Ayres Rocks

We have the engineering back finally. I had to send it back and insist that some of the terminology used throughout the paperwork was inconsistent with what we were actually doing. A big thankyou to RCI for understanding my concerns and getting all the words in order.

Now we have all this, it’s time to send Darren at Wise Drafting Pty Ltd the engineering so he can complete the technical side of our drawings.

Once we have these back it is then off to a certifier. The certifier is the third party who checks all the drawings and engineering and signs off on them as complying with all relevant codes. We could have Council do this as part of the application, but by going the private route we remove any potential objections the council may have. Simply put – if the certifier says it’s all proper Council must send us an approval notice within 5 days of us lodging for this part of the application.

Once we have all this paperwork and it’s stamped and approved it’s again to Council for the third-last application we need to make on this journey. We still need to apply to Council to have them approve the waste water installation and issue a certificate of occupancy.

This phase has been long and drawn out with a lot of “traps for new players” we have come across despite researching as thoroughly as we did.

Would we do it again?– Yeah, I think we would. This process has cost us a around $4000 from the first chat we had with Darren and including the (yet to be done) certifier’s work. This is around $1500 more than if we had left it all to Council to make the decisions on. I feel we got more of “our way” with the end result since we have paid the professionals we used to deliver what we wanted. Council on the other hand are only obliged to approve what they feel is fitting with the development plan for the area, and I feel we would have been forced to heavily compromise the end result to satisfy that plan.

If you’re thinking of going the owner builder route and want to discuss with us just what we had ready at each stage of this process (and what we missed), or just want some general advice I’m always happy to offer what I can. Contact me via the information contained in the About section of this site.

To be honest it’s more like half a tree of copies of the plans we submitted sent back, signed by the council’s chief planner as being approved. We have been granted planning approval for the development!!!

All said and done it was 50 days between lodgement with a single round of clarifications and amendments, before we got the approval.

As we were all wide eyed and slack jawed with what needed to be done, I need to send out a big “thanks” to Aaron at the council who took on our case and was truly easy to deal with.

Now, we just need to get all the engineering paperwork back so we can get started on the building consent approval which covers the various building codes and so on we are required to adhere to.

Holy cow. I think we’ve just killed and printed out a tree. 15 sheets of A2 paper is what was needed to satisfy the councils requirements for copies of our plans.

All forms are now filled, duplicates made and sorted awaiting an appointment with the council planning officer so we may get our planning application made and approved.

Fingers crossed

I shot off an email to the Mid Murray Council development and planning officer we have been conversing with over the past few months. I listed what we had so far to seek the planning approval and he responded back with the OK on what we have, plus all the forms we would need to complete before lodging our application.

This experience is very different from the suburban council we spent the last 7 years living in. The response to every enquiry there always seemed as if we were creating work for them. How dare we pay rates and expect service I guess.

On a bum note, the concrete vibrator arrived Monday, was broken, looked decidedly second hand and was certainly a far inferior quality then the “best quality tool, don’t pay $1500 elsewhere” advertised on the Ebay listing. The seller has ignored me for 24 hours so far, another 24 hours and I will make their name absolute mud and leave no one searching Google for details about them in any doubt that this retailer will rip your off.

I’m also posting them the link to this post, because this is where I will shame them.

Word to the wise AG#$^%^.I’m a webmaster who controls somewhere near 1000 domains and has around 500 more under management. I could easily backlink several posts about your sham operation from tens of thousands more by contacting a few friends in the business.

I’ve contacted the NSW department of fair trading about lodging a complaint and the person I spoke to was concerned with your warranty conditions and other aspects of your business (implied trading name, fraudulent product description and so on) not complying with statutory requirements. Resolve this quickly or I will lodge a formal complaint.

Darren delivered the finished provisional plans late on Friday. We now have all the details required to put the application for planning permission before council. This will give us permission to build the intended development, but not permission to commence with the development.

Once that is accepted we’ll get on with getting the properly specified and engineered versions completed so we are able to apply for building consent. This will then give us permission to commence the development as specified by engineers and certifiers.

A big thanks to Darren for happily taking on all the numerous small changes we made to his (and our own) ideas along the way. He has been a very easy person to deal with, happy to listen when needed and happy to advise when requested. His wealth of knowledge on all things design and construction made our decision making process much simpler than it may have been.

I need to seek his permission to display the designs, I will post them to the site once I have that.

You can contact Darren by heading over to his website, Wise Drafting.

Now for the dreaded next step – approaching council for planning permission.

The generator made it overnight from Melbourne which I found quite remarkable considering some of the other purchases that weigh far less and were bought days earlier are still not here despite the freight being 2-3 times that of the generator. My panel lift also made it here, just after the generator.

The 4.2Kva “Silent Inverter Generator”
We bought the generator from this Ebay seller and would recommend anyone looking for similar to keep an eye on the auctions this seller has. His items do sell for a little more than through other Ebay stores, but his freight is so cheap I recommend you weigh up the freight from each seller before you settle on your bid.

First impressions on the generator are excellent. Solid packaging and the quality of the unit far surpasses my expectations. Nicely finished, details paid attention to and a manual with a better grasp of English than most, like, you know, teenagers. Filled the sump as instructed and exact volume stated was required, 1.1L of oil.

Connected battery as instructed, splashed some fuel and used the remote starter to fire it up. This is one nifty feature and the manual states up to 50 metres effective range and I got about 20 through solid brick wall so I was happy with that. It’s not “silent” but you could happily hold a conversation without having to yell over the top of the noise.

Being new I didn’t want to stress it too much but it did fire up the Makita circular saw (1800W) without any real increase in revs. With voltage control regulators, it should be able to power any of the tools I have now without raising a sweat and without using a hell of a lot of fuel.

The “I-force Panel Lifter”
Purchased this item new from this Ebay seller.

Again, I was very surprised at the quality of the item fearing it may have been a cheaper version than those available in the store despite being very much an identical product. It folds down to something you could store under a bed, not that you would, but now you know how little space it needs.

This item also has a well written manual with useful instructions and I had it out of the box and together in under 5 minutes. Just as important, I had it disassembled and back in the box in the same time frame.

Title says it all I guess.

I cut and welded the steel for our prototype last night, deciding to tack rather than weld in full which turned out to be a brainwave. I was originally allowing for half an hour a divider, with 8 welding rods being needed for each. It turns out by tacking the mold at the base and welding the steel not covered by concrete provided a quicker, neater and far less intricate solution to the problem. End result is steel was cut and welded in about 5 minutes.

The wife and I made up an MDF mold for the whole experiment to sit in, the idea being that would keep the concrete tight against the steel divider as if it were stuck between 2 full size blocks. My greatest concern is with no taper to the shape of the steel divider it may have been stuck by slip force. This turn out to be partly true and I now have an idea for a prototype divider removal tool

We also took the opportunity to try a wet mix. One half was tamped as each shovel of concrete went in, the other was simply slumped into the mold and let to set. Preliminary results tell us we need to tamp the mix to ensure a clean and consistent gap free finish.

Turned out to be a great day in terms of outcomes and productivity, we also managed to get several hundred redgum seedlings potted on to grow tubes and another several hundred seeds sown for the next lot of seedlings. With some luck we’ll have 2-3 thousand seedlings ready to plant by Christmas.

With the draft plans now approved for the first real working set to be drawn from it’s time I got my arse into gear and started working out the finer details of all the ideas we have for putting the house together.

Today I had the first chance to use the concrete mixer since the conversion to petrol from electric. I am so glad I went for power and spent the extra few dollars on the bigger 6.5HP engine. Even with the added expense of the reducing gears and the clutch it still had trouble spinning 100kg of dry mix. With some water added and a slurry slumping around in the bowl it had no issues even at low revs keeping the mix moving.

So a big tick for that item. When we are using it to make the mix for the house it’ll be a wet bowl with dry ingredients added to it since we need to mix the clay soil to a slurry before cutting it back with the coarse sand and aggregate to get our ideal mix.

I’ve also finished sketching out detailed plans of the molding system. Tomorrow, weather permitting out come the toys and I’ll spend the morning cutting, drilling, screwing and welding together a prototype which I’ll then embed into a concrete slurry and replicate the process we’ll be using to build the house. 

I want to be sure it’s as easy to assemble as the prototype I have lurking around the back of my head. From the results of this I’ll then make tweaks if necessary and then go to AJ Stock and order all the steel for the molds we need to make.

Once the system is proven and I can grab a sample of the soil we’ll be using in the mix from our block, the first destruct testing samples can be poured and passed on to the engineers to certify as suitable for load bearing wall.

Darren delivered our final draft of the plans today, working in the cut for the slab and the resultant levels around the house it looks to sit very nicely into the spot we selected as the housing site.

It’s big though, overall the development pocket is 13.2 metres deep and 47.5 metres wide with 3 levels across the width to allow for the fall away in the block. The house itself is 30×9.6 metres. In that space we have 5 bedrooms, craft/hobby room, pantry/store room, laundry, 3 way bathroom and an ensuite with a very generous walk in robe.

Each bedroom is a minimum of 4.2×3.6 metres, allowing for the kids to have their own pesonal space as we only have 1 large open plan communal family area. This area is 10.5×9 metres and includes the kitchen, dining and lounge area as one space.

Adjacent to this is a 9×9 metre verandah/outdoor room. We are tossing up whether to deck or pave this area, paving being a better option for a bushfire zone, decking is the nicer option for living with. This outdoor room spans across to the shed, with a 6.6×6 metre car parking space and a 6.6×3.6 metre workshop area for me.

Total roof area is 576 metres give or take a few pieces. With last years drought record low rainfall this will still allow us to catch some 200 000 litres of rain per year, more than enough for household, animal and garden usage.

Darren from Wise Drafting Pty Ltd has emailed over the first draft of the plans based on our sketches of what it is we want. He has adapted all the dimensions to suit the poured earth blocks we’ll be using and balanced the window and door positioning to give a visually appealing symmetry to the “front” of the house – because of the view and predominant weather patterns, the front of our house is facing East so as you approach from the road you see the “back” of the house.

There is a nifty variation on the 3 way bathroom he has come up with that we think flows well, and with a minor variation to the ensuite we think he’s nailed that as well. It’s nice to see a sketch become a plan that will later become the actual house.

This week I need to organise the contour survey from the road down past the building envelope to assist the council in deciding if we can build in the spot we want and indeed use a septic as we wish.

We’re also looking at a better water storage solution. Pioneer Tanks and Heritage Tanks both provide the style of tank we are looking at. Since these tanks can be made onsite, there is no access issues that the poly tanks are going to cause. Also, with a 20 year warranty there is some peace of mind that they will last a lot longer than the 10 years warranty on the polytanks implies. Price wise they are competitive, with a 30 000 gallon (120 000 litres) proving cheaper than the equivalent in poly tanks for the same storage.

These tanks also have the capability of being able to capture water from their own roof, vital in our instance since we are relying soley on rain water for our household and garden needs.