Australian Passive Solar Home

I’ve been asked about owner building a home in Australia. It’s a process that we’ve nearly finished so I feel I can speak with some insight. What is the process, and the advantages and disadvantages?

First the process. Owner building can involve the owner doing nearly all the work themselves, or at the other end of the scale, subcontracting all the work out to trades. Or doing something in between. In all cases, the owner is the legal builder.

The two main advantages of owner building are cost and control.

Cost is the big one: depending on how it is done, the savings can be huge. In our case, I have done all the painting, the steel work for the outside deck, the insulation, the wiring (under the legal supervision of an electrician), the ceiling ventilation hatches, security system, heat transfer duct, the whole-of-house sound system and so on. Trades have been employed for all the major building work – e.g. constructing the walls and roof, doing the concrete, the plumbing, electrical connections, plasterboard, etc. I estimate we’ve saved something in the order of 40 per cent over having a commercial builder do the whole job.

By control I mean that when you’re on-site all day, every day, you have a lot of control over how the house is built. In our case it wasn’t so much pulling-up trades doing the wrong thing but instead answering numerous questions about how, exactly, we wanted stuff done. On some days there would be a dozen questions – so many choices! But compared to if it had been built by a commercial builder, in numerous details the house is far more how we want it.

The main disadvantages of owner building are time and, yes, also control!

Very few owner-built homes are completed under a year, and our house will take two years – perhaps a bit more. If you were taking time away from work to owner-build, that would obviously cost a lot. I work as a writer, and that can be fitted around whatever commitments the new house requires.

The other disadvantage is there are so many things over which you have no control. Delays in materials, rain delays, delays in trades – and so on. If you were to set a deadline for each stage, you’d go mad. Our tiler took 5 months to do the bathrooms; I looked at swapping to another person mid-job but the alternative tiler couldn’t start for months so I stuck with the original person. Part way through the job, the carpenters requested large scaffolds at each end of the house; delays meant that these were needed for four times as long as expected… basically quadrupling their hire cost. A key part of owner-building is to philosophically roll with it.

Owner-building has been an extraordinary, life-changing experience. The tradespeople have nearly all been brilliant, and I have learned a massive amount by watching their every move (I worked as a labourer for all the trades).

Worth doing? – absolutely.