G'day
We are in the very early stages of our OB adventure. In fact, so early we only received our OB certificate yesterday!
We are building on a suburban block Bayside Melbourne. Because our block is surrounded by houses that have been there for years, we are quite restricted on our design with regard to setbacks, overlooking etc. We think we will be applying for a variation to rescode to be 6m back rather than 8.5m which will be interesting.
We also have a big restriction from Melbourne Water, it's a 1 in 100 year flood overlay. This means that our ground floor levels will have to be around 80cm above ground level, and believe it or not our garage floor will have to be 65cm above ground level.
As a result of this we decided we would be better off building on stumps. We weren't happy about this initially as I remember my parent's wooden house in the bush on stumps which was always having stumping problems and in fact the last 10 years of the houses life there was always a small step across the middle of the lounge floor! This has led us to look for alternatives to wooden stumps and has steered us, via our draftie, to using steel stumps on concrete pads, and as a natural continuance to that, building using a steel frame. This of course will be more expensive stick-for-stick than a timber frame, We're hoping we will recoup a lot of this cost by the fact that we can assemble the steel frames ourselves easier than timber in our opinion, and that everything will be straighter than timber which should make the finishing quicker and easier (not counting on this til we've seen it!)
We're planning on cladding with hebel panels on the ground floor and lightweight poly panels on the top floor. We're also planning on over-insulating using foil board and sound batts to exceed the current ratings standards. The house will have a colourbond roof which will probably be flat (2 degrees gradient for water runoff) or domed.
We've never built a house before! We built a shed and a greenhouse once! We'll do the bits we feel confident doing ourselves, hopefully with vendor support, the rest we'll subcontract. We want to do as much as possible ourselves though.
Our draftie is halfway through our plans now, so we have a way to go before we can get the footings down.
Hope to pick up some tips from this forum and help where we can too.