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 […]
All posts filed under: The Build

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 […]

Plans approved, here we go!
Once the black box idea had been cast, our architect was able to work more rapidly on the plans for council development approval. It feels like a huge triumph just to get drawings done, and yet we are miles away from turning soil. And even […]

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 […]

Pettit + Sevitt Elements
When we first purchased our house, the real estate agent hadn’t even noticed it was a P+S. Needless to say they freaked out afterwards, realising they might have been able to sell it for more. Nevertheless, we confirmed with the seller’s son and it was indeed […]