2011 Dreaming -House Progress Report

This year we were going to get back on to the job of finishing off our owner built house. We have half-heartedly said this a few times before, but this year we have actually started. The first room to get the treatment was our bedroom. The job turned out bigger than we expected (don’t they always), because a close look our timber beams and wall cladding revealed that they needed further sanding before we could get underway. A full day was spent rectifying this situation before we could start the main game. Choosing colours is not one of our strong points so our bedroom was to be the site of the great colour “experiment”. We had a long chat with the folk at Grimes & Sons who are well known local manufacturers of stains and paints with a particular knowledge about mud brick construction.

We started off with a range of several “off the shelf” colours and these worked well for most of the room. However, it was not quite so easy choosing the wall colour and we ended up developing our very own tinted colour with the help and expertise from Alan Grimes. Our rather primitive method involved measuring out a quarter litre of the base colour and then adding drops of tint with an eye dropper until the colour was just right. The magical number was 50 drops. After that we used an old medicine glass to work out how many ml equalled 50 drops. As the final colour was a result of Heather’s experiments we have christened this colour “Heather”. Another colour that had a great name was the one that we used for the upright posts and main beams. It is called “beer”. We did not choose it because of its name, but because it is a rich mellow colour that makes the timber grain look really beautiful.

We have now finished our bedroom and are really happy with the result. Unfortunately the cooler weather is not conducive to painting and staining so we will try the next room when the warm weather returns. It is great that at last we have made a start.

Grimes & Sons have a web site www.grimesandsons.com

Would We Do It Again?

Would we do it again? No, not at our age now. We have done it once, enjoyed the journey and now we are happy to live out our days enjoying the fruit of our labour. However if it was a question of the clock being wound back would we go down the owner builder path again? We certainly would. We thoroughly recommend that everyone at least consider the owner building process. If you do, we found the following helpful

· Undertaking some major renovation tasks at our previous house provided us with some building experience
· Choosing subcontractors wisely (recommendations are useful). The cheapest is not always the best. Look after subcontractors (cups of tea etc). A good relationship will often yield good advice and valuable information. We may have just been lucky but every one of our subcontractors did an excellent job, fitted in with us and were very helpful. Many contractors are happy for you to reduce costs by doing some of the work yourself.
· Having access to paid long service leave enabled a lot of work to be completed in a shorter period of time
· We contracted a qualified builder (Rod Sheppard) to help us erect the frame, and we worked as his labourers. This saved us money, gave us the chance to learn skills on the job, and meant this complex stage was completed in a quarter of the time it would have taken us to do by ourselves.
· Attend as many house tours as you can, to get ideas for your own project and to learn from other people’s experiences.
· Publications such as Earth Garden, Renew Magazine, Grass Roots and Owner Builder frequently have useful articles and useful contacts. These and many helpful books can be found in local libraries.
· Improve your bbq skills so that friends look forward to visiting (and helping when you need an extra hand). This doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try.
· Learn as much as you can about good design. By this we don’t mean the so called “good style” demonstrated in coffee table magazines, but design that works for you and the planet over the long term.

In conclusion we recommend the completion of a Permaculture Design Certificate. This course introduces all the basic principles and concepts needed to develop plans for an energy efficient, environmentally friendly house which integrates with other infrastructure.

Here is a list of tradesmen/contractors we used or know, and whom we would happily recommend:
· Rod Sheppard - Marysville –survived the fires (Builder, building designer, draughtsman, building timber supplier) Top photo
· Kevin Jones -Chirnside Park (Very skilled and knowledgeable. Did our excavations, driveways and dams) Bottom photo
· Bill Hayes -Lilydale (Plumber & House fire defence sprinkler systems)
· Stephen Cook- Glen Iris (Top class Electrician)
· Glen Morris of SolarQuip Healesville (Solar Supplier & Installer)
· Regis Bezencon Healesville (Solar Supplier & Installer)
· Janelle Murphy of Australian 5Star -Bayswater (Energy Rater who will work through the process with clients, and Insulation consultant)
· Alan Duke of A&A Wormfarm Waste Systems - Hastings. Disposal of all grey and black waste water. Middle photo

Owner Building - Does it save money?

Building your own home can save a lot of money, but there are pitfalls and traps for the unwary. Many houses have been seriously damaged because of inadequate termite protection. Poor foundations or mortar mixes have caused brick walls to crack. Financial institutions may make life hard for owner builders. Subcontractors can be a wonderful help or they can cause a myriad of problems. There are dozens of things that can go wrong with such a large and complex undertaking. Even professional builders occasionally end up in disastrous situations.

We have learned a couple of big lessons on our journey. Building a house is a far bigger project than we imagined. Instead of taking 1 or 2 years, it is now 10 years since we began and we are still finishing the place off. We completed 75% of it within 2 years (enough to get our occupancy permit) and then got distracted by our real love- developing our gardens, orchard etc. From this though, we learned that enjoying the journey is far more important than reaching the destination.

Building is also much more expensive than we thought. As owner builders there is no fixed price contract. Generally you pay as you go, and boy do you pay. Perhaps we were naive, but our total costs were over double what we imagined they would be. This was partly because of lack of knowledge (lack of research). What is particularly easy to overlook is the myriad of small things that by themselves don’t seem much (eg bolts, tiles, taps, nails, paint, door knobs, locks, window furnishings etc.) Budget increases were also partly due to inflation. Our plans were approved in 1997, but by the time we started building in 1999 inflation had increased prices. On top of this, the newly introduced GST increased prices a further 10% by the time we were ready to purchase most of our major fittings.

Obviously owner building has potential to save the cost of all the labour that owners put into the job. There are also other possible savings to be gained from paying as you go. If you can get away with a lower (or no) bank loan, you avoid paying large amounts in interest. The downside is that if you lack tradesman skills, the job takes much longer.

ARE OWNER BUILT HOUSES CHEAP?
As described above, savings are possible, but total costs depend more on the size of the house. Labour costs are only a small proportion of construction costs. However I have read articles in Owner Builder magazine where people have built small cottages for under $20,000. These people have usually used second hand and lightweight materials in their construction. Although mudbricks can be low cost if you make them yourself, your pocket suffers when you pay for the slab, which needs very strong beams to support the weight of the walls.

The cheapest form of owner building is to buy an established house, get it transported to your land and then renovate and retrofit it to meet your needs. A friend of ours did this, used contractors to do most of the reconstruction work, and saved a good deal of money. We’ll do a post on her experience soon.

A Mudbrick Adventure

We promised to do this post about our house design way back in October last year. (Recently Geoff from Flood Street Farmlet - http://floodstreetfarmlet.blogspot.com/ reminded us about this.) It's a convoluted tale so we will start at the beginning and spend the next few posts filling in details.

We spent several years pondering our house design and considered a wide range of materials and housing styles, ranging from the traditional Australian homestead with verandas all round, through to concrete earth-covered domes. To help us clarify our ideas, we spent about 12 months going on every alternative house tour we could find. This was a great way to explore possibilities. During this period we drew up the following criteria that we wanted our house to meet.

· Maximise our involvement by being owner builders to save costs and to maintain “ownership” of the process
· East-west alignment with large north facing windows to maximise solar gain
· Smaller windows on South, west and east to minimise heat loss
· Minimise fire risk by giving the house a low profile and by using low risk materials
· Eaves to exclude summer sun but allow winter sun to warm house and protect mudbricks from weather.
· Utilise at least some earth covered wall construction (a carryover from our earlier thoughts of building an earth sheltered house)
· Use thermal mass to maintain constant pleasant temperature (20 –25 degrees) and minimise energy use.
· Utilise natural ventilation and cooling pipes (stack and cross ventilation)
· Maximise natural lighting to all rooms avoiding need for lights during daylight hours
· Wet areas to be in close proximity to HWS to minimise hot water pipe distances
· Incorporate a window outlook that provides views of our bush environment
· Accommodate wheelchair access to most of house
· Plan to include provision for large concrete water tank, wood stove and wood heater
· Access between garage, pantry and rest of house
· Cathedral ceilings and exposed beams
· House to have appearance of being part of the environment- not alien to it
· Rooms to be reasonably spacious and Incorporate plenty of storage space
· Use plantation timber (not old growth forests)
· Minimise “wasted” space eg. halls
· Use materials with a low “embodied energy component”
· Adequate insulation using natural non toxic materials
· Use physical termite barriers- no poisons
· House plan to incorporate 3 bedrooms, a study/office/spare room, lounge, family room, kitchen, walk-in pantry, bathroom, toilet, laundry and garage/workshop.
· Deciduous vine covered pergola along northern wall for shade in summer but light in winter

OUR SOLUTION
Our solution was a mudbrick house (external and internal mudbrick walls), built on a slab with one earth sheltered wall (built with “normal” fired bricks and back filled with soil). The house and garage area is around 25 squares. A clerestory is used to bring light into the back of the house. We are very happy with the design we came up with, which meets 99% of our initial criteria.

WHY MUDBRICK?
We decided on mudbrick because:-
· They have low embodied energy
· We were planning to make the mudbricks ourselves. After we had made 80 bricks (out of the 4000 we needed) we decided to buy the rest from Barclay Bricks in Hurstbridge. Back in 1999, puddled clay bricks were only $1.65 each delivered- a very reasonable price we thought.
· They do not require great skill to lay. Slight irregularities in levels add to the “rustic charm”. We use this excuse all the time to explain imperfect lines etc.
· They have good thermal mass (but not good insulation)
· We love the texture of mudbrick wall surfaces
· Laying a few bricks puts the wall up a fair bit because of their large size
· They are fire reistant
· The density of the mudbrick adds an element of sound reduction so that activities in one room have less impact on people in another room
· By building a post and beam frame and later filling in the walls with mudbrick we could put the roof up first and then work on the walls under cover in rain, hail or shine.

In the next post we will get into the nitty gritty of construction and layout.