Michael's new development site gave me renewed enthusiasm for documenting our building of PPOR on some acreage at Upper Brookfield (22 km to the Brisbane GPO, but pretty remote, with no mobile reception - which was a huge selling point for me ;-) ).
In case its of any use to other contemplating the same we learned a bit this time round :
1.
Site preparation - finally saw the light and used a really experienced site preparation expert with a drott and excavator working in tandem. We have a steep hill behind us with TONS of water coming towards us when it rains, so I was scared into submission. After $2,500 and a pretty major site cut, the water visibly runs off into the spoon drains they created. Money well spent (versus the few hacks I'd previously had at trying to get a level site on the cheap which resulted in an impromptu, unlevel, swimming pool
) I actually previously spent about the same again in the unsuccessful attempts - a lesson learned.
2.
Septic systems -
www.biolytix.com is the Maleny based firm that won a New Inventors award. They have turned 'waste treatment' on its ear from being the usual "aerobic" set up that requires chemicals and lots of intervention, to more closely mirror nature at work including earth worms performing the final stage of filtration, but all in a pretty high-tech setup that actually phones the service tech when it encounters a problem). The best bit was the overall cost was sub-$10K for everything including irrigation areas installed etc - the last treatment system we put it was around $5K more than that and needed maintenance nearly immediately after a break down. Right, enough about poo...
3.
Boulder walls - they're not quite as pretty as the real flash ones (which I was quoted $180 per face metre for) but buying the rocks (truck and dog costs $1,300 - $1,500 and does around 25 face metres) and using the local bobcat guy (I think its pretty important they have experience - our guy was/is great) worked out below $85 per face metre all up. And they're not going anywhere in a hurry. BIG rocks
4.
Bores - (no not me, the 'well'..) We are lucky to have good clean bore water. I didn't however budget for the $2,500 submersible bore pump we needed to push it up the hill to our house. This is the Rolls Royce of bore pumps, but it'd want to be ! I was warned off getting the $900 cheapies as they don't have failsafe mechanisms (like overload protection, switching off when running dry etc) so you will more likely need to replace it eventually.
5.
Soundproofing - the only issue I dug my heels in was the necessity for my home theatre room - (excused as a Wiggles Concert display area for 19 month old Ella, but really intended for 24 hour cyclical re-runs of Tomb Raider and Charlies Angels Full Throttle ;-) ) which in turn had me threatened with eviction for excess noise and bad taste. Found Bradford Soundscreen batts which are made I think from spun basalt (more rocks) and self-installed, reasonably simply (cut with large scissors). They work out to around $7-$8 per square metre and claim to cut down noise by 75 %. They're only in the stud walls at the moment so I can't report on how efficient they are - and we'll need ceiling insulation over the rooms (my office is done too, as is Her Majesty's Saturday Sleep In chamber) to complete the 'cocoon' otherwise a lot of the sound will go through the ceiling cavity. More on that later - with success and failure rating to suit.
6.
Cabling - I work from home, and it was cheap to pre-cable most rooms with CAT6 data cable ($0.90 per metre and I've since found it for much less at
http://www.skandia.com.au - d'oh ... ) I'e alllowed for one wireless access point in the centre of the house, but I like the convenience and speed of hard wired cabling. Assuming whatever the Tel$tra's of the world roll out to sell entertainment to us, we should be pretty well prepared to send it thru the house.
7.
Ducted vacuum - bought a
www.starvac.com.au and self-installed. It sucks ! literally - this thing could suck the concrete slab up if you left it on. About $850 for the unit, but a complete pain in the proverbial to install when you don't know what you're doing, even though technically its only gluing poly pipe together and running a bit of 12 volt wire. (I ordered 50mm pipe as directed, only to find there are 5 kinds of 50mm pipe - the wrong gauge being preinstalled and glued in my ceiling before the bloody thing arrived
I eventually tracked down the right stuff. After dripping blue plumbers glue into my eye from above and nearly killing myself in the rush trip from the top of the step ladder to the nearest tap (50 metres away) I think next time I'll opt for the unit and installation as a package. Still, Mary is coming around to the idea that she will only need to throw the coiled hose at me and order me to vacuum - much easier than attacking me with the whole vacuum cleaner.
8.
Services - we are set back 100 metres or so from the road, so we dug a 600mm deep trench with electrical in the base of it, then backfilled 300 mm and placed the water pipe (1.25 inch rural) to bring the water up from the bore. We cable-tied 5 pair gel coated phone cable to the water pipe so it had some support, and that's our Telstra feed in (and it actually tested ok, thank god
) So if we ever forget and start digging, we'll at least cut our phone off and get hit by water, before we accidentally cut the 240v
9.
DIAL BEFORE YOU DIG. An excavator operator on our job hit a 150 pair telstra cable (in a very obscure spot running diagonally across our property) when digging fence posts, and we received a $5,000 bill from Telstra. The only thing that saved us was the 1100 Dial Before You Dig maps that indicated the services were 4 metres away from where they actually where, and weren't even meant to be inside our boundary. ALWAYS will be making sure we have the latest Dial Before You Dig maps. That's 1,000 bottles of the quality red I am used to drinking.
Photos posted at :
http://www.invested.com.au/gallery/s...ge.php?i=23&c=
Plaster and bricks are next week, and we seem (touch wood) ahead of schedule for the 1 October completion.
Sorry, the saga's a bit boring, but its exciting for us ;-)
Cheers
Carl
