It’s true of Owner Building, like so many things in life, that you may want to build your house quick, build it cheap, and build it good, but, well, you’re probably going to have to pick two out of the three. Neil Gallegos, from Quindanning in the wheatbelt of Western Australia, is definitely building it good, and he’s getting great value for money, but he would be the first to admit, he’s not building it quick.
And then embarrassingly, for my own part, it’s nearly two whole years since I actually interviewed Neil, and I’m just now getting around to publishing this. We Owner Builders may get stuff done, but we don’ t necessarily get it done at speed. What can I say. I intended to edit and publish a video interview, but time has shown that frankly I’m just never going to get around to that, so here we are in a written form instead. I imagine that Neil’s project has moved on a whole bunch in the meantime. But, still I don’t think he’s actually finished…
The engineering approach
Neil is an engineer, and you can tell. His house is not messing about. It is built, not like a brick shithouse, but like a concrete one. And it’s not small. His build site is in a commanding position at the top of a hill, with panoramic views over his gorgeous 190 aces of rolling bushland, and beyond. And even in this setting, it’s impressive. He tells me it has 400-500sqm (4,300-5,400sqft) of living space. The roof soars. Serious steel beams hold everything up, and each of them meets with a precision and neatness which is a joy to behold.
When (uninformed) people tell me that Owner Builders are just a bunch of cheapskates who build crappy houses because they have no idea what they’re doing, I think of Neil (and, to a lesser extent, nearly every other owner builder I’ve ever met), and I am both laughing and swearing on the inside.
Building a rock solid house
His walls use ICFs (insulated concrete formwork). Think big hollow polystyrene blocks, stacked together, steel reo popped in, then the whole thing filled up from the top with concrete to create a rock-solid, monolithic, highly insulated, draught-free structure. Darren Reidy from Ecoblock did the walls for him, he’s a lovely guy and it’s a very tidy job.
The windows are some very beautiful thermally-broken aluminium Aluprof double glazing, Neil’s “one extravagance”. It looks like his family are going to be pretty cosy in there, no matter what the weather throws at them. It was a windy day when I visited, and as we talked we could happily have heard a pin drop. It felt a bit like we were in a library, where it was a bit rude to be talking out loud, although I imagine it will have a different feel after his kids move in.
“I like building things, and I think building a house is the ultimate challenge,” is how Neil describes his motivation. “I’m very focused on structural strength and longevity and robustness. You get what you pay for. This house should still be here in a hundred years. The high thermal mass also makes it very thermally efficient.”
Taking his time
Like a lot of Owner Builders, Neil is building his family’s dream home, and it’s taking a while. When I met him, he’d been working on it for six years. And that’s six years since he got the building permit, another four years before that since the germ of the idea. He already had a small house elsewhere on his block, providing a roof over his family’s heads for now. Four pre-teen kids were still crammed into a single bedroom, and he pointed out that this is how we would all have lived traditionally, that’s something that has changed quite recently, and it’s made his kids closer, it’s forged some closer connections. “When we move in here, they might find it scary not to sleep all together in the same room.”
He’s now building their forever home in his spare time, in the available gaps from both his full time day job, and “a lot of other hobbies and distractions, much to the chagrin of my wife,” he laughs. “But not having time pressure has made it quite relaxing. I’ve enjoyed the process to this point, I’m lucky I guess in that respect. No targets. It’ll be finished when it’s finished. I know they say that once you’re at lockup you’re halfway there, although I hope not, the running joke is that by the time it’s finished the kids will have left home.”
Following his dream
And why is he building himself, rather than just paying a builder? “Well, I wanted something quite different. Realistically you can’t find too many builders who are prepared to go too far from what they know. And I guess it’s expensive too, a lot of builds are are set around a predetermined way of doing things, that is uniform all the time, and that’s not what I wanted. You can pay a premium or you can take control of the build yourself. It’s the biggest purchase of your life and I’d like to get something that I really like. I’m bending this house to my will and doing it a bit more industrially.” He describes how in some ways it’s more like the processing plants he builds in his day job than a domestic dwelling. In my recording of our interview, I go off on a rhapsody here about how beautiful it is though too, it’s like a cathedral, which it really is.
And he’s putting in the hard graft to get there, here’s the concrete suspended slab that he’s ground and sealed himself:
The winters down here, a couple of hours south of Perth, and high up on this hill, will be on the chilly side, so to distribute the heat from his wood-fired boiler, he’s built some lovely hydronic heating into his floor slabs, which sounds extremely fabulous to me.
Resilient design
Although in other seasons bushfire is definitely a risk in this setting, but when I ask Neil what BAL zone he’s in, he tells me he got his building permit just before that became a thing. He thinks probably his site’s rating would be Fire Zone, or something close, and he has built to some of those requirements. He’s a local volunteer firefighter, and has a good sense of how to defend his property if push comes to shove, including ensuring water supplies for emergency situations. The back of the house is built into the slope, and there’s a pantry back there which is also designed to serve a dual purpose as a fire refuge.
Water runoff down the hill, including during heavy rain, was also a design factor, and the back wall of the house there, retaining part of the slope, as well as a waterproofing membrane, has a dimpled plastic drainage mat, ag pipes, and a gravel backfill, to direct water flows around the building, with the land also reshaped to form a kind of levee.
Designing out termites can require some careful detailing for ICFs when they are used below grade – they’re not edible to termites, but termites can travel through the polystyrene as a highway to other food sources such as roof timbers, but Neil’s approach has been to pretty much design out timber. He will use some local hardwoods, but he tells me that is bordering on the hardness of steel. “White Gum is naturally termite resistant and I’m using that for the stair treads and the front door. The trees blew down on our property a while back, and I got them sawn. They’ve been in a shed drying for a few years now.”
His block is off the grid for water supply, so they’re already on the case with harvesting rainwater for their water needs. And I ask him about waste management and trying to minimise waste and landfill, and he laughs the laugh of an Owner Builder and tells me has “sheds full of treasure! Treasure! That I’ll one day use”. Excess waste is not on the cards.
Costs and benefits
When I ask Neil how he thinks it’s all going to turn out cost wise, he says certainly more expensive than if he’d built it himself using traditional construction, but certainly cheaper than if he’d got a builder to build it. As long as you don’t put a cash price on your own time, that is, he chips in. He hasn’t made cheap choices of materials, and things like getting the concrete pump out to his country block to fill the ICF walls was more expensive than an urban build. But, overall, he feels headed for a much better result than he would have achieved by paying someone else to do the job. “Plus there’s a lot of satisfaction from doing it myself. At the end of it, I’ll be able to point and say, I did that, and I did that, and I was responsible for the whole thing.
I ask for any tips on obtaining low cost materials, and he tells me that it helps to be flexible about timing. If you’re able to wait around and pick up second hand materials, on Gumtree or on Facebook. “Collect the bits.” How much will you spend in total do you think, I ask, and he laughs. “I have no idea,” he says, “I’ve lost count. It’s not about the cost, as long as you’re not bankrupt, and happy with the end result, then I think it’s worth it. I think in the beginning we were talking about A$450K.” (About US$300K.) But then he reflects on the mission creep of his high spec windows, and how it’s likely gone up. “Everything always costs more than you expect it to. Where we might need to compromise is on the finishes, I’ve been quite fixated on the quality of the structure, a really solid structure is something that appeals to me. We might end up using bricks and wooden planks for furniture at the end of the day.”
It occurs to me that in some ways Neil’s setup, with tons of space for storage, and a feasible little house to live in the meantime, giving him all the time in the world to plod gently forward, earning money in his day job all the while, is pretty much the Owner Builder dream. But of course, his timescale really is huge. To keep on keeping on, for that period of time, takes stick-at-it-ness. Stamina. Motivation. Grit.
The surprises?
And when I ask him what has surprised him along the way, he laughs, and says, just how long everything takes. Writing this now, I take some heart myself, from how long my own Owner Builder journey is already dragging on, and I haven’t even started physically building anything yet. But yes, I talk to some people who are just starting to draw up plans, and telling me they’ll be done in twelve months, and I try not to be a wet blanket when I gently say that every owner build I’ve seen has been a project spread over years rather than months.
“You learn a lot of things through the process that you didn’t understand earlier,” he says. When I ask him if there’s anything, looking back, that he would have done differently, and he says that mainly he’d go back and tell himself not to get so distracted. “I’d probably be finished now if I hadn’t let myself get distracted with so many side projects.”
We wrap up with a tour, and me asking another hundred odd questions, and a chat outside about the ideal colour for the acrylic render he’s going to finish it with. “It’s a niche interest, isn’t it,” he says, “a lot of people don’t understand it at all. Why would you build your own house when there are plenty of perfectly good houses out there that you can get a builder to do for you in the space of a few months?”
I drive away just so impressed and inspired by the quality and thoughtfulness and visible lack of stress in Neil’s build. As I go I see him walk purposefully towards his nearby collection of sheds, and large items of machinery, with the look of a man both in his element, and on a mission.
Ready for your turn in the spolight?
I’m always keen to learn more from other Owner Builders! I’ve met maybe a dozen of us so far, and visited their building sites, and learned so much. This blog is partly all about paying it forwards. If you’re Owner Building, or you’re doing something else interesting to build a building a better than standard house, and you’d like to feature here and share some of what you know, just get in touch.