When building a new home, it’s common to feel overwhelmed by all the moving parts… especially when it comes to managing your budget, staying involved in the design process, and choosing the right builder.

In this episode, HOME Method members Fionna and Ed share how they approached each of these steps, and gained certainty along the way.

You’ll hear how they collaborated closely with their team, made value-aligned decisions, and created a home that’s not only beautiful and sustainable, but also tracking on time and on budget.

Listen to the episode now.

Hello! This is Episode 378, and it’s Part 2 of my conversation with HOME Method members Fionna and Ed, who are building a new home in Canberra on a challenging but amazing site, where the home design responds to the unique site conditions, as well as the goals they have for their lifestyle into the future.

If you’ve missed out on the first part of this conversation, head back to Episode 377 to learn more about how they secured their block, the due diligence they went through, and getting started on their project. 

In this latest update, you’ll hear how they collaborated with their architect through the design process. We also explore the practicalities of budget management during design and how they selected their builder. 

Fionna and Ed also share the detailed thinking behind elements like their flat roof design, airtightness, threshold detailing, and passive performance. And how their team’s professionalism, transparency, and willingness to upskill gave them complete confidence through the process.

If you’re looking to better understand how to work with your team, manage your budget, or prepare for the complexities of building well, this is an incredibly generous and insightful episode I’m sure you’ll find super helpful.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW.

For timeline context, Fionna and Ed joined HOME Method in July 2023. At that point they had put a conditional offer on a property in December the year before, with settlement happening in April 2023. 

They hired their architects in June 2023, and joined HOME Method the following month. They signed a contract with their builders in October 2024, and are expecting completion of their project early next year, 2026.

I also want to take a minute to talk about building contracts. Fionna and Ed have used a cost-plus contract in their project, and I want to share upfront that we generally recommend against them in HOME Method, and we do this for a range of reasons. 

This is one of the reasons I LOVE bringing these HOME Method member stories to you on the podcast. 

Because I think there can be a perception out there that, when you join an online program like HOME Method, that there’s a ‘right’ way and a ‘wrong’ way to do your project. Once you learn the ‘right’ way, you can’t unknow it, and then if you want to do your project differently, you then can’t lean in for support or feel some sense of guilt that you’re going against the grain of the training.

And so, because you can’t unknow what you learn, people think they’ll just avoid learning it in the first place, so they can do their project how they feel they need to.

That’s not the case in HOME Method at all. 

We have members, as you’ve heard in the stories shared here on the podcast, who are taking the learning and applying it differently in their projects – and yet they’re still doing it in a fantastically informed and empowered way – and creating a great home whilst enjoying the process.

Why do I suggest cost-plus contracts are not the way to go? 

Well, it’s a big topic, but to summarise, it’s mainly because a cost-plus contract puts most of the risk onto the homeowner. The project will cost what it will cost, and you have to pay for it whether it’s more than the builder estimated initially. 

People can feel it’s a more transparent process, that they’ll then know exactly what things actually cost. 

However, if you have a builder who isn’t systemised, efficient or able to productively plan a project, or estimate their upfront costs with confidence, you’re basically hiring a person (and their company) to coordinate your project. And then you’re paying them whatever that costs to make it happen. 

Inevitably, as the builder makes their 4th trip to Bunnings that week to pick up some supplies because they didn’t plan ahead. Or you feel they’re not working fast enough, and the invoices keep rolling in and rolling in. You get frustrated, and the inefficiencies and greyness of it all feel like you’re being made a bottomless pit of money for the builder.

You’ll hear Ed say ‘there’s no such thing as a fixed price contract anymore’ in this conversation. And to a certain extent there’s some truth in that – because even in volume built projects, and especially in custom projects, there’ll be things a builder cannot, or is not willing to, fix a price on. 

It could be something like your kitchen design, because you don’t have sufficient documentation, or it could be something they’re never able to accurately predict prior to construction, and so can only estimate it at the point of contract preparation.

Fixed price contracts will list these items in provisional sums and PC items, and that gives the builder scope to charge a variation should the cost be more when it comes to that part of your project. Additionally, the variation margin is often higher than a builder’s standard margin, and there can often be an admin fee included as well. 

However, all of these things can be mitigated through pre-contract negotiations, a pre-construction process that enables a more thorough understanding of your project, and detailed documentation that scopes your project sufficiently for accurate pricing prior to the contract.

So, yes, it’s not ‘fixed’ … but it can be a heck of a lot more fixed than a cost-plus contract in my experience.

Fionna and Ed have had a successful cost-plus contract experience so far, which is so exciting to see – and I believe it’s largely due to the completeness of their documentation prior to construction that enabled their diligent, data-driven and professional builder to price their project fully and accurately, so they’re only experience a VERY small variance right now in their construction cost. 

If you need to finance your project, lenders will often reject cost-plus contracts because they see them as too risky, so that’s something to be aware of as well.

This is the transcript of my conversation with Fionna and Ed about how they managed their budget, collaborated through the design phase, and made a confident builder selection for their new build project.

Amelia Lee
So yeah, onto that point of collaboration. It sounds like it was a really lovely collaborative process for you, where you felt very involved and heard, and had a design professional who’s really receptive to your feedback, and that the research and work that you’ve done to get yourself prepared plus to really interrogate how you needed the house to perform, that there was a platform for that to be discussed and an openness for that to be embraced in how the design was coming to fruition. Was that your general feeling and experience in that?

Fionna
Yes, absolutely. And it was an enjoyable process. And one of the things that’s taken enormous stress off us is we can stay in this house till the other one’s finished. So, time’s a bit important to us, but quality was really important to us.

And we could invest the time and the patience in doing that that we were both saying, had we been in our previous full time careers, I can’t imagine.

Ed
That’s an issue that both the architect and the builder mentioned is that often their clients are working and they’ll pose a question that’s time critical, and the clients will never get back to them because they’re just busy taking kids to daycare, and what have you. The fact that we regarded this as the number one priority and had the ability to do that, we weren’t too distracted by other things.

Fionna
And reasonably decisive.

Ed
Yes, decisive and rapid.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, it definitely does help. And I think it’s that understanding that you actually have to dedicate time, attention and effort to this as a project. You actually have to park it as a thing. And I mean, we talk a lot about people saying that they don’t have enough time, and when you say I don’t have enough time, it generally means that it’s not your priority right now, because you know that you’ll make time for the things that are your priority. So you’ll manufacture time if you need to. So it’s not linear. So it’s really interesting. I think that, yes, I imagine that your lifestyle is where you’re at this point in time in your life did accommodate perhaps with a little bit more ease than if you had little children running around and both working very busy or very, very full, demanding careers and that kind of stuff.

But still, I think it’s that understanding that people need to know, if you are planning on building or renovating your house, it is going to take time, and those decisions are going to need to be made, whether you’re making them or not. And so, if you do want to be involved in those decisions, then you need to actually make space for this in your life. So now, can I talk quickly about your budget and your expectations around that? How did budget management look like during the design? You talked about the involvement of the builder.

I’m curious how, as you were working through these iterations of design, how you went about setting your budget, and then what that looks like in terms of managing it as the design started to be brought to fruition?

Ed
So I guess, in a helicopter sense, we bought the block, and the block had an associated unimproved value. And so the first question was, is the block good value? And we didn’t pay much more than the unimproved value. So that was a tick. And then a friend of ours, who was very keen on homebuilding, said, “You shouldn’t spend less than the unimproved value on your build, because otherwise you’re wasting what’s going in.” So it gave us a number, and so we put a reasonably tight number on the architect. And so she understood that money did matter. It wasn’t a carte blanche at all.

And that got her thinking in terms of, “How do I make something that’s nice and interesting and architectural but is not unnecessarily expensive?” So there are no curved walls, for instance, and things like that. The price per square metre that we were given by the builder at the start, not on our design, but he said, in general, price per square metre is x. And that’s pretty much what it’s come in at. And so, that was okay as well. The number that we signed up to in the contract was arguably quite a bit more than when we started this whole process we thought we might be spending. But it was consistent with those criteria. And at the stage, and we’re at the shooting stage, they’re about 1% over budget.

Fionna
And when we asked them at the beginning, they said they usually ran within 3%.

Amelia Lee
Isn’t that fantastic that they’re tracking that and they’re able to let you know that, and then showing in the way that they’re doing?

Ed
Yes, very, very good at tracking. We have a GANTT chart for the schedule. That’s not updated very regularly, but we know what the steps are. But every month we get the invoice. And it might be 50 pages, and that’s a very large spreadsheet of costs, cost to complete, expected completed cost on, say, 200 items. And we get all the invoices, all the time sheets, because it’s a cost plus fixed fee deal. So we get to see all their costs, and then their management fee, which is fixed for 11 months. So they run over 11 months, they’re paying their own management fee.

So the architect looked and gave us advice on the bids that we got. And there isn’t such a thing really as a fixed price building contract anymore, because the uncertainties, particularly post-Covid, are just too great. And she looked at an example from the other builder we were seriously considering, and was a bit aghast that really, while it was called fixed cost, it wasn’t fixed. There were a lot of stuff that was contingencies. And the scary part about that, in that client’s case, was that, for instance, the trusses, there was an amount for the trusses. Now, if the amount came in above that amount, the client was paying the extra amount, obviously, but they were paying the 27% builders contingency, because the pricing changed, despite the fact the scope hadn’t changed. So that was a bit of a nasty shock.

So we felt that this cost plus fixed fee was good for a couple of reasons. It’s very transparent, and our sister-in-law had been very happy with how that had worked. And the other thing is, of course, that a builder in that situation can only be stiffed by a client for one month’s payment. So we felt we were in a much safer position if the builder was being given a hard time by another client, they were only up by a month’s cash flow on one job. So the risk to us was much less.

Fionna
And by the and by the time they got a deposit, they’re actually not out. Yeah, but we really thought our biggest risk was a build going under. And so we looked for a business model that looked like they were very safe. And we just liked the certainty of their business model.

Ed
I was just laughing at your comments on podcasts about driving around seeing badly done gabled roofs.

Fionna
But, just to add, in terms of managing costs during the design phase, Wendy would, particularly, the house can as they do, as you often tell us, is bigger than we anticipated. So she kept on saying, “Now you realise there’s a cost implication here.” But in addition to the curve, she also had softer structures. So, spotted gum above all the windows versus brick and the other things to minimise construction costs. And there were a number of things she did like that in the roof design, which everybody put a lot of effort into, because we were paranoid about black mould.

Amelia Lee
Yes, tell me more about the roof design, because you’ve mentioned that a couple of times. So tell me more about that.

Ed
So it’s three flat roofs, one slopes to the east, one slopes to the south, one slopes to the north. I’m from Broken Hill, originally the Silver City. It was called the Silk City because it had corrugated iron roofs. It wasn’t because it was a silver split and sink mining town. And so we went with galvanised iron as a throwback to that, and it works well with the spotted gum and the recycled bricks. So, they’re all simple, they’re all flat. They all run into…

Fionna
Well, they’re not, they’re sloped.

Ed
Yeah, there are no angles in them. They all run into big, oversized gutters. They’re 250 mil diameter gutters that look really nice. They’re galvanised, and then big galvanised down pipes within the roof space. They put a lot of effort into figuring out, how do we make it energy efficient? How do we control the moisture? And they took themselves off to…

Fionna
Both builders and the architects went to additional training courses.

Amelia Lee
Love it. Love it.

Ed
Like ProClima with one of the local people who provides ProClima, a company called Laros. And they work with Powerhaus on this. And when they decided that they had it nailed, literally, the builder, Parry, took me up on the scaffold, to Fiona’s horror, and showed me where the insulation was, where the ProClima was, or the membrane was, where the air was flowing, where the gratings at the top and bottom were, where the counter patterns were. He was very, very happy. And on that visit, we got one of the contractors that works with Powerhaus up on a scaffold as well.

While he was doing a walk around…

Fionna
As one of our quality control points.

Ed
He was doing a walk around to look at the cladding and the membrane. And he was very happy with what was done. And he was particularly happy about the sliding doors, because sliding doors are always a potential problem unless you’ve thought them through. They’re just a direct look out if you’re careless. But he was very happy with the roof.

And his comment was, “Just going to go up the road to the builders building that $6 million house up the road and tell them…”

Fionna
The passive house designed?

Yes, “…Passive house up the road and tell them that you’ve got a much better roof here.” I think he also said that he was very happy with the thought into the design and also the quality that the builders were achieving.

And both Wendy, our architect, and Parry, our builder, said, “Having nailed that roof design, that will be their default setting now.”

Amelia Lee
So they’ve now got a library of parts. Isn’t that great? Because this is the thing. I mean, we talk about it inside HOME Method, flat roofs are challenging. They’re particularly challenging for a condensation mitigation point of view, and they do need to be detailed in a really specific way. And your designer and builder both need to know that before you commit to a particular height or a particular pitch, because getting the layers right can mean that the roof can be a lot fatter than if you are just assumed a structural profile. To be able to get that ventilation cavity, to be able to get the insulation working, figuring out where the line of the building envelope is, and where that thermal barrier is, and all of those kinds of things.

And so I absolutely love hearing that these professionals that you’re working with knew that this was going to be a thing that they had to solve and a challenge that they had to embrace, and the fact that they upskilled themselves in that way. I mean, I can imagine, as clients, you were going, “Actually, this really heartens me. This really helps us feel that we can really, what is the word, builds trust that they’ve got us.”

Fionna
And just so professional. And one of the things when Wendy first designed it too, it was fitting in the air conditioning, and I always get the initials wrong…

Ed
MHRV.

Fionna 
And I think our builder was just thinking, “Did we need that or not?” And we just decided we did.

So I think that took some complexity out for everyone too. We just…

Amelia Lee
Made the commitment early, yep?

Fionna
Made the commitment early. But designing to get all the pipes through, quite tricky.

Ed
Wendy was very concerned that the MHRV piping could go through the ceiling space of the two links. She worried a lot about that.

Fionna
Yes, so that and the other, I guess, emerging thing in terms of the new building standards, was we wanted absolutely flat thresholds, and we wanted a well-sealed house. So, there was a lot of flurry around balancing water management, termites and that. But we wanted Raven seals on the doors, and none of the door people, at that point, other than one Wendy had found knew how to do that design. Was it flat because they always wanted that little lip, like it was a window. And then Parry, our builder, figured out the detail on that design. And then within the two months between the windows being ordered and us signing, he went and talked to his favourite supplier, and they all worked out. They now have to figure out how to do that because of the new building standards.

Amelia Lee
So he’s upskilling the supplier as well.

Fionna
Yes, and the main thing he wanted was the Raven seal to drop down versus pop up, because he just thought that was lower risk. But him having that conversation took our window price down by $30,000.

Amelia Lee
Oh, wow.

Fionna
Because he got a local supplier that he was very happy with and he got them to sketch up what they do, and then compared it to the other quotes we’ve got, and it was exactly the same solution.

Amelia Lee
Gosh, oh, literally, just so many green flags with these professionals. And I think what’s really interesting is, I know working with builders and also speaking to architects and designers, there can be a fear that if they can’t sit with you and go, “Yeah, I know how to do that”, that you will see a hole in their professionalism or their abilities. And it’s such the opposite end. The fact that they were like, “No, we don’t know about this yet, but we’re going to go and learn about it and where we understand that the industry changes and learns all the time as well, and then we’re going to take other people on the journey with us, because the project here is the ultimate goal, getting the best outcome for this project.” To me, I can see how that has just really shaped your relationship with them, and had instilled a lot of confidence in their abilities.

You’ve not looked at and gone, “Well, why don’t you know this?” You’ve looked at it and gone, “Oh, this is awesome. They’re learning, they’re improving themselves. And they’re bringing other people along on the journey with them.” And I also thought it was really interesting that you pointed out the budget management. I do find that designers who’ve had a background in commercial, often, which can have very different budget metrics to a residential project, and often, anything has to be really value-managed from a design point of view. So decisions like let’s not put heavy weight over the openings, let’s make sure that that’s lightweight, and some really rational economic decisions that are just really commonplace in commercial projects, but don’t necessarily filter into residential. It’s great that Wendy was able to bring that cross-disciplinary experience into your project to really maximise the potential of your budget overall in terms of the design outcomes.

Fionna
And we’re very happy with how it looks. So, no, that was good. And just to emphasise, well, not Wendy, but our builders are very experienced. They’ve been in business for 20 years, and they’ve got a wealth of experience. They’ve brought but you just often hear the phrase, “Well, I always like to learn something else.” So we didn’t feel we were in any way in inexperienced hands, because they were always keeping themselves up-to-date, and, I guess, treated professional development in the way you would expect any other profession to do. We’ve all got our 20 hours a year that we have to do extra and those sorts of things. And that was quite a delight.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, really heartening.

Ed
Builders involved in education for apprentices, and builders with the professional body, MBA, or whichever he is involved. So, there’s that running through the whole thing.

Fionna
Yeah, fantastic.

Professionalism.

Amelia Lee
Yeah. Next time when you come back, I really want to dive into the construction part of it, and working with the builder. But can you just tell me, for the purpose of this conversation, when did the builder get involved in the project? 

What was the timeline that you actually committed to that builder?

Fionna 
So, we started a conversation with them when we, in fact, almost before we bought the block, I think, but with two builders. And then, when we got to development approval, we had another formal round of conversations. But because Sonder had an existing relationship with them, there were a few bits and pieces they checked in with them on. Then we gave it to the three development approval, I think we gave it to the three potential builders. And in each case, we had a meeting with them to walk them through the plans.

And then we had a meeting with them for feedback and their costing so we could get some design input at that point. And then, as we were getting close to building approval, we had another round of detailed meetings with two of them, and the people who were trying to do the in-house design and build got knocked out at that stage because they kept on wanting us to overcommit to them to even finalise pricing. And we just said, “Well we’ll just see how the other two go then.” So, it then came down to two, and we honestly would have loved to have hired both of them at one level, but when we got to references, Pichelmann just walked on water in terms of their clients.

Amelia Lee
You can see why, hey?

Fionna
People had done multiple builds with them. They just had a wealth of people. And the other builder had good references, but one of them was all, “Absolutely lovely, but I’m not quite sure where my budget’s up to”, that kind of thing. And they were, however, mainly because of the project management fee, 20% more than the other builder. But when we looked at fixed prices, and really fixed price and the cost of builders margins if we found something we wanted to iterate in, I was thinking the bit when the builder comes in is detailed design. This is conceptual design. We just thought, “We think they’re worth that.” So, that’s the way we went. And we have found, for example, we have done some upgrades. Notably, I didn’t listen to Ed carefully enough on how much he hates engineered floors. We had contingency money set aside, so we upgraded when that wasn’t needed at the beginning.

Ed
And the reason for that is that, because we had such good project cost visibility, and they were well within margin, we got to a point where the frame was up, so a lot of the risks like excavation and so on, risks have gone. So we figured, you’re on budget at the moment, the likelihood of you going well off budget is not great. Therefore we know we can afford to think about upgrades within that contingency. And so at one point, I sat him down and said, “Parry, I’m thinking about hardwood floors.” And there was this look of such relief and gratitude. “Oh, thank God.” So he didn’t want to do engineered floors, but he hadn’t complained about it. Good example is he didn’t like the oversized guttering that Wendy had proposed.

And Parry’s originally a plumber, but he didn’t complain. He put it up. And then he said, “Oh, Wendy, you’re so right. That’s just the right size.”

Amelia Lee
Yeah, I can imagine, proportionally, it would look fantastic, particularly with the three pavilions. And particularly, also, you said the galvanised down pipes, like, this lovely expression of how this house deals with water is really beautiful.

Fionna
Yes. And in fact, when we negotiated with all the neighbours about the fence, we said, “Oh, we’ll take the side with the steel pipes exposed.” Which actually contributed to the home, but they all thought we were being really nice giving them the pretty side of the bed.

Amelia Lee
You’re like, “No, this works with our palette.”

Fionna
And we’ve found so far that they’ve been swings and roundabouts because most of the suppliers have stuck pretty closely to their original bid. But we’ve had things like the windows really go in our favour, and we went from veneer to solid core doors. And Eugene, who’s the other one of the other owners in the company, had overestimated the door costs, so that came in within budget that upgrades. But we just, in the end, decided it was worth paying for the quality. And Wendy, who helped us evaluate them, kept on saying the whole way through the process, she said, “Look, choose a builder that really cares about their reputation.”

Amelia Lee
That’s what Undercover Architect is known as.

That’s good advice.

Fionna
And I think, in terms of HOME Method, oh, we did use your builders checklist all the way through too. And oddly enough, the only person that had heard of you was the X volume builder, because we walked in and we said, “Oh, we’ve got this checklist with us.” And he said, “Oh, yeah, don’t put the sink in the island bench.”

So that was quite funny. But it was really that criterion of, are we going to trust them? Because I suspect our costs would have landed roughly in the same ballpark by the end anyway.

Ed
And fixed price contractors, if the builder’s running into any problems, his first approach is to cut a corner somewhere in material or time or quality. Whereas on a cost plus contract, it’s a shared problem. And you get to decide how to address that problem.

Fionna
And they were very clear on they would work as close to budget as possible. Their fee’s fixed for a certain period of time. But they said, “But the time it takes to do the quality job will be the time it takes to do the quality job. We’ve got an incentive to be efficient, but we’re not going to take less time than we need.”

Amelia Lee
Gotcha.

Fionna
It’s reassuring to us because we’re lucky enough to be able to stay here till we’re ready.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, well, when you’re back next time, I’d love to dive more into that whole contract, because it sounds like you’ve had an unusually good experience of a cost plus contract. And in my experience, they go pear-shaped more often than they don’t. And so, yeah, I look forward to unpacking that more, because I think that there’s some secrets in how you’ve navigated that that we can unpack to set up success in that cost plus contract, not only in how the builder selection worked and the builder’s performance, but also in how you worked through preparing for your contract and your construction phase as well. So yeah, I look forward to diving into that more detail.

Because I think there’s still people who really believe that the cost plus contract is the way to go, and for all the reasons that you outline. However, for most people, it doesn’t go well, and it ends up being a bit above a bottomless pit of just having to pay whatever it’s going to cost.

Fionna
We’ve had friends who’ve had that experience for sure, so yeah, interested to talk about that. And I’ve done a lot of big projects in IT areas, and the motto there is, they always make money on the change requests.

Amelia Lee
Now, before we wrap up, I’d just love to know, you spoke right at the beginning about the reason that you joined HOME Method was that you said, “I didn’t think that there’d be more behind the paywall after listening to the podcast, and then there was more behind the paywall.” And I know that that’s the experience a lot of people think about the podcast, because the podcast does go very comprehensive, very generous information, and it’s always been my commitment to be generous with it, because this is, for me, just far too important, people navigating this blindly and not having good quality information.

But I do love that people, for all sorts of reasons, make the decision to dive into HOME Method, and we can work more closely together there. How has that, being part of HOME Method and that education process and the preparation, you feel helped you with your project in terms of decision-making and identifying cost savings and time savings and those kinds of things?

Fionna
Look, I think, we certainly used all the checklists. And I consistently always listened to the podcast and Ed not as much. So we could go through the videos when we needed together, and just some of it written down in a different way, that there’s just a wealth of detail there that helps you navigate it. And, I think, also having access to you is just that safety blanket, just there’s another opinion. And, I think, what it did, at the heart of things is prepare us to be good clients. And I think that’s that’s three quarters of the battle and and things like Wendy, when she did her quote, gave us a list of ‘and here’s the other professionals you’ll need as consultants’. And I was ready for that conversation because I’d read the Undercover Architect material, and thought, “Oh yes, that’s right.” She talks about assembling your team a lot. And she was just saying, “And this is the team you’ll need for this stage.” And just to check things like what we went through. What did we go through the other day?

Because there’s something where we’re just a bit uncertain, and we just dove back into maybe it was interior design. It was something. There’s something we thought, “Oh, we’re just going to be prepared for that conversation. We could just go and look up all that content in one place and find it.” It’s been a absolutely worthwhile resource. And as I said, we made the decision because I thought, “Well, Amelia can’t not get paid in all of this contribution.” And then there was, “Oh, this is really good.”

Amelia Lee
I’m glad that it was because I’m not a charity.

It’s very kind that you were thinking about that as an exchange of value. So I’m glad that HOME Method has delivered beyond that for you.

Fionna
Oh, it was, it absolutely was.

Ed
A resource we used was a book called Nail It! by Adam Hobill.

Amelia Lee
Ah, yes, yeah, I’m familiar with that book, yeah.

Ed
So he’s a local, and he’d been involved with the house our friends had built on the other side of the circuit. But he also was the building designer for the house next to us, which was the other half of the duplex. So, yeah, Canberra is a small town.

Amelia Lee
Yes, it is, isn’t it?

Fionna
We, pretty well, had every architect in Canberra have a go at it, because it’s been redeveloped because big blocks with poorly designed houses on it. And we did, I don’t know if we said, reused all the bricks from the knock down rebuild.

Amelia Lee
Actually, tell me a little bit about that.

So the small house that was on it was a built in the 1940s, and it was painted white on the outside, but it had Canberra reds. So because it was double brick, they went quite a long way. And we did supplement them with other Canberra reds, but they look really lovely. And there was that whole nerve-wracking moment of we decided to recycle bricks, and I thought, “I really hope I like them.” I see them without all the paint on them, but supplying our own bricks, it cost us $1 a brick, and it would have cost us $3 a brick to buy them.

Fionna
That was really nice. And we’ve actually got a couple of features on the house, where they turn the stamp round so you can see the manufacturing, and they look really lovely with the spotted pine. So we’re very spotted gum. Spotted gum. We’re very pleased with how that turned out.

Amelia Lee
So glad.

Wow, that’s fantastic.

Ed
Terracotta tiles on the house have been recycled or gone back into the Canberra building industry, because…

Fionna
They’re hard to find.

Ed
And then yeah, the roof timbers, which are good hardwood from the 40s, have gone off to Thor’s Hammer, which is a local bespoke joinery.

Fionna
And the tree we got rid of and the fruit trees have all gone to the Canberra Woodworking Guild.

Amelia Lee
What amazing contribution that’s all made, that’s fantastic.

Fionna
That was really nice. And something we didn’t say about the design brief at the very beginning was we wanted the house to look a bit like it had always been there, and sort of have a Burley Griffin vibe. And so that’s being able to reuse the bricks and everything else has helped with that.

Ed
We certainly don’t like the way you can drive around suburbs and say, “Yes, that’s a 1998 design, that’s a 2016 design, that’s a 2022 design.” There’s just such a trend in design that you can track. We didn’t want that, and I think Wendy’s done a pretty good job of making it, as Fiona says, more timeless and sympathetic with the environment. Touch wood.

Amelia Lee
Yeah. It’s just so lovely to chat to you and hear how you’ve approached this whole project, and the way that so many different elements of your goals have threaded through how this house is turning out, both functionally, aesthetically, pragmatically.

It’s a joy to hear how it’s been for you as an experience, and I can’t wait to see it all finished, and also for to get you back to chat more about the construction. Did you have anything else to add before we wrap up?

Fionna
I don’t think so, other than your podcast and the HOME Method has just been so helpful in terms of us formulating our thoughts and knowing what to expect, and, I guess, even in terms of setting a reasonable budget and all those sorts of things. It’s really made an incredible difference to the certainty we’ve had in this whole project.

Amelia Lee
I’m so glad to hear and thank you so much for that feedback, and now you get to be one of the voices providing help to other people on the podcast as well. So it’s so generous of you to be here. And yeah, thank you so much for sharing this part of your journey, and I’m really looking forward to getting you back and talking more about construction and how that’s been for you, because I know that that will be super helpful for others. But thanks so much, Fionna and Ed, for your time. It’s been really great to have you here.

Fionna
Pleasure.

RESOURCES

Episode 283 ‘Lifting the Lid on Builders’ Margins’ >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-builders-margin/ 

How to Choose the Right Builder | 3 things to know >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-how-to-choose-the-right-builder/ 

Episode 245 ‘Is the “Get it Right with Undercover Architect” Podcast Enough for Your Project?’ >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-get-it-right-with-undercover-architect-is-it-enough/ 

Access the support and guidance you need (like Fionna and Ed did) to be confident and empowered when renovating and building your family home inside my flagship online program, HOME METHOD >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/courses/the-home-method/

Learn more about how to interview and select the right builder with the Choose Your Builder mini-course >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/courses/choose-your-builder 

My free ’44 Ways’ E-Book will simplify sustainability for you, and help you create a healthy, low tox and sustainable home – whatever your dreams, your location or your budget. Access your copy here >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/ways