Building the Granny Flat Part 1

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Part 1 of the adventure of building a granny flat as an owner builder.

It's a great design, built of Nordic spruce with double glazed windows, insulation - the design I chose has a 44 sqm deck, which I love!

The actual building was done by Custom Creations, but I "managed" the other parts, getting the plumber & electrician when needed (though I had a bit of expert help from a very good electrician friend - he had the knowledge of when things needed to happen and contacts in the trade). How was I to know that you needed a special electrician to put in the air conditioner? or that the plumber needed to come before anything else happened to get the trench dug for pipes? or to ask for a day or two pause while we put extra insulation in the ceiling?

Hopefully you will also have a bit more knowledge after watching my adventures and how things went!

I found the easiest way to get the BASIX approval to the level it needed to be was to put in solar. The roof on the main house needed replacing anyway, so before anything else happened, I had the roof fixed and a 4.8KW solar system installed on the main house, to provide power to both the old house and the granny flat.

It couldn't be done as "Complying Development" because of the location being a flood plain, so I had to put in a "Development Application". You can search previous applications to council, so I did that and found a similar application that had been successfully submitted and modified it for my build. I had a site plan professionally drawn up, then used that to add on the proposed new building. You can download quite detailed instructions of what council are looking for from their website.

You will briefly see the other jobs I needed to do in the video - getting rid of the garage and lifting a few hundred bricks used for paving that would have ended up under the house. I sold the garage and kept the bricks to make a path leading to the granny flat.

I hope this is useful for you! I found it quite difficult to get an overall view of how things would happen and when! It seemed like a case where to those who know it seems obvious, but when you are doing it for the first time it is pretty daunting. If you have cash to spare I guess you just get someone else to do the lot, but my preference was to spend my cash on doing it in the nicest way possible and save some on the bits I could.

I don't know how many parts there will end up being, but maybe at the end I will do one to go through the documentation and costs. Please subscribe and Click on the bell to get notified when another video is uploaded.