and Riddells Creek on the Sunbury side, and Craigieburn, Mickleham and Wallan to the east toward the Hume Freeway. See our northern Melbourne page for the rest.