Farewell to building... hello to renovating & relocating!

We have decided to close the chapter on our plan to build in Tasmania.
As such, we have also decided to close this blog.
However, our exploits of relocating from mainland Australia to Tasmania, and renovating the 1970's brick monstrosity we have acquired will be captured on our New Blog Field Guide to Moving, Renovating & Working in Tasmania.
We will be selling our beautiful block of land (we cannot imagine building anything other than the house we spent 3 years planning) and concentrating our efforts on the move (planned for August this year) and getting work.
As always, we wish you all, dear readers, the very best of luck, health and happiness.
We hope that you may join us in our new journey.

V&A

New Year... New Journey...

It's official - we are now proud owners of a house in Southern Tasmania!
No, we didn't by some miracle manage to build it and transport it into the present.
No, it isn't the minimalist architectural down-sizer we spent 3 years planning and designing.
No, it doesn't have an indoor cat garden.
But what is does have, is:

• a weird enough layout to allow for His & Hers studios (Viktoria's even comes with a wet-room!)
• a combined dining-living-kitchen space with a wood heater and wood stove
• room for a library
• 70's curtains and matching fluoro lighting...

• lime green laminate bench tops that almost completely fail to match (either) tiles

• this guy!

What it lacks in modernity and general colour-coordination, it makes up for with its double-brick exterior, brick interior, concrete-slab construction, and loads of potential.
Stylistically, it's completely bonkers. And that suits us just fine.
Our immediate "to do" list is to get the switch-boards (which are the original fuse type from the 1970's) upgraded, and replace the gutters and downpipes... or rather, install gutters and downpipes, as it currently doesn't have any. Apparently they fell off.... Several years ago....
Never ones to say no to a challenge, we are quite smitten with our ugly duckling.
As we progress with the renos and updates, we'll keep blogging.
With a new positive focus for 2015 ... "Home, James, and don't spare the horses!"

V&A

 

Captain GreatPants lost his battle over Christmas, and we made the difficult decision to have him euthanized. 

His is now much more peaceful, and with his other siblings who went before him.

RIP Captain GreatPants

Where have we been?

Time, so the saying goes, flies when you're having fun.
From experience, it can also fly when you are having something less than fun.
And so it has. Flown, that is.
We have been (metaphorically, at least) 'away'.
And now we are back.
However, in the sense that this blog was originally about building a house in Tasmania, that part of the journey is at an end. The support, advice and well-wishing has been wonderful. Unfortunately, the universe has had other ideas.
Whatever new direction we take, how we get there, and where we go, are as yet uncharted waters.... but we are making the necessary preparations for whatever lies ahead...

Where we have been in the meantime is a story for another day.
When our maps are charted for the next leg of our journey, we will let you know how we ended up where we are now.
Until then, we remain
V&A

New builder... new month.... new outlook

After the latest quote from the first builder came in still more than $250,000 over our budget, we had very long faces and were looking like nothing would ever happen.
There was certainly no space to negotiate that amount of a reduction in the price with that particular builder.
But all is not lost!
We have a second builder on the case, and he is busy churning the numbers and gathering quotes from his subcontractors. He has around four weeks (from 22 May) to get the quote together, so we are back in a holding position waiting on an outcome.
This has, of course, come about at the same time as dealing with some health issues as well as some troubling scenes at The Android's workplace, which has made for a couple of very stressed people. But we remind ourselves that there are far many more people in much worse situations.

First World Problems

Many thanks to all those lovely folks who have sent in suggestions & offered support.

That, and the fact that Viktoria won her family Eurovision-Tipping Competition, has been an enormous help.

V&A

Maybe we just cannot ever afford this....

The final piece needed to green-light our project has come in - the builder's quote.
Except that it's over our budget.
About $250,000 over budget, to be precise.
We've come to the point where this is no longer upsetting... it's just pissing us off.
Sure, you hear that the building industry is replete with people who want to rip folk off by hyper-inflating prices. We entered into this with our eyes open, and expected there to be a slightly higher cost as we are building in Tasmania, and not on mainland Australia.
But this is just insulting.
In this Internet age, it's fairly easy to locate companies that will supply & install in the most remote of locations. So in the intervening time between receiving this and the previous quote, we've been making a few phone calls. This exercise was also partly a sanity check - we had begun to think that we must have such unrealistic expectations that it had completely clouded our perception of what the build would cost.
So, let's look at a couple of examples...

1. We've had a couple of quotes for a custom-made glasshouse manufactured to our specifications, and shipped to Tasmania. Approximate cost from our research was $12,000. Cost on quotation $26,934.51. That's about $14,000 difference.
2. We've had three quotes to supply and install (on the actual site address) a 7.5kW stand alone solar power system, with AGM batteries, a German inverter and back up generator. The average quote we received was approximately $34,000. Cost on quotation $66,340. That's a whopping $32,000 difference!

On those two items alone, the difference is about $50,000. And we don't have any trade discount or connections.
This makes us wonder, do the builders:
a) think we are really, really wealthy?
b) think we are really, really stupid?
c) not actually want to build the house after all? or
d) all of the above?
We really wanted to use them, because we admired the quality of the work that they had done on other builds. But we are very much feeling like we are being taken for a ride.
As the quote only came in on Friday afternoon, we are yet to discuss the detail with the architects. However, from our calculations, even if we replace all the subcontracted items with suppliers we source ourselves, there isn't going to be anything like $250,000 worth of savings.
And for what is a very small house (one bedroom, one bathroom, combined kitchen-diner) only a madman would consider the amount quoted is reasonable or viable.
We progressed with the build because the initial estimate we received (on this very design) last July was in the vicinity of $480,000. Which sits happily within our budget.
We are completely unable to fathom how it can now be priced at around $700,000 + fixtures / fittings + driveway for the same building. Either the builder's estimating tool is so erroneous as to be useless, or something else is going on.
Maybe, we just have to give the dream away.
V&A

Ground Hog Day on the house design...

From our last update on the build, things were looking pretty grim.
Because of having to have a turning circle built for a fire truck, we had to push the house site further down the hill. This resulted in a long driveway, a suspended concrete slab, and Uber-Footings to hold the house up. All that pushed the build cost from "yes, we can manage that" to "OMG!". This was accompanied by much soul-searching about how a one-bedroom, one-bathroom house could cost only slightly less than a Harrier jet.
We were left with a long list of "If"s which needed to be fulfilled - if we were ever going to be able to build.
The good news is, that there has been some positive progress. Of course, this really just puts us back to where we were in about July 2013... but progress is progress, and at least while we may still be in the forest, we can at least see some light through the canopy.
The first and main issue to resolve was to see if we could have the house moved back up the hill to its original planned site, and therefore not need to have the turning circle for the fire truck which the bushfire consultant stated was a requirement.

Through some mystical super power possessed by Building Certifiers, we have been able to have that decision over-ruled under the Building Code. This means that we no longer require the turning circle, and can therefore move the house back to the higher (and flatter) part of the block. Being on a flatter site, we were hoping to have a slab-on-ground, which would negate having to have the Uber-Footings required further down the hill, where it would mean a floating concrete slab.So far so good.
We have had verbal confirmation from the engineer that by moving the house back up the hill, we would indeed be able to have a slab-on-ground.
A small, but tentative "hurrah" could be heard Chez Viktoria-Android.
We have also had verbal confirmation from the Council Planning Officer that we would not be required to submit a new Development Application, but could get away with submitting an amendment to the original application.
It should be noted, that when we say "we" in the above context, we actually mean "Neal-and-Catherine-the-Architects". They have done the running around, phoning around, and listening to our angst. We (Viktoria & the Android) have just been responsible for creating angst...
But now, the only teeny tiny thing remaining is... how much is it all going to cost?
For some reason, the builder needed to have a holiday (we are sure that it can't just have been us driving him crazy). But he had previously advised he would be able to re-do the estimate for us this week.
Will it come in on budget?
Will we ever get to start building?
Will we end up living in a tent, surrounded by cats??
We are keeping all our fingers and toes crossed.
V&A

Happy Birthday Captain Greatpants

A belated happy birthday to our beautiful boy, Captain Greatpants, who recently turned 14.

Not bad considering the little guy was given about 2 months to live almost 3 years ago...
V&A