Our Build

Diary

Nailing Our Design

Posted by Ben

It’s both exciting and incredibly daunting designing your own home. Exciting in the fact you can create a space that’s tailored exactly to your tastes and lifestyle. But daunting because you could completely balls it up, left to live with your mistakes staring back at you on a daily basis.

We spent weeks fine tuning our design, eventually arriving at a solution we absolutely love. It’s a modest 165sqm (plus 80sqm of deck), made up of three bedrooms, two bathrooms with a large open plan kitchen, living and dining area. Then there’s the cherry on top – Kylie’s genius idea of a roof top deck, enabling us to maximise our outdoor living sunshine hours.

Thinking ahead we have future proofed the bedroom side so it is capable of holding a second story down the track when we have the funds we’d need to eventually create a 250sqm home.

On the exterior we’re going to clad the house in architectural cedar and incorporate as much full height glass as possible, including our bridge connecting the two sides of the house together. While we’ve incorporated large cantilevered sections to design away the stereotypical ‘pole house’ look as much as possible because we need to build our home on stilts to keep it above any theoretical flood events.

Armed with the scale drawings we had completed of the house, I asked an architect friend to create some elevations for me, which I then took to visualisation company DeeDee Studio to produce a 3D model of our design.

Wow. It was incredible to see the ideas that had been spinning around our heads for so long come to life and look even better than we had envisaged. The only problem is we just want to move in right now!

Getting Some Inspiration

Posted by Ben

Like we often do, we went for a bit of a twilight stroll around the bays tonight. We find it’s a great source of inspiration for materials and ideas. Although Kylie’s starting to think maybe we should have bought a beach front section instead. Of course she’s dreaming unless she’s won lotto and hasn’t told me!

Building round a giant pohutukawa. How’s that for an idea?

Ooooooh. Glass. Kylie thinks floor to ceiling windows are the way to go.

Measuring Up The Site

Posted by Kylie

We had yet another visit to the section. We just can’t get enough!! Ben’s creative little or should I say BIG brain has come up with a pretty crazy idea of building over the stream with 2 house pods and a bridge. I myself am struggling to visualise what this will actually look like and if it will actually fit on the site.

Therefore we had a wee trip to good old Bunnings to get some sticks and string to try map it out on the section. It was quite fun measuring out the design on the section but it wasn’t an easy task trying to make the string stay in straight lines due to it getting tangled in all the bush and shrubs. May have fell in the stream a couple of times while trying to do this too. Hmmm feeling like I am a bit out of comfort zone but it sure was exciting to see that the design could actually fit!!

Trying to get my head around the design.

Ben in the thick of it.

Soooooo hope we can build it!!!!

Coming Up With Some Designs

Posted by Ben

Standing on the section for the first time I had the idea that we could build a house either side of the stream then connect it together with a glass bridge spanning the waterway. We really liked the concept of working with the section to maximise its natural assets instead of working against them to create a unique home. So making the stream a central feature really appealed.

I mean it’s not everyday you find a section in the middle of Auckland that has a stream running through the middle of it while being surrounded by mature native bush full of tuis, wood pigeons and bellbirds. It’s so incredibly unique. Apparently prospective purchasers in the past had been trying to cover the stream over and clear a lot of the trees. It seemed absurd to both Kylie and I. And a wasted opportunity.

Ideas quickly flowed out and onto the pages of my notebook while we sat at the beach trying to figure out if we could build something quite different to what other people had been considering. Within about an hour we had a pretty decent plan on paper. We had the kitchen, dining and living areas on the sunniest side of the stream, opening out towards the water and bush beyond, while slipping three bedrooms and two bathrooms below the bush canopy on the opposite side. But we still had no idea if you’d be allowed to build across a stream.

Here are some of the first sketches we did of a possible house.

From Bush To Beach

Posted by Ben

Stunning Milford Beach and its marina is literally a couple of hundred metres from the section. Choice eh.