Browse Forums Owner Builder Forum Re: Want to build a new house in Perth - advice/tips need!!! 3Feb 20, 2012 10:05 am Accessible Carpentry & Cabinets accessiblecarpentry@gmail.com accessiblecarpentry.com.au https://www.facebook.com/pages/Accessible-Carpentry-Cabinets/583314911709039 Re: Want to build a new house in Perth - advice/tips need!!! 6Feb 20, 2012 12:14 pm Accessible Carpentry & Cabinets accessiblecarpentry@gmail.com accessiblecarpentry.com.au https://www.facebook.com/pages/Accessible-Carpentry-Cabinets/583314911709039 Re: Want to build a new house in Perth - advice/tips need!!! 11Mar 29, 2012 4:36 pm Our owner-builder journey - viewtopic.php?f=38&t=45187 Re: Want to build a new house in Perth - advice/tips need!!! 12Mar 29, 2012 10:42 pm Accessible Carpentry & Cabinets accessiblecarpentry@gmail.com accessiblecarpentry.com.au https://www.facebook.com/pages/Accessible-Carpentry-Cabinets/583314911709039 Re: Want to build a new house in Perth - advice/tips need!!! 16Mar 30, 2012 11:27 pm Accessible Carpentry & Cabinets accessiblecarpentry@gmail.com accessiblecarpentry.com.au https://www.facebook.com/pages/Accessible-Carpentry-Cabinets/583314911709039 Re: Want to build a new house in Perth - advice/tips need!!! 17Mar 31, 2012 4:15 am I hear you Chippy, Quote: He did however finish building back in 1985, 3 years before I started my apprenticeship. No actually he was still building up until 2005 when he died on new years day, just not full time - but only coz people would seek him out of they wanted the quality of yesteryear. We lost a $20k joinery job in our own town to a joiner from Busselton by only $300 and every external door frame supplied had planted on door stops - I kid you not! We had supplied the owner with 200 odd square meters of 5 inch cover WA Blackbutt select 6 meter length flooring for this house. He then asked us for a quote on the joinery and gave the job to the Busso joiner rather than us...then against our advice he laud that kiln dried blackbutt on top of wet chipboard... Then he wanted us to come out and show him how to stop it all swelling etc, (i.e. dry out his sub floor) which because we supplied it and he as an owner builder ignored our advice... so at our expense mind you - and after we lost the joinery job, took my non invasive tramex moisture meter out and mapped the moisture in his sub floor and showed him how and where to locate heaters and fans under the house to dry the subfloor... Guys a world renowned concrete engineer who travels the world consulting in concrete engineering for massive bridges and sky scrapers etc etc and knows everything their is to know about concrete so he owner builds his own house out of timber go figure and doesn't listen to a word of advice from a master builder with eventually about 50 years experience....by the time he dies in 2005.. (1954 - 2005, Reg no 938). Then when his windows and doors were all leaking water past the planted on stops in a decent blow (built on top of a hill in the Blackwood valley), he asked us to come out and take a look and advise him again (for free of course) because the joiner from Busso who supplied all his joinery refused to have anything further to do with him.. Guy was sharp as a tack when it came to concrete and dumb as an ox when it came to anything else. Like many of our eventual clients they would come to us in a small southwest country town as the local expert builder, joiner, cabinet maker, and furniture maker, when something they had bought cheaper elsewhere from someone else, stuffed up! We saw it time and again = people would bring in wooden chairs sourced from Asia in "monkey wood; (it was still growing in the Brazil rainforest with monkey swingin' off its branches 3 weeks before it was made into a chair in Asia, and glued together with rice water) - that they bought the whole dining suite table and all for $600 and ask us for a quote to fix the chairs coz they were all falling apart!! I'd want more than $600 to stop work long enough to tell em to naff off somewhere else!. It's human nature...you work long enough in any trade as you know Chippee, and you meet all kinds of clients - we had some great ones as i recal over the 20 years in the southwest but we had our share of shockers also and we saw some incredible things... Same concrete professor employed a Busso surveyor to set out his house for footings etc for below ground cellar built from local rock and so on - which was all done with a new fancy laser level / theodolite... Old man took one look and said somethings not right with your peg and levels - its out! (he could see it by eye - but the owner concrete engineer wasn't having any of it - so back to town get the auto level and shoot the levels and sure enough the downhill side of the peg out is a meter lower than the uphill side... If you've seen that Blackwood Valley between Nannup and Balingup, the country is steep as - mountain goat country, so getting a feel for level is tough even the cattle there grow 2 legs longer on one side so they can stand straight to eat grass. OB / concrete engineer rings Busso surveyor and claims the levels are out by a meter and surveyor says not possible - but OB insists and says local master builder checked with auto level and its a meter out, so surveyor comes out with fancy laser level - and yep a full meter out from one side of the job to the other and he never noticed with the naked eye!. Says he pushed a 1 instead of a 2 or something on his laser level keypad or something....but heck he SHOULD have been able to see it with the naked eye....the old man did at first glance. We were asked to supply the same guy a jarrah tree with the bark off as the center pole for his octagonal house and he even specified the bole and crown diameter, for a tree about 9 meters long and weighing a tonne and half - as if the faller out in the first is going to actually stick a tape around the tree before he cuts it down and remove the bark first to see if it exactly matches the supplied spec and clime 9 meters up the trunk and do the same thing at the crown end before he fells it... (Normally they wouldn't fall such a young and small dia tree for timber logs so this is a "special order") We deliver the tree and he starts whingeing after the fact that it's a half inch in dia larger at the crown than he specified...I only charged him $90 for the tree which was my actual royalty cost from CALM for the supply of the tree & I borrowed a spiral lock pipe trailer and collected and delivered his tree to his site with it for zippo (again coz he was a local and not capable of organizing it himself being dumber than an ox when it came to anything except concrete engineering). Then I ended up coz he wouldn't stop complaining, having to rebate the crown end for him to fit a steel cap he had designed /engineered before obtaining the tree to take the exposed rafters that this tree had to support.... He was almost impossible to build for IMHO.. He had a disagreement with the 2 chippies from Busso who framed his double story timber house to plate height, and wouldn't pay them the $10K he owed them..... So wonder of wonders, the first 200 m^2 of select 6 meter length black butt flooring 5 inch cover I supplied him 2 years previously - "disappeared" the same night out of his storage on site shed! (I wonder why!) ... it was worth you guessed it about $10K - I had actually sold it to him 24 months earlier as a "favor" for $6K, (and stored it for free all that time only delivering it to his shed for him on site about a week before it mysteriously "vanished"), so he comes back to me the now 2 years later, when he's now desperate for flooring, and wants me to replace it for the same $6K that he was paid from his insurance claim...that he bought it for 2 years prior, so he got all the 6 meter length boards I rejected from his first order for minor blemishes...and I charged him $10K as I should have the first time!. I dunno some people you just have to feel sorry for... you try to help them...but few actually "listen", and then they want you to come help them fix their stuff ups...when they COULD have engaged you as their builder in the first place and avoided all the expense and headaches. We would see this all the time with some people - yet others were actually great to deal with - they listened attentively if they didn't understand they asked intelligent questions - they paid promptly and were very happy with the product or service etc and would recommend you to their friends and relatives. After 20 years in that town we did work for local people we met when we first arrived and soon after - and at the end 20 years later - we were still doing work for their now grown kids! It is a little different in a small country town chippie - I am the first to admit things are a lot different here in the big smoke. You know all that 5 inch cover, 6 meter length black butt flooring, came out of the 1 tree I was lucky to source when the power line went in to the Jangardup mineral sands mine on the south coast west of Pemberton and east of Augusta. Normally WA Blackbutt is hard to get - (not so the Qld variety) but the WA trees at least in our area grow with their feet in the creeks, and the logging rules require that all roads rivers and streams have a now 50 (used to be 100) meters road river or stream reserve, to protect water quality - as a result few blackbutt's get felled in normal logging coupes, unless they grow on the side of a hill around a spring or soak..,,which isn't that common. So when a power line has to go thru - it has to cross such creeks and occasionally if your lucky there will be a large old growth (this one was close on 800 years old and nearly 2 meters dia at the butt end, and almost 20 meters long and over a meter at the crown) Blackbutt tree in the way of the lines that has to come down. I was lucky and with our contract for high value specialty logs we obtained this one magnificent tree...and turned it completely into 6 meter lengths for 150 x 25 planks that we hand straightened and put thru a 4 sider to make 5 inch cover blackkbutt floorboards...all in 6 meter lengths. Never seen wood like it again to this day... What never went to the concrete guru, out the Blackwood valley, went to a builder in Margaret River for his own double story house, and it won house of the year award for all of Australia that particular year. Sad thing is, I believe the entire double story house was one of those raised recently in the Margaret river fires that started at Prevally...because CALM / DEC's controlled burn got away in November last year. As I used to be a forester for them for 8 years prior to my 20 years in partnership with the old man in our "timber days"- and my son still works for DEC today - I know more than a little about those Marg river fires... What Keeltys report never showed - was that DEC couldn't do the controlled burn in question during the ideal spring burning windows of opportunity in Oct, because of the CHOGM meeting in Perth with HRH QE2 and all the worlds press attending, because Colin Barnett our illustrious Hon Premier issued an edict to DEC, that they couldn't do any spring aerial hazard reduction burns in Oct while CHOGM was on, in case the smoke drifted out into the indian ocean in the A.M. with the strong Easterly breezes in the morning and then back across Perth in the afternoon with the Southwesterly sea breeze! So while a certain Forester from Busso (who I used to work with) got all the blame, it was actually Barnett himself who was to blame for the Marg River fires in November...when fuel was too dry and temps to high and winds too strong.. the only time left that DEC could light it up before summer proper... It's not just in the building trade I see so many screw ups - even FESA and DEC are in a shambles these days... It seems like all the values we once had that once stood us in good stead are sacrificed on the alter of expediency today. Is that because the new generation are the "instant messaging", "want it now & bugger the consequences" "me, me, me" generation (our "baby boomer" offspring) and with no patience? Never mind the story give us the cliff notes... Personally I believe its because they were raised in front of the TV as their baby sitter, and haven't an attention span any longer than an average advert break in length! There were no ADD and ADHD kids drugged up on Ritalin in my day, there were just naughty kids who got a kick in the Khyber from the parents and the teacher (and if that didn't work, the local copper)! Then again in my day, red food coloring came from cochineal beetles not a chemical factory, the pocket calculator or TV hadn't been invented yet, nor the digital watch or computers or - well you get the idea - in my day we used a slide rule at school.... Sometimes I think all of our progress is robbing us of something valuable...... Now if I was just young enough to remember what heck that was! Its Ok I'll go take my medicine now! Cheers! Madness takes its toll - please have exact change handy! XCEM Alpha flooring seems to relatively new and I could not found any reviews. Have you or someone you know have used it and would recommend over other subfloor options?… 2 7597 6 55355 I would be wary. Is you site demilished but nothing else done? Sounds like liquidity problems to me. Our builder did the same. Got hundreds of thousands of dollars of… 2 15413 |