Hi All,
My wife and I are about to begin an owner build in the south west of WA. Argyle is 7kms outside of Donnybrook. We purchased the land 13 months ago. It is a 2.5 acre block. It starts at 110 metres above sea level on the northern boundary where the road and driveway enter the property and slopes down to the back boundary to about 90 metres above sea level on the souther boundary over a distance of a bit over 200 metres. Behind our block on the southern boundary the land falls away about 50 metres in height over a distance of about 40 metres, so a bit more than a 1:1 slope. Giving us views to the south through the trees to the orchards below which run along the Preston River. The hill at the back of the property is all public open space and the Munda Biddi bike trail runs along at the base of it, which is the mountain bike track that runs from Serpentine in the Perth hills down to Albany.
The building envelope is all cleared now and ready to make a start. The house we are building is a basic design, 20 metres long and 10 metres wide. from the back left hand corner to the front right hand corner the fall in ground level is about 1.5 metres. The ground is very rocky and I am not looking forward to the 66 footings I have to dig for the stumps. I will dig as many as I can with the mini excavator from work and then have to get in a bigger machine with rock breaker for the ones I can't get with the small machine. I was originaly going to use a proprietary steel flooring system from either One Steel or Stramit, but I have worked out that they charge you roughly double for the steel for the privledge of having them design it for you, and then whack their engineering fees on top, which I have already paid for when the engineer gave me a design. The only down side is that I will have to dig 26 more holes, as my engineer has over engineered the flooring system. I think he got nervous when the soil testing came back to say that all 3 of the holes had been abandoned after 300mm due to rock, but it is better to have it over engineered than under. I will save about $5000 by making my own flooring system, but it will mean I have to spend about a week cutting steel and welding. I will have all of the structural posts hot dip galvanised which will cost about $1000 and the extra concrete for the 26 holes works out to about $1000 so I will be $3000 in front by then end, but will have a much stronger system which is properly gavanised.
I had to take out one last tree. It was a big old Marri tree that I was originally going to leave, but I was torn as if it came down, it would fall on the house, and once I started building there would be no where to fell it, so I decided to take it out now. I got the professional in for this one, it was a bit large for my inexperinced tree lopping skills (and I don't have a chainsaw big enough).
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On the up side I got 3 really nice large logs out of it which are getting taken off to be milled up into floorboards next Friday. I was told to expect in this rocky country for the tree to have a really large conduit up the middle, and to not expect great wood. In the scheme of things this tree had bugger all crap up the middle and I am really happy with it. Should get some great boards out of it.
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I will put up the house plans tomorrow after I have scanned them in and give you a run down on the ideas behind the design.
Cheers
Scott