home renovation

Complete renovation of my own home

Back in 2021 I bought my first home to live in.

The fundamentals of space light and air were much better than most new apartments in Sydney that are too stingy to even give you a bathroom window. Its nice and sunny and keeps within a good temperature range year round without much need for airconditioning unless its peak season. But the interior finishes were 50 years old and in bad shape. This would put some people off, but not me. I saw it as an opportunity to not only make the kind of design decisions you only get to when you are the client, but also learn how to build.

I reckon DIY saved me at least 40% in estimated building costs. For anyone considering doing this, pick your battles. We have limited time, and each part of the process takes a different risk calculus. For example, you can buy a tin of paint and some brushes and rollers and train someone up to do a half decent job in a couple of hours. But to drill into a wall and rearrange pipes to move a shower safely and correctly requires a qualified plumber who knows what they are doing. But that doesn't mean you cant watch them work, and learn far more about what the various trades do than you ever will working in an architeture office. 

When it comes to buying materials and tools, there is no getting around the cost. I also had volunteer labour from my wife, brothers and other friends and family. Most of all, my Dad was able to teach me skills, lend me a lot of tools and between us we were able to work out how to do things. Although he spent most of his professional life doing boring accounting jobs, other tradies have described him as the best self taught amateur they ever met. I owe more of who I am to him than any other mentor. 

It took me most of 2022, every weekend doing something, and even building on my lunch breaks while I worked at Autonomation full time. This included:

• Design development
• Procurement of materials, tools, fixings and other products
• Project Management
• Demolition
• Site management
• Painting of walls
• Painting of ceiling
• Kitchen joinery
• Bathroom and Laundry Joinery
• Kitchen bench
• Installation of cabinets
• Coordination with trades for installation of electrical and plumbing fixings
• Floorboards
• Skirting boards
• Doors
• Balcony planter structure

What I didnt do was:

• Install ceilings
• electrics
• plumbing
• waterproofing
• tiling

The old kitchen was way too small to store everything and it would literally crumble into dust on touch. I needed to be efficient with the design to milk every last millimeter. I also couldn’t use any off the shelf units, because I didn’t have 600mm of depth to work with. I took a look at some publicly available casework families, but quickly concluded that Revit wasn’t going to give me the level of precision and flexibility I would need to follow through all the way to construction. So I modelled everything up in Rhino where I had full control, storing each module as a Block with a letter for its name. The next challenge was how to translate that into physical objects. So I built a grasshopper component for taking the pieces and panelizing them as blocks, inheriting the letter and adding a number. This way I could lay out the pieces on a sheet, and send that to a factory with a CNC machine to cut them.

They arrived on the back of a truck. I had to sort the pieces, assemble them and install them. I also built the bench out of upcylced jarrah, so no poor tradie had to develop lung problems from cutting fake stone. Its actually a great option, and all you need to do is periodically sand it back and oil it up to maintain it.

The grasshopper script used to make it has now been developed into proper components, and combined with other components built since to become the first version of the BlackKite DfMA plugin. Coming soon, watch this space.