The frame of the house is made up of treated pine and kiln dried hardwood. All of
these are farmed rather than cut from some Brazilian rainforest. As some span are
longer than 3 meters, steel beams were used in lieu of hardwood.
The external frames are 450 mm apart and the internal frames are 600 mm apart. Australian Standards requires that frame spacing to be at most 600 mm for both external and internal frames.
This structure was started on the 7th of June 1996. The weather on the up
coming week had been wet and cold. We were so excited that we go for a 20 minute drive
each night to visit the construction site after dinner. At one point, we arrived there
at 9:00 o'clock on a rainy night. We parked the car and trained the headlights
to the front of the house and watched it from inside the car as you would
in a drive-in movie. It is a small house, we thought ... but it is ours.