The first floor framing started just before Christmas!

... and as before, it went up rather quickly..


The relatively steep slope means that we can get a view of the roof by just walking up to the next block!  Here is the framing completed, ready for the roof to go on.


Keen eyes may see some of the decks are in... the internal deck has been covered with cement sheeting (waterproofed - since it is above the home theatre room it is fairly important!)  We will have another finish on top of this, details to be confirmed later.


.. and the room under the rear deck - which will contain the water tank, hot water cylinder, and so on - has had a treated pine deck - nothing fancy.  In the picture below it had been raining which makes it look all shiny!


Both the rear deck and the lower (drying) deck have been done in Modwood - a product made of recycled plastic and sawdust!  It doesn't require lots of maintenance like a timber deck, is environmentally friendly and looks great!  The finish we have used is 'Silver Gum'.


Closeup:


Plenty of updates in the next couple of weeks, roof and cladding of course, but also bathrooms, kitchens, electrical, and more!

Time for a series of house building updates ... When I last posted about the house, I think it was still at excavation stage... well, it is well past that, but let's tackle it a step at a time! The slab was poured on 14th October!

(view from southeast and northeast, respectively) It is quite easy to recognise which rooms are where from the slab. The courtyard sticks out in the middle - notice it slopes towards the drain in the centre slightly, and (less obviously) there is an overflow drain which goes from the northwest corner to the under deck area only a couple of metres away. The only area which may not be obvious is the guest room and bathroom, which are on a floating floor extending from the side of the slab (the "empty box" on the west side). However, this photo only five days later gives it away!
It only took a couple of weeks (October 26th) for virtually all of the ground floor walls to be completed:
Nothing too surprising here - although one change was the guest bath window, which was changed from facing the neighbours block, to face the mountain (through the undercroft area).

In the photo above, you may also notice the doorway in the block wall at the back. This provides access to the under-deck area with the water tank. The door was originally going to be in the western wall (from the backyard) but it was easier to do it this way as the level of the slab was closer. We decided to put a treated pine deck in there to give it more of a level floor so it can be used as a shed type area - technically outdoors, yet secure. The hot water cylinder has also been relocated here from the garage. I expect it will become a dog sleeping area as well, especially in the colder months!

From here, things progressed quickly.  By mid-November, all the walls downstairs (including the concrete block wall next to the garage) and most of the floor joists for upstairs had been done:


A week later, they were all done (the front ones were waiting on the steel beam across the top of the garage door):


Notice the joists in the middle which are perpendicular to the rest - this is the internal deck area.  They are aligned the other way so that rain run-off from the deck will fall into the courtyard area.

By early December, the flooring for the upper level was complete:


Note both decks and the stairway sticking out here!

This step was important as we could now determine whether or not we have a water view!  (we are not quite on the top of the hill, so while the southern view of the mountain is amazing, the northern view is.. well, if you stand in the right spot, peek between the neighbours houses and the trees, and squint.. you can just see the Derwent River.  I'm going to count that!)

To be continued!

I've been meaning to do this every night for the past three weeks... well, here it is!

This is the view from the front-right (south east) of the house - the last one was taken on July 21!

How many updates was I going to do this month?  Did I promise three or four?  It is now 11pm on March 31 so I guess I should get this one out there pretty quick!

Last week we signed the contract to build our new house!

Construction is due to start between April and June; the contracted end date is 1 May 2012.

As expected we will have bits and pieces left to do afterwards; the guest room, home theatre, storage room, and so on - but that's fine by us.  The upper level will be where we will be spending most of our time so that is the important bit for us.

The latest plans:

... and it has occurred to me that some people haven't seen the view from our block!  Apologies for the blurry panorama stitching issues!


Other random items of note...

- The geothermal heat pump came in at close to $100k... so it was swapped for a ducted electric heat pump... which came in at about $35k - it is now a $10k ceiling mounted unit for the main living area and panel heaters for other areas!

- Some windows have disappeared - the glazing came in at $30k more than expected.  Quite a few have gone (eagle eyes can check the plans!), this also helped to get our star rating up (it came in at 5.7 in the end ..)

What is annoying is that the modelling used to calculate star ratings can't "cope" with "different" houses. eg. our cladding will be alucobond/vitrobond. They don't have an equivalent in their system (does everything have to be brick or render???). Our windows on the first floor have a niche which runs all the way around 3 sides of the house - making the roof height at the edge and therefore window height 2990mm. The niche is only about 290mm x 290mm, big enough to fit a roller blind, so the height for the rest of the house is 2700mm (think of it like a giant sunken ceiling). The problem is the star calculations can't deal with that shape of room and must base the calculations on the entire house having 2990mm ceilings, that is a LOT more space to heat! So in practice our house will perform much better than the ratings say in theory.A little bit about the bathroom plans - the joinery details include: Square above bench sinks, mixer tapes coming from the wall; square ceiling mounted "rain head" shower heads; built in niches in showers for shampoo etc. Tiles are 600x600mm for floors, 600x300mm for walls. Colours can be changed but we have specified slate for now. The best bit - my cousin owns a bathroom superstore - so I'm getting all that stuff through him and supplying the builder/plumber :) Also, underfloor heating for the bathrooms has been estimated at about $1000 a bathroom - so we think we'll go for that.- Kitchen benchtop - polished concrete bench of that size was, again, going to cost too much, so the architect has changed to an Essastone bench with a finish that resembles polished concrete - at a significantly smaller cost, which we are very happy with!

- The Vitrabond cladding we will be using will be costing about $20k, but installation of it about $40k! That's someone's wages for the better part of a year! The builder is try to negotiate this down ...

- We have also received a copy of the building specification document - which is a 133 page document that specifies the quality expected of the builder on every single detail.. as an example, the dimensions of the doors, number of hinges, minimum sizes of hinges, etc. Includes which Australian Standards they comply to. This kind of thing for every component of the house! Not exactly interesting reading but will be useful!

Hi everyone,
About time for an update! We had another meeting with the architect on December 22nd. Over the last few months he has been working with the engineer, drawing up structural, plumbing and electrical plans, and made a few minor changes to the floor plan to account for these. We also went through the glazing schedule, confirming the sizes and types of all the windows. We also met the builder for the first time!

Latest plan revisions:

There were another 20 or so diagrams/plans with these ones but I won't upload them all - things like updated elevation diagrams, subfloor plan, roof plan, and so on, I won't scan them all :)

Major changes:

- A niche running all the way around the top cornice area of 3 sides of the house - this was because the roof support structure needed a bit more space than what was available (and raising the roof level would have required going back to planning approval) so to keep window sizes the standard height they added a gap. This works out well because it provides a spot where blinds etc. can be installed and then be hidden when they are open - and also allows some niches to be built into some walls.

- Laundry chute location confirmed, after about 4 different options were attempted!

- AV/network cabinet location changed - made it bigger and placed it between the theatre and the garage. Discussions with many AV enthusiasts have let me to believe that cat5/6 will be used for AV in the future (there are adaptors to do so now) so as a result it made sense to consolidate the network and AV runs.

- A step before entering the garage - because the garage is 300mm higher than the rest of the lower floor. I think the step may get in the way a bit, so will raise some alternatives with the architect!
We've also confirmed some floor surfaces:

- Polished concrete in the downstairs hallway (as well as hopefully a polished concrete benchtop)

- Modwood for the decks - modwood is made of sawdust and recycled plastic milk bottles, doesn't require oiling every year or other maintenace, and doesn't splinter!
I've also done some sketchup mockups of some areas to give the architect and builder an idea of what we are after.
Kitchen:





(Appliances are Electrolux oven & induction cooktop, F&P fridge, Robinhood rangehood and Asko dishwasher)

Laundry:




And my work of art, the AV unit!


Construction is now expected to start in March 2011.. which means we may not be in there before Christmas 2011 as we had hoped, but that's ok, we'd rather it be done well than done quick!
 
That'll do for now, electrical and plumbing to come in a future update!

Enough about our house.. here are some of the other fantastic houses (and houses-in-progress) that I've found on the HomeOne forum. It’s a great resource if you are building a new house, with dedicated sections for everything to do with building a house - kitchens, bathrooms, heating and cooling, lighting, AV, automation, security, flooring, landscaping ... it’s not even restricted to the work itself, with sections on investment, real estate, being an owner/builder and so on.

People in Glass Houses is Michelle and Tom’s blog. They are nearing the final stages of completion of their architecturally designed 5 bedroom house in a bushland area only 5 mins from Hobart’s CBD! It is a very modern design with lots of angles and designed for a big family similar to ours.

Chris and Kelly’s blog is called Housearama. They have just finished building a passive solar designed 4 bedroom house in Adelaide, roughly based on a Longridge Madison 255. It features a separate home office, a great kitchen (including a professional wok burner – which is a story of its own!) and lots of “cat features”. This is of course on top of all the smart environmental features like retractable shades, opening skylights and power monitoring features.

Building Our 9 Star Home is the blog of Rodney and Elizabeth in Melbourne. Hopefully the key feature of this house is obvious. Their house will actually be ranked as 9.1 star! Not only do they use passive solar design, but they are going to great lengths to ensure the house is as friendly to the environment as possible through choices such as materials used in their kitchen and type of paint used. One of their friends owns the block next door and they will be sharing a backyard for their vege garden and chickens. Construction hasn't started (last I checked), but I think this is going to be a great one to follow!

Big Red's Castle is worth the link just for the amusement of this post!

And last but not least... they don't have a blog that I can link to but sis & bro-in-law Ben and Laura are also planning to build soon, and drawing on Ben's experience in AV & automation they are planning some pretty smart things for their house!  As an example .. they will have an automated watering system for their garden - not that unusual - but the system will take into account time of day, current temperature, recent rainfall, water tank level and weather forecast for the next few days!  So long as it isn't called Skynet ...

As I alluded to in a previous house update, here are some "before and after" plans of some parts of our new house, compared to similar areas in our current place.

It's been a long time since the last update, but plenty has been happening!  I just haven't kept the blog updated... here is a roundup of the last few months ... and this post will be light on text, high on pictures!

At our May architect meeting, we saw a cardboard model of the house!

If you are wondering what sort of material the black sections of the external facade will be, it is something called Alucobond - I hadn't heard of it until the architect mentioned it!  It is a type of aluminium cladding ... I found some images of it used in a residential environment, reproduced from here (click link for bigger images):




It is long lasting and very low maintenance - basically needs cleaning once every ten years - which is great for people who are, lets say, home maintenance challenged such as ourselves!

Our plans are currently with the Hobart City Council and were advertised publicly on July 21st!



The public review period has ended and I don't know if the council received any submissions, but we did receive one call from a neighbour - saying that if we had any clean fill to get rid of, we are more than welcome to have it dumped on his block!

Last of all, I have been playing with Google Sketchup (which incidentally runs quite well under WINE) to design some of the joinery areas.  The most complete one so far is the kitchen: