Nanette McCallum’s new water and energy efficient home was built by a keen group of carpentry students and delivered on the back of a truck. It’s also one of the first built to stringent new bushfire regulations. She explains how it was done.
This is the tale of ‘Frog Hollow’, my relocatable holiday home built by carpentry students from Holmesglen TAFE in Melbourne. The house is one of the first built to the highest level of the new Victorian bushfire construction regulations developed after the tragic Black Saturday bushfires last year. Under the BAL-FZ rating, all external surfaces must provide 60 minutes protection during a bushfire. A number of sustainable features have been incorporated including toughened glass double glazed windows, a grid-connected solar PV system, heat pump hot water system, bamboo floor, a large bladder water tank and under-floor insulation.
Holmesglen carpentry students have built transportable homes, cabins, club houses, granny flats and other small buildings for customers mainly in country areas around Melbourne for years. Students from other disciplines undertake plastering and tiling work. Professional trades people perform the electrical, plumbing, painting and kitchen installation, which for this house were completed prior to transportation.
I discovered these student-built houses more than 10 years ago when I attended a short course in woodwork at Holmesglen. The instructor gave a tour around the school and took the class through a very impressive sports clubhouse and small home that were being built at the time. When the opportunity arose in May last year to buy a small block of land, I rang Holmesglen first to ensure they could build me a house.
My block is in the coastal hamlet of Sandy Point near Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria, where I love to go windsurfing on the adjacent Shallow Inlet. Timing was tight. The house needed to be built by the end of the 2009 school year as it was anticipated students would be busy rebuilding homes to replace some of those lost in the Black Saturday bushfires. Yet at the time the Victorian bushfire building regulations were being redeveloped and in a state of flux. Bob Collins, a local Fish Creek draftsman, spent many hours along with Peter McMahon, Training Manager in the School of Carpentry and project manager on this build, trying to understand the new regulations in order to complete the plans to the required specifications.
Read the full article in ReNew 111
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 at 1:21 pm