8 - The Preparation

Once the development application was done and the major contracts with the removers and the stumpers sewn up, we had about two months to wait and prepare. The house was vacated a lot sooner than we were told it would be. We were under the impression it wouldn’t be until a few weeks before the move in April. It wasn’t. The house had been emptied of people and things just before Christmas, which means we could do things there, like take the photos you see around these words.

Asbestos Removal
The first thing to do was to have the asbestos fibre sheeted ceilings throughout the house removed. The Tweed Shire Council will not allow any asbestos product to enter its boundaries. Fair enough. We got a couple of quotes. They were between $2500 and $3000 - licensed asbestos people charge big money. We went with the cheapest. Because the asbestos sheets were mostly on the inside of the house, their removal would hopefully not leave the impression that the place was being taken apart or something. We were a little concerned about leaving the house unattended for 4-5 months in the city. We feared looters or squatters or arsonists or historians or wood fanciers or claw foot bath fanciers or nice deck fanciers or pretty much everyone else in the world would somehow notice the house was empty and strike.

The ceilings have a lot of decorative wood attached to them in different patterns for each room. We asked for this to be kept if possible as some of it may be able to be used for the same purpose afterwards.

The job was done. However, in our desire to go with the cheapest quote, we failed to notice that ‘nail removal’ was not mentioned. As a result they weren’t. The other company had stated they would remove them, but the one we went with did not. So in many areas there is a ten cent shape worth of asbestos sheeting surrounding the nails. We will have to bear this in mind when working on the house later. The total cost was $2750. Substantial - though not too bad.

All the wood was left in piles in the room it was removed from. There was a lot of it and some of it had split. If we do not use it for the ceilings then I’m sure it will be used for something else one day.

The Removal of Part of the Front Verandah
In New South Wales they have a rule which stipulates that houses traveling on trucks can be no wider than five and half metres. In Queensland it’s eight metres. Damn. The cut for our house will look the best if it is done under the skirting board along the edge of the lounge/dining room. This leaves about one and half metres of left hand side front verandah sticking out over the NSW width limit. Damn. We thought that perhaps the removers could dog leg the cut a bit to incorporate the verandah better. They weren’t prepared to. Damn. In the contract with them it states that the one and half metres would be cut off and left behind. Hoover Dam.

The verandah section in question here is a little tricky. It has its own piece of peeked roofing perpendicular to the main entrance peek.

We first thought we would need to hire someone to take the section apart and then travel two hours down here later on to put it back together. Finding someone to do this in the current busy building climate would turn out to be near impossible. After ringing a few people, we decided the person taking it apart does not have to be the same person who puts it back together again. It is not that complicated. We could take it apart, hire a truck, move it in bits, store it until after the house is all put back together and then get someone to work on it, or maybe I'll give it a crack.

A friend of mine in Brisbane, who does a bit of cabinet making and has a lot of tools and things, agreed to help pull the section apart. He would charge me for his time but at a very cheap rate. So I took a few days off work and went to work.

We had to remove a lot more than just one and half metres because we did not want to cut the nice balustrades, or the great silky oak fixed shade louvres, in half. The dismantling was not too bad. The two 200mm by 200mm hard wood posts were very heavy and tested our sheer strength and endurance. We passed but only just. The process introduced me to a new favourite tool, the single handed demolition hammer (insert growl sound here).

In the end the cost for the verandah removal was about $695. Twelve hours of my friend’s help was $300. It was $250 to hire the truck and the rest was eaten up in extra tools and things.

Placement

One of the largest issues leading up to the move for us was where exactly to move the house to. Our 15 acre block has lots of undulating hills. Together they sort of make up a basic bowl shape with a dam at the bottom resembling the few spoonfuls of milk left after cereal. The shed we live in now sits on top of the hill that mostly faces south. There is a small part of it that travels down the north from the shed to the boundary. This is where we grow food at the moment. The hill we chose for the house mainly faces east. It runs down from the road and west boundary. This hill was chosen because it feels like the middle of the property, it has great views of Wollumbin (Mt Warning) and it has gullies on either side that add both north and south aspects for growing various things. The hill choice was easy. We would face the back deck towards the east to soak up both the thawing morning sun and the great view. This leaves the living areas of the house facing the north, which is ideal.

We want to surround the house with veggie gardens, fruit trees, chooks and some ornamental trees and shrubs. Because of this we decided to place the house more to the south side of the hill as it opens up the north side to grow more things on.

We figure that one day we may want to build a room under the house. Thinking ahead is rather handy for this because houses are heavy. Before the house arrives we thought we would get my neighbour, who owns diggers and things, to cut into the hill a tad. It would just be enough to open up the space under the back deck and maybe one day we could build in a room there. I wasn’t keen on the house looking really high from the ground.

All these considerations proved a little hard to make room for. We got back in the site surveyors so they could peg out ‘solar north’ (about 12 degrees off magnetic) for one side of the house. This gave us a starting point. The pegs suited the sun but not quite the view. We compromised by swinging the house site slightly back towards the south. I read on the home technical manual site (link to the left) that variations in site orientation were alright for passive solar orientation as long these fell within a 15 degree difference. We made sure of this, swinging the house pegs about 10 degrees back.

5 - The House

As I have already mentioned, the house is in great condition. It has housed only two owners since it was built in 1926 by a man for his wife. Fifteen years ago it had enjoyed some restoration and renovation work. One of the results of this was the bathroom being relocated from its original position on the back deck to one of the three bedrooms. This gave the house only two bedrooms and a large but lovely bathroom. The old deck bathroom became a large laundry and storage area.

The Kitchen
When seeing the above layout, some friends of ours suggested knocking out the wall between the kitchen and lounge or at least cutting a large opening in it. This got me thinking. I like the idea of the separate kitchen. There has been quite a push lately in house design circles to open everything up. The dining area is merged with lounge, media, entertainment and what not and over to one side, as if on stage, is the kitchen ensconced in island bench. Perhaps the thinking is that the cook or dish washer can stay part of the party as they quietly toil away piping up occasionally with witty observations in tune with the topics at hand. For all other times those in the kitchen can talk with family as they watch TV in the other corner or watch it themselves or simply discuss various matters of everyone’s busy day as the evening meal is prepared. I guess all this is a nice idea. Here comes the ‘however’ subtly signposted by the ‘I guess’. However, I kind of think you lose the purpose and function of rooms this way. A separate kitchen complete with an area for dining is a very nice thing. It is the kitchen – the place for creating meals, storing food, sprouting sprouts, rising bread, learning about flavours, imparting a sense of interest and passion within children and lots of messy experimentation. To be able to sit right there and eat in the place that the food was prepared, with the leftovers bubbling away on the stove at arms reach, the smells of dozens of herbs and spices wafting around and the sights of jars and jars of dried beans and the like, gives a nice understanding of the origin of the meal and contributes to the richness of its eating.

So the fact that the small kitchen in this house has a little dining nook, with a view to the prospective veggie gardens, is perfect for us.The walls will act as vertical storage, like a library of culinary delights. The kitchen benches will need some work as they are fairly minimal. The previous owners had a large rustic looking stand alone bench in the middle and a cupboard on the back wall. We are hoping to simply have a bench and cook top on that wall and no bench in the middle, the room is too small.

The Living Room
Having a separate small living room works for us too. It will become the centre of the house and a place for relaxing, talking, reading, playing and creating. The name ‘living’ sums these activities up nicely as there is an active element to them. We will have to place the computer somewhere in this room though there will be no television. I have recently welcomed a new TV free chapter in my life. Not that it made up a large part before but it was there and it didn’t feel right. Its absence is producing things during a time usually devoted to passive consumption. This blog is an example, so to the collection of hand made clothes worn daily by my daughter at the hands of my partner’s busy hands.

The Bedrooms
There are two and this is fine for now. Should the need arise to fill a third we will move the bathroom back to its original location and convert the space it was in back in to a bedroom. The one issue with bedrooms in an old house is the lack of inbuilt cupboards. We will have to come up with solutions to this. For us it will probably be a combination of old stand-alone wardrobes and maybe some clothes racks hanging from the roof at eye level.

The Bathroom
This will be half in the laundry, marked 'toilet', and half in the house as in the design. The claw foot bath that comes with the house will stay where it is for the time being. However, we are going to install a composting toilet in the laundry which will probably become a bathroom in the future. Having the composting toilet out there will make it easier to get in under it to replace the full chambers. Also it seems nicer to get down to that sort of business away from the more delicate living areas of the house. Flushing toilets have brought the whole affair closer and even into people’s bedrooms. When you think about it, this is a bit weird. It has not been decided at this stage but we will probably get the toilet from Nature-Loo. There will be more on that later when I write of our on-site waste treatment systems.

Orientation

The house is nearly perfectly orientated to suit the need for passive solar design for our site. The house has a longer east west axis and is narrow enough to benefit from cross flow breezes. The verandas at each end of the house will act as a buffer keeping the sun from hitting the house. Of course, bedroom 1 will cop it from the west in the afternoon, however we plan to plant some trees over that side of the house and perhaps insulate the wall. The large windows in the living room will benefit from northern sun and the area just outside these will work as a sun trap in the cooler months where we can grow things that aren't keen on getting cold.