Taking the walls out of a house the family was still living in

The contract describes the job in one line: remove structural walls and replace them with structural beams, and infill a carport. On the drawings that turns into most of a house changing shape. The kitchen, living and rumpus open into one another. The bedroom at the end of the wing becomes a master suite. The old study becomes an office, the old family room becomes a rumpus, and the kitchenette and passage give up their space to a study and a laundry. At the other end, the carport gets closed in and becomes a double garage.

Nobody moved out

The owners lived in the house for the entire programme. That is not a small detail and it is not free, so it was priced rather than absorbed and forgotten: a daily site clean rather than a clean at the end, dust barriers, and the site run as zones so the part of the house being worked on was sealed off from the part being lived in. Most quotes exclude the owner living in during construction outright. This one costed it in, which is the only honest way to do it if the answer is going to be yes.

There was asbestos, and it was gone before we arrived

The site tested positive. Removal was carried out and confirmed complete before the job started, and we required the clearance certificate in hand before anyone set foot on site rather than taking someone’s word for it. It is worth being precise about this: the removal was not ours, and the certificate was the condition of us starting. Nothing further was found once the walls came open.

The roof gets looked at before the walls come out

Both the engineer’s drawings and the architectural plans required a written roof inspection report before commencement, and the quote carried an allowance for making the roof good. The reason is simple: when you take out a wall that is holding something up, what it was holding up becomes your problem, and you cannot know what that is from underneath the plaster. Look first, then price it, then start. As it turned out, the roof needed no extra beam work at all.

What went in where the walls came out

Three members do most of the work. RB1 is a 300 by 63 LVL beam at three metres. RB2 is a laminated pair of the same, four point three metres across, which takes two people and props to lift. L1 is a smaller lintel, a pair of 140 by 35, at two point four metres. Each lands on a stud pack, and the bracing lost with the walls is put back as Type B double diagonal tension straps to AS1684.2. The whole lot is temporarily propped while it goes in, which is the part of the job where a house is at its least structural and the most attention is being paid.

The carport was already half a building

The steel columns were sound and the brick pier was sound, so both stayed, and the drawings were revised twice in the fortnight before the permit specifically to keep them — one revision for the pier, one for the garage walls and the retained columns. Around them went new stud walls, wall wrap, 10mm Axon fibre cement sheet, flashings to the door head and jambs, and a panel lift door with an opener. Underneath, a 100mm raft slab on strip footings, dowelled into the existing footing with chemical anchors so the new concrete and the old work together instead of separately.

Inside the time allowed

The contract allowed 102 calendar days, of which 12 were an allowance for weather, weekends and public holidays. Site start was 8 June. The slab was inspected before the pour on 11 June, the steel the day after, and the pad footings on 19 June. The final inspection was approved on 12 August. Sixty-five days on a job that had ninety to play with, in a house that was being lived in the whole way through.