Residential Building Plans in South Africa: A Concise Reference

By Leon De Kock

This reference guide is a short introduction to building plans and the building plan process, aimed at taking some of the anxiety out of the building plan process for home owners.
This is not a guide to building design. This is a reference guide to what you should and should not do if you own a home in South Africa - as far as building plans are concerned.
The guide was inspired by many home owners asking me the same questions, because they all run into the same problems. Too often they are asking those questions too late, when the damage has been done. A common scenario would be a carport. These are often built in the front corner of a property, usually over at least two building lines and one servitude.
This manual will explore what building lines, servitude and other building restricted areas are.
The scope of a reference guide like this cannot cover the whole of the law. This guide is an entry point, a ‘where to start’ for owners who want to build, or have built and need to get their building plans in order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leon De Kock
• Release date: Jul 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005955878

Leon De Kock

Leon de Kock was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on Friday the 13th, October 1972, the sixth child of Pierre and Sally de Kock.Although life seemed boring on the surface, Leon lived an adventurous young life through reading. Everything went, he started off innocently with Enid Blighton of Famous Five fame, rolled through the other greats of the day, devoured Agatha Christie and then got sucked into the darker, more intense novels of Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz and the likes. Currently his reading includes a lot more of the fantasy novels of authors such as Rowling, Pratchett and others.His story telling began at a young age, by high school he was telling full-length stories through epic poems, some of which would be incorporated into a book and published many, many years later.After completing school in 1990 Leon enrolled for an apprenticeship with the South African department of Post and Telecommunications. After qualifying as a technician he stayed in that job until 1997, when he moved to work in the field of information technology. During those years he played bass guitar in a variety of heavy metal bands, where he was also responsible for most of the lyrics, and managed to get two of his poems published in a magazine.The editor of the magazine said of his first poem it was 'Dead in the Marketplace'. It didn't stop said editor from publishing the poem though.By 2001 Leon was working as an IT technician on a major coal mine in the Mpumulanga province of South Africa. It was around this time that he started work on the epic apocalyptic novel, Hordes.By 2002 the bright lights of his hometown of Pretoria were calling, and he moved back, with no job and no clear course of the future. He found himself working as an estate agent, then moved into architecture, working as a draughtsman.He kept up work on Hordes, and also wrote a second novel, the fantasy horror Dream World. A six month hiatus from working life, caused by a broken tibia and fibula from taking a tumble off his dualsport motorbike while riding off-road in December of 2009 helped him to complete a lot of his unfinished writing.Both Hordes and Dream World were Indie published on Amazon Kindle in May 2012. This was followed in June of the same year by the fantasy Story of Enchantment, a novel written through 250 poems, most of them epics, forming one continuous story.Dream School, the sequel to Dream World, followed in 2014.In 2015 came the horror Serenity, to be followed in 2016 by another apocalyptic, Sniffer.The companion book to Dream World and Dream School, titled Guide to Dreaming, was published in January 2018. Also in January 2018 came the collection of short stories, Night is for Nightmares.The first book of the fantasy Vespula series, Rituals, was released in September 2019, and was followed in by the second novel in the series, Insanity.In February of 2023 his collection of poems, mostly epic tales, was published under the title Riotous Rhymes.Leon currently lives in the city of Kempton Park, in the province of Gauteng, South Africa, where he continues life as a novelist and architectural draughtsman.Never far from nature, he has close ties to the Gauteng and Northern Regions Bat Interest Group as their membership secretory. He holds a membership with the Exploration Society of South Africa and the Speleological Exploration Society.In 2013 he was involved in a National Geographic expedition to retrieve hominid fossils from the Rising Star cave formation, working as a safety caver in support of the scientists.In 2014 he was involved in the Gobolo expedition to Swaziland to help explore and map the Gobolo Cave formation, one of earth's rare granite cave formations.Although his healthy sense of self-preservation has kept him from taking the plunge over the 50 meter precipice into the cave known as Armageddon, he was part of the team that first discovered and explored what would turn out to be one of the largest, deepest and probably oldest underground chasms in South Africa.You can find more information about the author's work at http://www.leondekock.com/

Book preview

Residential Building Plans In South Africa - A Concise Reference

2023 Update

Copyright - September 2023

Leon de Kock

Contents

Section 1

Introduction

The Legal Stuff

Disclaimer

Use Registered Professionals only

Structures that need building plans

Building plans that were never approved

Missing building plans

Building without building plans

Servitude, building line and other building restricted areas

Title Deeds, Zoning Certificates and more

Outbuildings and second dwellings

Section 2

The building plan approval process

When to start building

Building plan expiry date

Everybody else does this!

About the author

Section 1

Introduction

This reference guide is a short introduction to building plans and the building plan process, aimed at taking some of the anxiety out of the building plan process for home owners.

This is not a guide to building design. This is a reference guide to what you should and should not do if you own a home in South Africa - as far as building plans are concerned.

The guide was inspired by many home owners