Welcome

Welcome to my blog about Owner Building My Home in Western Australia. With no experience in building at all, it should be interesting.

Wednesday 27 April 2011

Site Works.. Rocks Rocks and more rocks

Site Works is a necessary evil in building a house. But, how evil it is, really depends on where you build and what you build on.. 
Well we have Rocks, and plenty of them. To the point where we wondered if it would ever end.. Before we can even prepare for our pad we had to deal with our endless supply of Rock!!




The rock breaker starting on our pool.


There was so much that we eventually had to pay to have them removed. An unexpected expense to add to our budget. $3000. approx. But nothing that was going to cripple us and it was at least something that was our decision.

Tuesday 26 April 2011

First Post - The Beginning

Hi,


My Partner and I looked at buying a home, building a new one, renovating an older house, hell we thought all options at one point or another. But, it came down to the fact that we couldn't afford to build new home anymore, and buying a decent home that wasn't ten years old was out of our 'financially comfortable' budget. Renovating became too expensive when the real estate market went into outer space. So we decided to try and Owner Build. 


Owner Building, a feat, that at times seems virtually impossible, but as we all know with house prices as they are there are not many options for young couples who don't want a half million dollar mortgage, but would still like a 'nice house.' 


It's taken us a little over 3 years to get to this point. 


2 years of arguments over the house plans
3 months of indecisiveness
1 set of double storey house plans
1 set of one storey house plans
1 Architect
1 Draftsman
Tape Measures and Spray paint
A forest worth of House Magazines
6 months of impatient toe-tapping whilst our plans were at the Council
and Banks... need I say more!!. 


Sigh... But it is finally happening.. 


We decided on our Site Works Contractor, and for $5000 extra to dig our pool, we got things started. Yes, I said a Pool, not even an option we could have considered before this.


The Rock Breaker was delivered and Construction started on the 21st March 2011.



I am eager to get some pictures up for now, so in my next posts I will put more information about our quotes and budgets, etc.