Progress

We have development approval! We have development approval! We have development approval!

Well, clearly we don't have it in our sticky mitts yet (too much to hope for, we're only 6 months into the planning process...) but we have been reliably informed that it was being typed up on Monday to be posted to our architect, scanned and then passed on to us. So we spent a couple of hours down at the Council offices yesterday filling in forms and paying over outrageous sums of money to get the whole Construction Certificate process underway. For the uninitiated, Construction Certificates are a way of progressively inspecting and certifying the build once it's underway, so that it can be said to conform with bye-laws, planning constraints etc.

On a slightly LESS enthusiastic note, we also have the proposal for a Coffs Harbour by-pass which, if the relevant legislation goes through and the land is bought up and so on, will pass within a kilometre of the bottom of our block, although it will be partially hidden by trees. I suspect we'll get some noise from it; eight lanes aren't quiet, after all. However, it isn't even going to be started for another decade and Australians seem generally quite sanguine about living near big roads so I doubt if it will have any effect on the financial value of the land. And it's so far into the future, who knows what will happen?

Fingers crossed..?

The first potential buyers for this place come round on Friday, and there's a possible visit lined up for next Wednesday too. Apparently the next-Wednesday-visitors are a couple from Dorrigo who want to buy an investment property and rent it out, so who knows, if they were to proceed they might be interested in letting us stay put...?

Solar power for gadget freaks

OK, here's some funny stuff. We've been having a lovely conversation with Steve from Bellingen Solar, who is a very nice chap who came round and smiled at us again yesterday. I do think we must be a great source of amusement locally, for all sorts of reasons.... especially this one.

When you embark on the whole road-to-Damascus-solar-conversion thing you have to take a stock of your current electricity consumption in order to determine the necessary size of your save-the-planet solar power system. This exercise requires a small gadget that plugs into your power points and appliances and laughs itself silly at the resulting HUGE consumption figures. Wonder why we've been delaying this part of the process? Anticipatory embarrassment, that's why. Only now we're up to genuine embarrassment because we've discovered that our 52" plasma TV consumes ONE THIRD of our total electricity.

ONE THIRD. By itself. Not even counting the media centre and the sound system.


No #1 daughter's expression is incidental. She's indicating scale, not humour


This is really embarrassing. Our TV consumes FOUR TIMES MORE POWER than Michael's powerful server uses. TWICE what our fridge and freezer combined use when they're drawing full power from the system on a hot day with their doors open.

What does this mean, apart from the fact that we clearly have a very large TV screen? Well in solar electricity terms it means we need a $40,000 stand-alone system JUST TO POWER THE TV.

What does that mean in financial terms? We'll be selling the TV shortly. And please don't talk to me about things like under-floor heating for the bathrooms OR air-conditioning, because right now these items can't squeeze onto the "if my wish-list had a wish-list..." list. Instead, we're going to be SO green we won't know ourselves, and we'll be replacing said LG plasma screen TV with an LCD screen TV very shortly on the basis that even if we can't sell the plasma TV the LCD screen replacement will pay for itself immediately by NOT costing $40,000...

Another day, another builder!

Well, one more builder, Dan Duffy, to be precise. Perhaps Michael should be blogging about the meeting as I had to run off to a Focus group meeting half-way through, but he's busy trying to fix our Media Centre which died last night so he's off rummaging for spare parts!

I find it very interesting how different people are in their approach to things. Dan's been involved in some fairly 'green' buildings in the past, including for the local Steiner school in Coffs Harbour, which is about as whacky as buildings get locally. So he wasn't at all phased by our ideas. We want a timber frame? No problem. Want a square set finish to the interior? Fine. Double glazing? Expensive, but a good idea and it will pay for itself if we're in the building for long enough? But the really great part of the discussion (which, of course, I missed) was that he reckoned on a brief look at our plans and a lengthy talk to Michael that it might be possible to do the house and the office/studio for around $350,000 which is much more like the size of our budget! I'm not going to hold him to it, mind, and he needs to go away and do a proper costing of things, but it is a figure that gave us renewed hope in a week of major depression about the fact that we have to leave here and we might not have enough money to build ourselves a new home! And that is a large difference in price: $350,000 works out at about $1,150 per metre square instead of $1,500 per metre square...

Michael and I have been feeling quite stressed out about having to move. Again. Into our third home in two years and with all the associated cost and sheer inconvenience, just when we were relaxing into thoughts of Christmas around the pool! It's crap, really, and we are very upset about it. The rental market is difficult round here at the moment: apparently some houses have thirty or so people going to see them, and agents are holding 'open days' for rentals which is something I've only seen in big UK cities before. Now admittedly we might be looking towards the top end of the market in order to find something sufficiently large for us both to be able to work from there as well as live, but even so it isn't good news.

It's been amusing in a slightly embittered way to talk to the two agents who will be trying to sell this house. Our landlord is clearly aware that he's treading on eggshells with us at the moment and he has taken some trouble to ensure both agents realise that they must NOT, on ANY ACCOUNT, annoy me! So anyone being shown around will have to be pre-approved, to deter sticky-beaks (a lovely phrase!), and I'm to understand that viewings will be at my convenience. I must say it's nice that he's taken the effort to say all this. Of course he's also saying that he'll ensure a long settlement period so that we can rest assured we'll be able to stay here until after Christmas, but frankly I can't see that happening, and I can't rely on it being the case because it is out of his control. Who in their right minds is going to pay $840,000 (who indeed!) for this house and then say, yeah, fine, the tenants can stay in it until next year? More likely the place will sell just before Christmas and we'll be out on our ears just at the worst time of year when any family that's going to move moves because it's the long school holiday and they can get their kids into school at the beginning of the academic year... and it's also peak holiday season so houses are snapped up on short-term lets for families holidaying in the area, and other houses that might become vacant aren't because the tenants understandably don't want to move house over Christmas.... I know I'm being really whiny, but the situation just feels grim, and I am SO fed up with it!

The new road …

I realise I've been a bit slack in getting photo’s up here and thought I'd try some new technology - Microsoft Photosynth. Just click on the image to wander down our new road!

Builders

We had a great two hours with a local builder called John Newton yesterday. He was recommended to us by a friend's friend who is exactly the sort of person we'd want to build our house but can't because he's too busy with other projects...

How do you choose a builder? Answer: I don't know. I guess that you have to like them, because they're going to see you at your best and at your worst, they're going to find out a lot about you, you're going to pay them an awful lot of money, and they will be responsible for delivering your dreams in three dimensions with a roof on top.

John seems very nice: calm, practical, no nonsense. He runs a tight ship, so to speak, employing regular builders and tradespeople whom he trusts, and he seems to have a focus on a quality finish. He also knows and likes our architect, and likes Christian's work, which helps. So far, so good. The down side was that he thinks - without doing a full costing - that he'd be charging us around $1,500 per square metre and that our budget, therefore, is inadequate. Damn! Now $1,500 per square metre will buy you the structure (frame, walls, floor joists, flashings, chimney, roof), basic electrics (internal cabling, connection to your power system, wall sockets and power points, light switches etc), basic plumbing (connection to your sewage system, internal plumbing, taps and shower heads), some internal cabinetry (standard kitchen/larder/cupboard/bathroom units with standard tops, basic shelving, doors, skirting boards and architraves if you want them), internal flooring (tiles, carpet and wooden floorboards) and a spray-paint finish. Not included, as far as I'm aware, are toilets, bidets, baths, shower screens/cubicles, kitchen appliances such as cooktops or ovens or dishwashers, light fittings, airconditioning, windows, exterior work such as outside lights or patio tiling or decking, or your swimming pool! And if you want anything fancy you're going to pay extra for it too.

Anyway, 223.5 metres of house plus 84 metres of office/studio comes to 307.5 square metres of internal floorspace which at $1,500 per square metre comes out at $461,250 of basic build cost. I understand that one ought to allow around $100,000 for internal fit-out and 20% contingency... OUCH! I guess I need to go back to my spreadsheet.

It never rains...

Our landlord just popped in for a brief chat, to tell us that he's putting this house on the market!




BUGGER





Better get on with building our house then, I suppose.

Quoting, quoting, one, two, three

Now as we have no experience at all of building a house apart from that gained from watching in horrified amazement at the antics of people on Grand Designs, we are being guided by our architect as to what needs to be done next. Christian has been telling us to get on with discovering what we'd like to build the house with - everything from what windows we like to which light switches we'd like on our walls. Along the way we've discussed the number of powerpoints needed where, hanging systems, hardwood flooring, tiles, shower screens, louvered windows, cupboard fronts and laundry units... the list seems very, very long. And now that we are forming opinions about things we've started going out to get quotes, which is at once very exciting and absolutely terrifying!

Take windows, for example. Most people would agree that they would like to have windows, probably windows that open in some fashion. If you've lived in the UK you'll be familiar with double-glazing and might take it as read that double-glazed windows are sensible, even in a warmer climate, because they keep out hot sun in summer as well as keeping the heat in during winter. Fine, so you think you might like to have double-glazed window units.

But if you have environmental concerns, what sort of window frames do you choose? Aluminium frames are cheap and the metal can be recycled at the end of its life, but aluminium frames leak heat around the edges unless you go for a 'thermal break' system. Wood looks nice, but what about cutting down forests? How can you be sure that your timber is from a sustainably managed forest, and what about the sort of paint we would need to maintain a timber window in a humid, seaside environment? It isn't going to be low-VOC, water-based paint... PVC and u-PVC used to have a bad name environmentally speaking, but now people talk of them as having 'low embodied energy' and a long life-span without the need for on-going maintenance, so as long as they're responsibly produced and aren't going to 'off-gas' in your home maybe they're the best solution? Or why not go for something different; how about pultruded fibreglass frames? Modern technology means that fibreglass can be mixed with resins (both containing a percentage of post-consumer waste) and turned into a very stable, non-warping, maintenance-free, thermally efficient window frame with a life-span of 50 years and able to be recycled at the end of that time. Choosing your window system is NOT an easy task.

Well we'd like to look at pultruded fibreglass double-glazed units, as our first option, followed by PVC frames or thermally-broken aluminium frames as our second and third choices. We can find suppliers for all these options in Australia, although no-one makes them within a 500 km radius of here (which means un-environmentally friendly road freight costs, but possibly better than flying in the frames from elsewhere - although more on that in a moment!), but price becomes the next big issue.

When I asked Christian how much he thought windows should come in at he felt that $10,000 - $20,000 for single-glazed aluminium frames was a good ball-park figure, and that leaves plenty of room for maneouvre! I know we're going for double-glazed units, which are unusual in Australia, but even so the three quotes I've had so far have come in at $41,000, $57,000 and $80,000! Just slightly more than I'd bargained for. So now I'm in the mad situation where I email UK-based double-glazing companies to ask for quotes to include shipping to Australia, in the honest belief that the price might be lower! Crazy, and not very ecologically sound but there comes a point at which money is the biggest issue and we certainly can't afford to spend the best part of $100,000 glazing our house.

I guess the big question is why double-glazing isn't a popular option here? I think it will become more popular: Australians use a huge amount of energy per head of population in what is a small nation, despite its geographical size. Many Australians live in areas that experience extremes of heat and cold. Perth, for example, in Western Australia, can get to zero or below in the winter and yet has temperatures as high as 40 degrees centigrade in the summer. Sydney drops to around 10 degrees C in the winter and regularly goes over 40 degrees C in the summer. The trouble is, everyone just turns on the air-conditioning. Coffs Harbour has a fairly regular temperature, which is one of the bigger reasons why we moved here. Although this winter has been unusually cold, temperatures normally only vary between about 18 and 30 degrees C during the year. We want double-glazing to keep the heat in during winter and keep the summer heat out, and thus save the load on our solar electricity system so that we don't need to switch on any air-conditioning.

Leaving windows aside, the other amusing quote I've had has been for the material with which to make cupboard fronts for the large storage unit and island unit in our 'kitchen pod', which will be in the middle of our open-plan living/kitchen/dining area. My colourful idea is to front both units with sliding doors that reveal an array of shelves and storage areas behind them rather than individual cupboard and doors. I thought that if the sliding doors were made of translucent resin panels they could slide over each other, creating new colour combinations and we could back-light them so that the units could function as big lightboxes in the evenings. Cool idea, really silly price: I've been quoted over $25,000 just for the resin panels - no sliding mechanism, no cupboard units to mount them on... just the material, in sheets, to make up into the sliding doors! Now that I've sat down, laughing, for a while I'm searching out alternatives.

There aren't many pictures, are there?

I realise that there aren't many pictures, and of course that's because neither Michael nor I have put up any of the photographs we've been taking on our increasingly frequent visits up to the block... which is a long way of saying that I'm about to up-load some photographs to show you how things have progressed during the last few months. This translates into an explanation of how we've been spending TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars!


First off, the road, which back in March looked like this...





... and by the end of August looked like this, very handsome, having been properly engineered with culverts underneath at crucial points to give water somewhere to go instead of ruining the surface (you can just see the white ends of the pipes in the photo), and having been compacted and covered with a good thick layer of gravel.

When we last posted photographs we'd also got started on the house pad (when I say 'we', I do of course mean 'John Lacey' and his merry men, since my awesome skills don't yet extend to driving an excavator.

In January the back wall of the semi-excavated pad looked like this: a rough, almost vertical wall showing marks where the excavator had bitten through it. It wasn't 'battened back' so the surface was still loose and crumbly.

Looking along the house pad from the top of the road, this was the view: a basic platform without any shaping or drainage channels.

By March John had begun to shape the back of the pad (this time the shot is taken from just in front of the tree fern you can see in the previous picture, looking back towards the top of the road), putting in slopes and channels to direct run-off water coming down the hill away from the house.


Now the back wall looks like this: it has been well and truly battened back and now has two 'benches' in it i.e. platforms that break up the slope, making it more stable. Initially we built it with only one batten and a 45 degree angle to the slope, but the geotech report came back recommending a 43 degree slope and two battens, so we took out our wallets and called John up again...

As you can see, the digger had a lot of fun going round in circles moving mud, clay, rocks and tree trunks! This photo was taken from where Michael was standing in the previous picture.






And this is a close-up shot of one of the battened slopes, showing the banded colouring of the layered

clay/Argillite.