Hi all
I've been hanging around this forum for ages, getting heaps of great tips and seeing all of your wonderful builds going up. Congrats to all of you, you are all such inspirations! And thanks for sharing all of your knowledge.
Thought I'd best let you know about our house and if I can work out how to upload photos, I will! I've tried to do a couple of times but can't quite get it to work.
Anwyay... our story .... hubby finally convinced me we could OB (after talking to friends who had done it successfully). We found our land in Feb 08 and initially signed with a major builder, but after agreeing to us doing our own site cut still wanted to charge more. So gave them the flick and decided to go down the OB route instead. Took quite some time to design, have drawn up, have plans approved etc so didn't get to 'go' stage until Jan 09.
Hubby is having an absolute BLAST! He is a Civil Engineer so pencil pusher by day but is quite a handyman and has enjoyed doing a lot of the work either by himself or with me (I'm quite useless unless directed specifically - split my index finger open with a mallet and had to have 7 stitches, just by trying to hammer in a metal stake during the site cut stage!!). He has also enjoyed helping out the tradies, laboured for the chippy in putting up the frame and doing the fixout). We also designed the house ourselves (based on parts of the millions of display homes we saw in our travels) and had it drawn up by a draftsman.
We started the slab process in Jan 09 and all has gone pretty well so far. Apart from the usual delays (due to weather or delays in availability of tradies) everything has gone pretty well - no major stuff ups (phew).
We have a fantastic chippy who has been a great source of information and is willing to share his knowledge with us. We did our own site cut, retaining wall (sloping block and house next door with established entertaining area), drilling holes for piers, pouring concrete piers, assisting with frame erection, sisalation, noggins in roof for ceiling battens, I'm sure there is more but have been quite hands on. Oh yes and by 'we' I mean hubby. I help out from time to time but he is definitely steering this project.
Of course when you design a house yourself everything gets BIGGER. So a common saying of anyone visiting working on our house is "It's so BIG!". One of my indulgences was that I wanted a really big laundry, but I have a plan so there is reason for my madness (in the end it was actually bigger than the kid's bathroom... hehe) storage storage storage. So it's 43 sq but that includes a verandah around the front and an oversized garage, and WIR's in all the bedrooms and the study. So it's not THAT big! (So I keep telling myself and anyone who will listen).
So that's us... we're currently at plaster stage, which is really exciting and we're just waiting for the plasterers to turn up in the next couple of days. Sometimes it seems to have flown and others it seems to have taken AGES. The kids are aged 7 and 4 so if you ask them they'll tell you it has taken a lifetime!!
Will keep updating and will put up some pics soon. Thanks for reading my rambling!
Melly