Late August 2016: It was a happy day when my Dad came over for a peak at the progress. My parents tried not to visit the building site, as it was full of hazards. So, when he came around and had a look, he said […]
All posts filed under: General
Getting out of the ground
We’re finally out of the ground, after about 8 weeks of digging, drainage, fill, pool dig and concrete, and foundations. Yay! At every step our builder has been excellent. As we are living in the existing house, being owner builders has worked well. We usually […]
Digging begins
Here’s a photo of our excavator turning the soil for the first time in late March. Very exciting! The weather was good, we’d nailed down a start date with the builder and started talking to the window manufacturer to place our order for the first […]
March: Builders & Building Costs
It’s late summer and the weather is giving us time to dream and think in the outdoors. February 2016 Our large challenge for our extension has been our limited budget. So, we had always agreed to start building using a phased-in approach. The living extension […]
Vale Architect Ken Woolley 1933-2015
Vale Ken Woolley. I feel he has followed me around through his buildings somehow…having been born in St Margarets Hospital where he designed the 1956 Chapel, and then I spent many years in the University of Sydney Fisher Library as well as the Wentworth Building. […]
Plans approved, here we go!
Sam our architect was able to work more rapidly on the plans for council development approval once this modular idea had come to life. It feels like a huge triumph just to get drawings done, and yet we are miles away from turning soil. And […]
The Barcelona Pavilion
Over the years we’ve been fortunate enough to travel to a few places that have offered us lots of design inspiration. In the middle of our design process, we travelled abroad for work purposes and managed to visit the beautiful Barcelona Pavilion in Spain, the new […]
Lowline extension design progress
When I last posted we had stalled in our design process. Single storey or two storey? Could the budget handle it? Are we mad? And would we be doing the existing house justice? All difficult questions but we arrived at these dilemmas because the first […]
Houzz on Pettit & Sevitt
Photo: Lowline B by Ken Woolley for Pettit & Sevitt. Photo source: Modernhouse.co (Photographers © Michael Nicholson, © Tamara Graham) Houzz recently published a handy rehash of the reasons why P&S houses work on so many levels. It’s been hard to find much information about P&S […]
Lowline extension…
As mentioned in my earlier post, we’ve been tossing up with the issue of single storey bliss and our floor plan needs as a family. We’ve spent months going over concepts and options with our patient Architect and along the way we have managed to test the […]
Single storeyness – The floorplan conundrum
It’s been a while since my last post, but I wanted to update on the ruminations we’ve had while working on the floor plan, various issues presented by the modern house, and our challenges and solutions so far. Key things we love about modernist design, […]
Architect Virginia Wong See
Good friend Architect Virginia Wong See and family made a big move to the NSW north coast. And who could blame them – clean air, open spaces and buckets of opportunities. Different opportunities to those offered by the relatively over-crowded, tightly contested Sydney market where […]
Sydney House. 