Superstar!

I picked up darling husband from the airport yesterday morning and together with dearest daughter (who has been so stressed out with all of our moving around that she was granted an exceptional day off school by her teacher in order to spend some time with daddy) we went for a drive up to the block. And this is what we saw when we got there!






Do you see the similarities with the model I built from the plans last year?




















It's fantastic to see the building clad in Zincalume and with the windows in place...














The silver cladding is really funky!





The bank of gel batteries in the shed that will store our solar power until we need to use it












One of two ground mounted solar arrays that will track the sun


Here's the other one with darling husband next to it, to give a sense of scale!








Things seem a lot more 'real' now the physical structures are going up, and we are really excited. It's all made a lot more pertinent given our current renting situation. For those that haven't been following my DoubleElephant blog, the sorry tale in brief is that after weathering weeks of uncertainty and disruption owing to fractured water pipes in the lovely house we're renting (including having to move out to emergency accommodation for two weeks and then back in again), our landlady has told us we can't continue our contract beyond the beginning of January... It's been highly stressful and I am currently investigating our options, in the sense of whether we have any recourse to a tenancy tribunal with regard to the fact that we haven't had full or peaceful enjoyment of the property during our rental contract.

That's another story, I guess, but what has been exercising our minds is what the *&^% we do now that we can't stay in the rented house? At this point I'd like you to put your hands together for wonderful Warren, our builder. Despite all the shenanigans with our mortgage he's been solidly behind us and is, in fact, suggesting that he can complete the studio building before Christmas so that we could move in there for a few months until the main house is finished. What a star!

Five months later...

And we have a builder! I won't bore you with the entire saga of builder 3 and 4. Lovely people, both of them, but we just couldn't afford number 3, and number 4 could build us a house for the right price, just not the right house! If we'd been happy to do it all the way he wanted i.e. cornices and architraves and concrete floors on the inside, and rendered brick and a tiled roof on the outside we would have been fine. The trouble is that we don't want rendered brick walls, tiles on the roof and bloody fussy detailing around every skirting board, the ceiling and every door. No, no, NO!!!!

Then, amazingly, builder number 5 - Warren Macdonald - came charging in on his white horse to save us. Previously he's been the builder's builder, the one others referred to but said we wouldn't be able to get him because he was too busy working on a smart local development. In fact the owners of the smart local development had warned us off, saying Warren was theirs and not to be contacted except for general advice! But in the current financial situation it seems that people aren't buying into smart local developments and so Warren has less work on with them than anticipated, so although we'd only asked for his advice he offered to do a full costing. Et voila it came in at a price we can - just - afford.

The next hurdle is the bank... Once we've finalised things with Warren and come up with a contract we can go to our bank and ask if they'll lend us the money. If we're successful there is a chance we could be starting the build in June or perhaps July... which gives us an outside chance of being well and truly moved into the new house by this time next year.

Builder number #3

We have no choice but to look at other builders, so I can now introduce the lovely Jim into the mix. He came to see us last week, saw my models, looked at our plans, went away with copies and will - hopefully - come up with a price. He reckons about $1,500 per square metre, so perhaps we'll be back to sawing off bits of the house in an effort to make it more affordable? We'll let you know in the next exciting episode...

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.