A first home in Bonbeach, from hand-drawn plans

Daniel and Alanna came to us with hand-drawn plans. Our job was to turn them into something compliant, buildable and worth living in. The block is locked in on its boundary, which decided a good deal about how the house got built: ivory face brick to the boundary line, Nuline square-edge weatherboard in Dulux Dover White everywhere else, Colorbond Surfmist above.

Then it gets modelled

From those drawings the house was modelled in 3D for the frame and truss takeoff. It is a working tool rather than a picture: it produces the cutting list the frame is built from, and it catches the things that are cheap to fix on a screen and expensive to fix on site. It also meant Daniel and Alanna could see their house before it existed, which counts for something when what you started with is a pencil drawing.

Strip the cladding off that model and this is what is underneath: every stud, plate, joist, truss and brace, with the LVL beams in yellow and the bracing in red. This is the version that does the actual work. It is where the cutting list comes from, where a clash between the roof frame and a beam gets found while it still costs nothing, and where the frame is proven before a delivery is ordered.

Most of the work was not on the tools

It was their first home. That meant the useful part of our job was helping two people work out where their money would actually be felt, rather than spreading it thin across everything. The kitchen, living and dining took the investment: oak-tone timber veneer joinery, porcelain benchtops, a built-in bench seat worked into the joinery. Upstairs took laminate flooring and flush panel doors. Both were deliberate decisions, and both were theirs to make once they could see what each one cost.

The staircase

The Pacific Oak stair is the piece we would point at. Clear-coated, with the stringer concealed inside the plastered wall so no support is visible. That takes the carpenter, the plasterer and the stair builder working to the same line, and there is nowhere to hide a millimetre out.

The paving is theirs, not ours

The crazy pave out the back is Daniel and Alanna’s own work, laid from tiles left over from the build. It cost nothing, sent nothing to landfill, and it is the most personal thing on the property. We mention it because it is a fair picture of how the job ran.

Six months, with Christmas in the middle

Site start to handover ran September to March. The Christmas shutdown sits inside that, and it is worth naming rather than hiding: the trade calendar stops for the best part of a month, and a build running through it either plans around that or loses the time twice over.