Our OB ..Sydney

Hello to anyone reading this. I have decided to share some parts of our OB journey after following the ride of others on this forum. Here's hoping our journey is an interesting,but uneventful one! It's certainly proving to be so far!

A little background. Building a 2 storey house with triple garage. Design was ours and drawn up by a draftsman. It's been designed and engineered a little old fashioned but with a modern twist. More on that later. Land is 600sqm in the suburbs. I would love to be able to afford to add another 0 to the end of that land size but it's not to be. Maybe that will be our next project? Land took just under 12 months to register from purchase date but surprisingly registered on time. Then came the delays, I mean start of the fun times!

The Block at registration


Council approval was just under 3 months after having to go through their Assessment Unit. It turned out not everyone liked what we were building Approval came and we headed off to engineering our design. That should read over engineering our design. After living in our current house for the last 14 years full of settlement cracks and poor design we decided to build this to withstand a bomb blast. Or so the engineer thinks! I think his exact words were "what's going here? A block of units?"

We broke ground with the digging of the strip footings on October 21st 2014. We took the whole lot down to rock rather than just the piering. All mostly went to plan. Then came the rain! And more rain! Strip footings quickly turned to creeks. YUK! Every time they were drained and dug back out the heavens opened again.

Time for some photos if I can work this out.






Edit: many of the photos I have posted seem to have disappeared for some reason. My apologies. Too busy to put them all back so if you're interested in something and the photo is missing let me know

It's Murpyhs law when it comes to digging footings.
By the looks of it you hit rock so the water logged trenches won't matter

Down to the rock the whole way round luckily. Thinking we can hire ourselves to drought stricken areas? Just a pain in the proverbial to dig back out in preparation for bricking.

Some more photos to catch up to where we are at, which is not very far unfortunately


My underground rain water tank. Why have one up the side of the house when you can have one underground. Not a huge cost difference and will work in better with our plumbing later on. Could have been filled 10 times over with the amount of rain we've had!
And about 1/5 of the total bricks delivered for the subfloor. Commons and face.

I thought of underground water tanks, but due to the unknown number of possible boulders under the house we decided not to take the risk of a cost blowout.

Still considering a water tank up the top of the hill, which we can pump up to with solar or off peak, and then gravity feed back down to everything.

Excited to follow along sounds interesting
Good luck and happy building.

Thanks for sharing, we are planning a custom design and the house designer also recommend an under ground rain tank to be place under the garage area. Where will your tank be placed?

Definitely interested in following this. Are you going to upload plans at some stage as I'm curious about what the end result will be - and that mix of the old fashioned with the modern twist.

Think we were lucky bpratt and were able to avoid any large rock formations and put the tank where we wanted it. Although don't get me started on the cost of disposing of dirt properly

Building4my3tots. The tank is actually under the house. I'll post up a photo if i have one. It has to collect all the rainwater from the building and then divert any overflow to a rain garden we are required to have. It made sense to put the two near each other at the lowest point of the property. The house itself is elevated off the ground on a suspended slab, allowing access underneath once it's built

We're looking for fill to go around the back of the house and elsewhere, and it's almost impossible to find someone who wants to get rid of fill, without having to hire someone else to truck it in. Would have to be cheaper to truck it to somewhere local, than to take it somewhere to dump.

But as I said I would've preferred to have put a tank under the house than one in front of the house, and although partially buried, it is still visible.

Hi thebrolga. Ill pop some elevations up so you can get a bit of an idea. These are just the basic ones without measurements etc, but it still gives an idea.

Old and new comes into it with the design.The block slopes more than we would like, and not being huge fans of slabs on the ground or expensive retaining walls from cutting the block, we decided to elevate the house off the ground. This eliminated the need to cut the block and gave us access underneath the house. It's old fashioned in that we are using B & J's on a brick subfloor but interesting modern twist in that the B & J's are actually made to measure precast concrete not timber. It will then have a suspended concrete slab after this. I've found a few builds on the forum here using B & J's and suspended slabs but unable to find any with the Ultrafloor B & J's. Can't wait to see it it all coming together!

Elevations

How the Ultrafloor B & J's will work. Not our house, but stock website images.





Advantages of using the Ultrafloor System in House construction are:
Speed of construction (installed in less than a day)
Less concrete (up to 45% reductions)
Less reinforcement (up to 50% reductions)
Minimal site waste (compared to conventional formwork)

My husband met some of our new neighbours today. They were of the brown furry kind. Rats and mice! Eeekkk! Let's hope they move out before we move in! Although, I'll take them any day over snakes and spiders. Guess it takes a while for them all to find new homes in a new estate.

Subfloor brickwork just about completed. Can't complain about our bricklayers. Waited about 7 weeks but they are doing a nice straight job and they're good blokes. It's not good working conditions going up and down the strip footings in this heat and to top it off we are using a heavy dry pressed brick. Lucky the brickie labourer (hubby) is a good worker.

Is the ultrafloor on the ground floor or first floor?

Nice house orientation, however my only concern is the number of west facing windows.

Nice, really interested to see the progress.

Hi JB1,

The Ultrafloor is for the ground floor. Should have some photos next week to add shortly of this. Its part of the build i'm most looking forward to seeing as it's so different.

Re: the west side windows we've chosen to use a 6.38mm comfort plus glass in all the lower windows on the west side and a 6.38mm translucent glass on the upper windows west side. They are windows of formal rooms (unlikely to be used) and bathrooms. Fortunately/ unfortunately we also have a 2 storey on the west side of us that is likely to block the sun from some of these. Our current house has the most enormous windows that face west. It gets so hot you cant touch them. Time will tell how it all works out for us I guess!

Thanks kavehman. Hopefully something a bit different.

So the subfloor brickwork for the house is finally completed. Garage isn't started yet as it is having its infill slab laid later on in the build. We went with a solid dry pressed mowbray blue brick, white sand and off white cement. Also used quite a number of pallets of commons in the areas below ground or where they won't be seen. At almost 4 times the price and twice as heavy, of the commons, I don't want to waste the Mowbray blue bricks. Bricklayers have done a marvelous job.

Onwards and upwards, as they say. In our case literally! And of course photos or it didn't happen!

Back of block looking towards front



Front looking towards back


Front verandah

Alfresco

After we filled all the footings back in.

I've only got one West facing windows in my current place near the staircase, and I think that's one too many! lol

I had it tinted because was got so hot.

I thought the photo's of the ultrafloor was your house! my bad!

What's the reason to use ultrafloor compared to yellowtongue (and insulation underneath)? Insulation properties?

I love houses on stumps, I'll never build on a slab again.