STRAW BALE u HEBEL u RESTORATION u MUD BRICK u RELOCATABLE

BE I NSPI RED – REAL STORIES ABOUT REAL OWNER BUILDERS

203 – OCTOBER / NOVEMBER 2017 $9.50

we made itHave you finished yet?

Kitchen benches and tilingLast diary entry was about our family

Christmas, after which we fell in a heap for a few days and regrouped.

The first tentative step forwards was finishing the kitchen bench. The slab top needed extra billets and bracing, so a couple of offcuts made the perfect inverse flying buttress arrangement. Everything was securely attached from all directions and then many iterations of sanding,

By JOHN O’BRIEN

I know that everyone meant well but it wasn’t really helping. Yet more council deadlines, the financial stress of finding dollars for those myriad unbudgeted small items, the physical stress of working seven days a week and the emotional stress of watching our parents ail were all piling up.

At times, it all seemed too much. In the end, the cure is in the problem – keep building and just finish the bloody thing.

After more than five years since starting our build, this question was being posed by friends and family with increasingly annoying regularity.

The questions was usually followed by such gems as: ‘Why not?’ and ‘But my friend X only took 6 months.’

The clincher was ‘So, when are you moving in?,’ to which I could have only one reply – ‘When it’s done.’

Building diary...

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resin filling, sanding, filling, etc. followed before it was tickety-boo. I finished it with many coats of Osmo oil, the final few were wet sanded with 400 grit sandpaper then buffed hard with a rag. Beautiful though the finish looks and feels, we are finding it not quite robust enough for a hard-working kitchen bench.

Quirky feature #437b… the wonky board on the hob was just short (and our timber supplies were dwindling), so I bunged it in anyway and made a dam out of plastic and cardboard to fill the end with resin. We also had some leftover Dana-made glass tiles and worked out their best arrangement around the sink before commencing the kitchen wall tiling. After grouting, caulking and cleaning up, the whole result looks great and gets a fair few admiring comments.

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mud daubersDana’s main gig on the build at this

stage was mud, mud and more mud. She now has a special relationship with her Japanese plasterer’s trowel. The second coat of internal plaster took hundreds of hours and slowly grew across the walls – weekends and nights alike. We’d found some plastic renderers mesh, which was invaluable on the window openings but walls were just endless buckets of earth plaster. One day, I might sit down and calculate just how many tonnes of this goo we have sifted, mixed and applied by hand. We still love the stuff though!

Time pressures meant outsourcing and extra help was needed. I had a local joiner build some flyscreens out of spotted gum for the dining and bathroom doors. My old mate Sol came over to help fit them. While he was doing that, I was sealing and priming the kitchen cupboards and then attaching some aluminium angle to the kitchen hobs for some special lighting. Local handyman Hughie chipped in to brace the framing under the hot water system before I finished plastering it. He was invaluable over the next few months, helping with sealing the eaves, external rendering, internal trimming and myriad other tasks.

All of this preparatory work eventually required a finish and it was a great joy to start painting the bathroom ceiling. Bog standard white to keep it looking sharp. We’d long agonised over the colour of the exposed steel rafters but our final choice (a deep grey/blue) looks great in both natural and artificial light. In between coats, I trimmed out the nook under our hot water system to ready it for render and installed some custom-made cowls for the electrical cabinet.

Stumbling blocksRushing along to get heaps done

quickly one day, an enthusiastic helper over wet the lounge room wall while rendering and we managed to get our first major failure. While drying, great chunks of render cracked and delaminated and it was almost down to requiring a rebuild of the whole wall. I pulled the worst of it off and commenced slowly building it back up, starting with clay slip, mud and much render mesh with each layer. The final result has still cracked slightly but has come up otherwise alright. Some things are best not rushed.

Having barely recovered from that saga, I was checking something in the electrical cabinet and noticed bits of insulation stripped away from the wiring leading into the house. It turns out that our rodent friends had been using this as a lunch stop while accessing the house, hidden from view under the recently installed cowling. I turned everything off and carefully taped up each cable in prep for our electrician to make an emergency visit to fix the mess.

We didn’t burn down – phew.I celebrated that near miss by

installing some LED strip lighting to the kitchen. Attached to the bottom rail of the steel beam and facing upwards to the ceiling, the effect is quite magical. I had anticipated a nice quality of light from this approach but the final result exceeds expectations. I added some useful (but mainly bling) light on the kitchen tiles. Then days of masking and covering preceded ceiling painting in the large space of the main kitchen/dining/lounge area. LED strips finished each space.

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Getting it readyBy now, every action was geared

towards getting ready for our final inspection. Extension after extension had been granted and the shire was getting impatient. I engaged earthworks contractor Rowan Burton to regrade the site around the house and cover it all with redstone. This gravel mix has heaps of clay in it and packs down super solid. Excess subsoil was pushed off the front of the site and gained us an extra 50m2 of patio. A large drain got buried across the drive and Hughie and I cast a concrete pit to direct runoff into it. Some well placed rocks and it looked chic.

While Rowan made muddy dirt mess outside, I made clean paint mess inside. Kitchen duly painted, Josh the plumber came back to fit the ovens. Sod’s law, the roof purlins were in exactly the wrong spot for the flues. We mulled options and went with a bend in the range hood flue and moving the wood fired oven another 100mm to the edge of the doorway. If only I’d seen this one coming when I framed the roof. Looks kinda funky anyway so we’ll go with it.

Also funky looking are the lighting switch plates. With an otherwise reliable supplier, I had all sorts of woes getting the 3mm thick stainless plates drilled to the right specification. We eventually succeeded but it added yet another layer to the strain-cake. We got some relief in the final product – the plates now look awesome. We used DC toggle switches, so it’s like operating an old aircraft panel.

inspect/FAiLA few more days of clean ups, a few

more spits and polishes and we were ready for inspection. I knew that it wasn’t 100% complete but thought it within the acceptable boundaries for Certificate of Occupancy (CofO). The inspector duly came and tut-tutted at a few unfinished bits but I got him to agree on issuing occupancy with some directives to finish various items. We jumped for joy that night but it still wasn’t in writing. Well, the writing did come the next week and it was no CofO but a notice to finish ALL remaining works within two weeks. Tears of joy gave way to tears of anguish. Eventually, some careful negotiation saw us allowed to continue, while providing fortnightly updates to the inspector.

On the defect list were: relaying 15m of drain that was working perfectly but didn’t pass visual muster; cleaning up some interior lighting junctions and installing all lighting switch plates (although what I had was safe and legal); installing exterior lighting; having the Certificate of Electrical Safety re-issued (at some expense and with no great reason as to why!); finalising wall finishes in the studies; generating written certification of materials used in glazing, eaves and external timbers; and the clincher – steel mesh flyscreens to all 21 opening windows and fixed mesh over all glazing below 400mm (six panes). The screens and mesh are a BAL-29 (bushfire attack level) requirement that I’d overlooked, misreading the specifications early on.

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The other items were painful but some needed doing anyway, so I kept the man happy and forged on.

Much as I was now capable of building the screens myself, the sensible option timewise was to go back to the joiner and get them built. Thanks Bob. These were beautifully made but purposely slightly oversize to cater for any potential out of square issues on the frames. Each unit required shaping, sanding and oiling before fitting hinges and installing. The extra care getting them in nicely has made them shine. Fitting the stainless mesh to the fixed windows was tricky but accomplished with some aluminium angle and a lot of patience.

We’d been given a very vague goal to get the walls in the studies finished to an ‘acceptable standard.’ Not so vague was the requirement of finalising trims before we could mud these rooms. The timber pile was looking like firewood but I persevered and used up the best of the scrap to line my study. It’s well whacky – and I love it all the more for that. Both studies got a first coat of mud and then I painted the ceilings. Before we called the inspector back, I cleaned out as much leftover material as possible and gave the whole place a good scrub.

inspect/PASSSo, the pivotal moment of inspection

came to pass and pass we did. This time we waited for the piece of paper before letting go. OK, so can we move in now? Nearly. The concrete floor finish had

copped a pounding during the build and was peeling up in the bathroom. I insisted on emptying out the house and resealing the floor first. Then we started with just a bed, some couches and a few essentials. The first night in was all a bit surreal but over time it has become a joyous space to inhabit.

First necessary addition after moving in was some robes for the bedroom. I was looking for suitable structural supports and kicked the bark off a pole that we’d chopped for picture rails. Well, the bugs had been sculpting furiously and we now had a totem pole for the built in robe. Like everything else here, it took some time to process and install but, oh so worth it.

Initial pantry shelving is plainer but no less useful. Not so plain is the window bay trim in the studies. This is built with the oft-maligned silver wattle. I even went a little left field with some resin and rocks. Also unique are the various door handles made from random nice feeling sticks. We get many requests to ‘feel our house up’ and everything is so tactile, particularly the burnished earth wall finishes.

Rob’s last hurrahOwner building is a tough gig by

any measure. For us, the stresses of the final year or so of a long build were compounded by watching our parents fall apart. All four had major health scares and it was Dana’s dad Rob who drew the shortest straw. We’d despaired that he would never see us living in our

house. So, it was a great joy to host his last visit out of Melbourne with the rest of Dana’s family coming from far and wide. Unfortunately, he is no longer with us but I will forever carry memories of him grinning like a loon at the end of our dining table.

Was it worth all the blood, sweat and tears? If you’d asked us in the weeks after moving in you may not have got the ‘oh yes’ that resounds now. Time has healed the most gaping wounds and we are still pinching ourselves daily on what a stunning home we share. A few months after moving in we hosted 80 people for a house warming and could not wipe the smiles off our faces for weeks afterwards. It has been an arduous and epic adventure but we are now a lot better off for having done it.

So, is it truly done/finished? No, of course not. This is an owner builder project after all! However, each week we find a few hours to keep chipping away at finishing each little section. There is landscaping, fencing, gardening, decorating and much more yet to come too. We also have a wee mortgage to pay so Dana is still on the Mon-Fri grind and I am still on the tools (doing local handyman work) but I’m finally getting paid for it!

Most importantly, the greatest joy is that we are enjoying having a life again and living in this beautiful house that we have built ourselves.u

John has been sharing their adventure with us over a number of issues: 166 Aug/Sep 2011 - 173 Oct/Nov 2012, 175 Feb/Mar 2013, 178 Aug/Sep 2013, 185 Oct/Nov 2014, 199 Feb/Mar 2017, 201 Jun/Jul 2017. This is the last instalment. You can read more of John and Dana’s adventures on their blog: bogiebushbuild.blogspot.com.au

u Seven Creeks ExcavationsRowan Burton, Euroa Victoria.

0418 297 990

u Osmo AustraliaDurable, natural wood finishes.

03 9464 4252, www.osmoaustralia.com.au

Links & resources

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