Browse Forums Owner Builder Forum 1 Jan 17, 2013 12:58 pm HI All, I wish I had come here before I started my Owner Build in Darlington in the Perth Hills. I have uploaded a fair few photos of later in the build and as we moved in. more of the early days photos to come. They can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_darlington/ please ask me any questions regarding this project as we all have our ups and downs on the build. I have actually moved in though the house still needs a lot of finishing work. I could write a thesis on the house and build but I will try to keep it short and succinct. Essentially the aim was to build a passive solar, energy efficient house using a lot of natural/ recycled materials and achieve some essence of sustainability for years to come. It uses rammed earth, jarrah, western red cedar, sandstone, kimberley black granite a recyled bowling alley as our kitchen benchtop. it is lightweigt steel frame out the back but lower garage section is blockwork and concrete slab on ground. We bought the block 5 years ago and started trying to pay as much off it as possible as we could not afford to buy it and build at the same time. It was in our preferred area of Darlington and we were willing to pay a little more for the block. it was sold online without photos! it has great views but most people were put off by the slope which is fairly steep in some places. it is 2270sqm so half an acre. It was the cheapest block in darlington by about $70,000 at the time and it also sloped due north so althouth the main axis is east west we still had a lot to work with to the north. I have always been into solar passive design, energy efficiency and renewable energy and so was excited by the prospect of building a sustainable house. I came up with a few concepts with my Dad who is an architect and we had some drawings done up by Don White (also an architect) who suggested the skewing of the back section of the house by 12deg so the master bedroom gets views past the front of the house (fantastic idea) and great plans, i could see they were going to work from the start. We also designed the shed with a skillion roof facing due north so that I could put a solar power system on it since I was working in the industry at the time. we got planning approval after some delays due to the shed being in front of the house. First thing I did was but a magical little bobcat (JCB Robot) and started learning to drive it and clearing the shed and house areas in any spare time I could find. I have not added these photos yet, will download sometime this week. also will update on the build further as I have time Hope this starts a good conversation up. Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 2Jan 17, 2013 4:02 pm Uploaded with ImageShack.us Plans for House as designed, but added a loft bedroom over the bathroom and a cellar under the bathroom/toilet area behind the rammed earth built into the hillside. Uploaded with ImageShack.us Photo from North looking at Shed and over the top to the house at the top of the block Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 3Jan 17, 2013 5:23 pm In the beginning: SHED: The little bobcat managed to clear and dig the whole area for the Shed, did not run into the dreaded granite. we moved in about 120cubic metres of sand to put the shed slab on, dug the footings and poured the slab in dec 2009, I then had a bricklayer lay the back wall of the shed which also acts as a retaining wall (concrete block fully core filled with r12 reinforcement bars at every 400mm attached to starter bars extruding from slab. I then jarrah framed up the rest of the shed using recycled 4 x 2's and roofed it with colorbond pale eucalypt picked up from another persons extension when they could not reuse the tin. I managed to get the solar power system on just in the nick of time to satisfy the old rebates so that 3.2kW system cost $5,000. because we were not living there at the time we exported almost all of the power generated to the grid and have since recovered around $4,500 in 2.5 years, pretty good return on investment. I then installed the Bathroom and had my first attempt at tiling. I built the shed to practice skills i had picked up along the way or may need for the house to get a quality finish on the home. I think this was quite helpful. I was a lot slower than a tiler but was happy with the finish and it is still pretty good to look at now, 3 yrs down the track. The Biolytix system was installed and the shed toilet became the site toilet (had the site toilet for 3 months only to minimise wasted costs), this uses a worm farm with what looks like a large fish tank filter setup that also has aerators and pumps to break down black waste and pump through subsurface drip irrigation onto the garden including lawn and fruit trees ~150sqm. Uploaded with ImageShack.us Shed, looking a little shabby before finishing work with North Roof for Solar System Uploaded with ImageShack.us Shed Bathroom and toilet which became the site toilet, my first tiling job Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 4Jan 18, 2013 8:45 am Gorgeous Plans I love all the decking and the Breezeway. <!-- l --><a class="postlink-local" href="https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=62083">viewtopic.php?t=62083</a><!-- l --> Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 5Jan 18, 2013 10:23 am Thanks AKB, the view is the most amazing thing about the block'' Uploaded with ImageShack.us This is from the deck looking north-west over middle swan out to ellenbrook Uploaded with ImageShack.us one of my favourite rooms the bathroom with rammed earth and jarrah bath surrounds and vanity [IMG=http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/3940/houseasviewedfromthedri.jpg][/IMG] Uploaded with ImageShack.us the house just before we put the balustrading up but with the concrete driveway done, makes such a difference Uploaded with ImageShack.us this is the kitchen with one of the best features....the benchtops are made from a recycled bowling alley you can see the inlay of the arrows in the canadian maple tops..it took a lot of work to get them to this point with jarrah trimming and a whole day worth of sanding (8hrs) but it has been worth it..get a lot of joy from the comments on this one. it was one of the first three things I bought for the house. Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 6Jan 18, 2013 10:26 am The Views are Stunning...... The hills are such a gorgeous area, and I love the kitchen. <!-- l --><a class="postlink-local" href="https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=62083">viewtopic.php?t=62083</a><!-- l --> Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 7Jan 21, 2013 1:38 pm HOUSE I started the clearing of the house site and was going ok but when I started going deeper I started coming accross some lovely granite boulders that the little bobcat could not cope with. I had to bring in the heavy artillery. Along came the 20Tonne excavator and was watching in awe as it removed a 2m x 2m x 1m Solid granite boulder and proceeded to balance on its tracks with the boulder half in the bucket slowly turning it round and round until it was on the front of our earth bund to retain the sand for footings under the house. There is a lot of rock from site holding the bund in place. another 360 cubic metres of clean recycled sand was delivered and we would put 200mm down then compact it then another 200mm and another compaction etc until we had minimum 600mm of sand down. At the face of our excavation we hit bedrock but it gave us the perfect foundation with 600mm of sand to build on, the level was perfect. so as long as there is no earthquake we should be ok. The slab design is insane! we have pretty reactive clay in the hills and have to design the slab accordingly (even with 600mm sand infill (most of the pad is 1000 to 1400 deep of sand). We wanted to minimise the amount of concrete slab on ground as it is expensive so only garage and main entry area downstairs is concrete (~100sqm) the back area of the house is on steel posts and bearers with jarrah joists and recycled jarrah floors. the footings are minimum 400mm x 400mm all round except for rammed earth wall footing which is 600 x 600! there are piles on the front as well they are 600mm round with reinforcement. They are spaced 2m apart with 5 along the front (1.8m deep) and 2 along the sides (~1.4 deep), there are also a number of other slab thickenings through the slab. All up there was about 36 cubic metres of concrete for a 100 sqm slab! standard slab in sand suburbs would use ~ 10 to 15 cubic metres. reinforcement was immense also to hold it all together with z bars, starter bars and F82 reo mesh. the starter bars were then fed into block work wall which was concrete filled and starter bars connected to wall reo at 200mm centres which were then tied to the second storey slab reo mesh F81. it is a bit of a concrete bunker base but it is good for fire protection and has thermal mass and stays very cool in summer. The exterior will be clad in stone (granite from site) Photos to come Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 8Feb 21, 2013 5:54 pm FINANCE: Sorry forgot to mention finance!!!! where do I start. Westpac is pretty much the only bank who will still touch an owner builder now. they will only lend you 60% of the total value of the house and land together. you have to come up with the initial 40% and they won't give you a cent till you have exhausted every thing you have and even then it will depend on a valuation by a supposed third party valuer. so for our place home ($360,000) and land ($275,000) total of $635,000. they would only loan $381,000 (we already had a loan of 125,000 so they would only offer us $256,000 to build the $360,000 house to lock up. I would recommend having at least 50% of the total value of the house and land in cash before attempting to owner build. To start with you have to get an estimate of cost of the total build by a qualified estimator or quantity surveyor. make sure it includes all costs to completion (if thats the agreement). We were told by the bank originally to get the house to lock up and then we have an asset that we can use to draw more for completion but at the end of the loan they told us that the money lent was for completion and not lock up. Yet they approved the estimate which only had the costs to lock up. so we had to complete the house for the cost of getting the house to lock-up, which is quite a difficult task indeed. Also our house was not a standard double brick and tile house, so the valuer had trouble assessing completion costs because he was using standard valuing % guestimates instead of going through the estimate provided and ticking off all the done items and adding up all the remaining items. so we got to our 40% but the valuer was claiming that we had only done 25% and that we would need to spend another $60,000 before we could receive a cent of bank finances......... when you have spent every cent you have on the house, where do you expect me to find a spare $60K, we were stuck in a bad place at this stage with a 40% built house and no funds to continue or pay the mortgage. I asked to speak to the valuer as I had not seen him once in my whole time building the house (i think he actually drove to the bottom of the driveway 120m away and did his assessment from there, as all his estimates of completion were way off compared to the actual value of estimation that had been done and we were using to track our costs. We finally got him to the house and I went through the list one by one and ticked off costs versus remaining items. I finally managed to convince him that we had spent 40% and finally the finances opened up and we were able to continue. In all it was a stress that wasn't required. I can understand their stance that a lot of owner builders go over their budget but why do they require an estimate of the building costs if they aren't going to use it to assess the costs to completion of the building, so that funds can be freed up. the other painfull things are you need to actually install and pay for everything before you can claim it, which means if you have $30,000 worth of windows sitting there they will not release that $30,000 until it is fully installed in the house. this is the case even after you have spent the required 40%. our problem was that we had pretty much 40% of the value available to build so when it came to getting the first payment from the bank we had no cash to buy the start of the 60% items, the bank made us take out a $20,000 side personal loan (at 12% interest) to finance buys so that it could then be paid by the loan account?? this seemed unfair to me. we are in our house now and it has been an effort on all fronts. but I think it has been worth it. viewtopic.php?f=38&t=62345&p=968325#p968325 as much as we thank our bank for finally getting there we will be switching banks very shortly for better interest rates and just not having to deal with them anymore. sorry the post is so long, sometimes its nice to have a vent, hope this helps as there are a number of things to be aware of Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 10Feb 24, 2013 1:48 pm Is it cheaper or more expensive to use recycled materials? I love the idea of rammed earth, my aunty built a house in Glen Forrest with it. Her house is amazing. There are actual tree trunk pillars. It's like a castle. GOODLIFE - Bravo - BUTLER http://getmistyfied.blogspot.com.au Display 20/02/2012 PPA 01/04/12 Prestart: 25/07/12 Settlement: 31/07/2012 Contracts:August Slab 19/11/12 BRICKS 10/11/12 Roof 16/01/13 Re: Owner builder in Perth hills rammed earth 11Mar 01, 2013 3:46 pm turtleschell Is it cheaper or more expensive to use recycled materials? I love the idea of rammed earth, my aunty built a house in Glen Forrest with it. Her house is amazing. There are actual tree trunk pillars. It's like a castle. There are some aspects where its cheaper, and some where it can be more expensive or equivelent, as an example, I got a truckload of Jarrah for our deck from a furniture manufacturer down south, it was between 25 and 35mm thick and between 75 and 110mm wide (assorted lengths as well), I got it for $10sqm but then had to thickness every board, at least we got a constant thickness of 27mm which is fatter than the standard 20mm jarrah, but the extra work for me and at times my carpenter who also arrassed the edges was a lot more time consuming and costly than first imagined and is probably equivelent in price to laying the new boards from decking companies (as the carpenter can just pick it up and lay it. But you get the satisfaction of knowing that jarrah trees from the southwest weren't uneccessarily brought down so that I could enjoy them on my deck. some things you do come across are by far cheaper, you just have to keep an eye out for what you need, you rarely get a bargain when you actually really need an item. I was lucky with the front door, it was a very slightly hail damaged western red cedar pivot door, insurance job, got it for $20!!!! these things cost $3000-4000 installed, so big saving there. also used an old bowling alley for our kitchen benchtops. these were $200 each but required 3 days labour to sand, sand and sand some more, then install the jarrah edging and polyeurathane the top so in the end cost probably $1000 (cheaper than stone and makes a nice feature) I picked up 2 garage doors for around $100 each with motors and remotes and installed them myself (learnt on youtube:) this was a considerable saving. if you have time yourself to do some of the work then second hand can be very cost effective, if you rely on a carpenter or trade to do all the work it could sometimes cost more. It depends on what you are recycling and how much work is required to get them to the standard required for your build. some items you can't actually buy new anymore either. I used 90 x 90mm jarrah poles from recycling yards, quokka and gumtree as no one makes and sells them anymore. Jarrah is getting rarer and more expensive! hope this helps Hi VK, Think it's worth investing time in an Owner Builder course to equip you with basic knowledge on Australian Building Industry and its regulations. Also, I suggest… 11 23047 Hi all. Anyone know when the $11,000 limit was set in legislation for renovations in QLD? Ive been renovating for 5 years now and this was the limit back then. As we know,… 0 4249 |