05/04/2021
GENERAL BUILDING TIPS
1. We have discussed before that, if you are building your house, the back of your plot is the most valuable real estate. A lounge at the front just has reduced design opportunities and most often than not, owing to small urban lot sizes, will have a majority of design permutations to have the kitchen at the back. A kitchen at the back is the beginning of all vices. That’s when you will get tempted to store old broken furniture, bikes used by your kids 15 years ago and who are already in university will be piled up to an untidy heap. That’s where the smelly dog house will be etc. For this unique challenge, a ‘back yard’ is ‘forced’ in this design, in form of a courtyard that will be meticulously landscaped. There is no direct entrance from the front of the lounge and one will access from the main lobby or the side collapsible/folding door.
2. Interior space is made spectacular by use of large massive windows.
-Lounge has three walls with windows. The ‘back’ opens into a beautiful courtyard.
-The dining and kitchen have lighting from two walls. You can have cheap finishes, but the feel of these spaces will be better than most high end houses in the leafy suburbs.
-A 100% glass ‘corridor’ gives views to both courtyards as one cascades from the higher lobby level to the lower bedrooms level. Transcendence. A sight to behold. A brilliant experience every day as you navigate your own house.
-All windows start at 300mm above floor level. Only kitchen, pantry, laundry and bathrooms start at 1100mm.
3. Create a raised lobby to serve two purposes.
-one, to create a play of levels hence achieve the ‘sunken’ lounge. Remember, if you have a sunken lounge that one has to go back up some stairs to get back on the ground surface, then the effect is not as thumping.
-two, this acts as visual ‘barrier’ between the lounge and the open plan kitchen.
4. The corridor is wide to allow for a gypsum feature with lit niches that just take off that feeling of a corridor.
5. Two bedrooms enjoy the courtyard.
6. Make the roof, as ‘boring’ and simple as possible. Easy to build, no leaks, looks better.
7. Have a good external masonry finish. In this case, yellow smooth zero jointed stone, punctuated with some cobblestone splashes that will be locally sourced. Good neat stone coated roofing tiles. No exposed beams and columns, all to be cladded in slates of the same yellow stone. Just exquisite.
8. From 300 square meters, this is only 230 sqm. Whereas walling cost ranges from 1600-4000 per square meter, windows of good quality will range between 7,500-30,000 per square meter. As we have discussed before, size of a room is not in it’s dimensions alone. Consider smaller rooms and larger windows so as to neutralize the costs and have a dream construction project.
9. Remember, in construction, there’s really no such thing as ‘cost saving’. When we are ‘cost saving’ we are either:
-Losing cash in opportunity cost.(‘I know where I can get cement cheap’…If you can get it cheap, get it and sell at a profit. That ‘lost’ profit you have foregone so as to use in your mjengo is money you have lost and must be included in your budget)
-Lowering/changing specification
-Reducing the quality of materials and labour.
-Making the construction project smaller.
-Taking shortcuts (The most common)
