Bureaucrats and bureaucracy!?!?
Crikey mate I hear you on that!
It took us twenty-three months and two weeks from when we bought the property to when we were allowed to move in.
And 99% of the hiccoughs were the result of prevarication and obfuscation of/by bureaucrats.
Terribly frustrating.
It started before we'd even put a shovel in the ground; our access to the place is directly off SH 45, when we bought it the driveway was designated as rural, ie two or three tractor/farm implement movements per week.
We had to change that to residential with specific measurements of width, depth, size of culvert pipe at guttering on so on ad infinitum.
Downers are the only company it our area allowed to install driveways on to State Highways.
We waited for NZ Transport Association to okay our plans, they're 200 miles away; so I couldn't turn up and talk to people, we waited for Downers to turn up and install the driveway, nothing happened. In the finish, I got a mate with a twenty ton digger in, told him "We've got all the relevant measurements; let's just do it. If anything hits the fan I don't know who you are, I've never met you."
So we did.
And we still, to this day, do not have permission for that driveway.

And it just went downhill from there on.

Right to the final sign off for Code of Compliance.