A carport on four posts, and a window that needed its own permit

The brief was a carport and one window. There was already a carport of sorts — the small one tucked under the roofline at the end of the house, about 16 square metres of it. The new one is 36 square metres and stands on its own, out on the gravel parking area rather than the concrete drive. The window is in the kitchen, and it needed to be wider than the one already there. Two modest things to write down, and between them they took two building permits, a structural engineer, a bushfire assessment and the shire’s consent before anyone picked up a tool.

Deleting posts is not less work

The drawings went through five revisions between July 2024 and March 2025. One of them, in September 2024, is titled “revised design, delete posts”. That sounds like a saving and it is the opposite: take posts out and everything left has to carry more. The carport finished up standing on four corner posts — 150 by 150 cypress pine, cast into the footings — with 240 by 63 LVL beams around the perimeter and 290 by 45 rafters at 600 centres spanning between them. Six metres clear, and nothing in the middle to reverse around.

There was no soil report

The engineer wrote it on the drawing rather than leaving it to be discovered: no soil report was provided at the time of footing design, so the site was assumed Class M. The pads were drawn 600 square and 1200 deep, founding at least 100mm into natural stiff clay at 100 kilopascals, with a note putting it on the builder to confirm that ground is actually there and go deeper if it is not. That is the line most people skim. It is also the one that decides whether the thing stays where you put it. The pads were inspected and signed off before the pour on 14 August 2025.

A bushfire rating and a flood overlay on the same block

The site carries a BAL 12.5 rating, which sets requirements on the roof and on anything exposed well before anyone picks a colour. It is also on designated flood prone land, which means the Mornington Peninsula Shire had to be reported to and consent given before the permit could issue. Neither is unusual on the Peninsula. Both are much cheaper to design around at the start than to find out about after the drawings are approved.

The parts you only see if you look up

The rafters are LVL, which is strong and does not like weather, so the side beams and the exposed rafter ends were encased in cement sheet and painted. Every piece of steel outside — cleats, bolts, washers, the lot — is hot dip galvanised, and the timber exposed to weather is H3 treated. The roof is a tray profile at a 5 degree fall in Colorbond Monument, with six metres of slotted quad gutter and a single 90mm downpipe run into the existing stormwater. None of that changes how the carport looks. All of it changes how long it lasts.

The window was never just a window

Widening an opening in a loadbearing wall is structural work. The old window came out, the opening was cut wider with the sill height held to match the rest of the house, and a 250 by 90 PFC went in over it, carried on triple studs one side and doubles the other. The overhead cupboards and the old rangehood came out with it and were made good, and a new stainless rangehood went back in under a tiled splashback. In the meals area next door, the old single doors and the wall between them were removed and replaced with one full-width double-glazed sliding stacker.

Two permits, two finals, six months apart

The carport ran under its own permit as a Class 10a building and was finalled on 16 December 2025. The alterations ran under a second permit as Class 1a, framework inspected in February 2026 and final approved on 24 June 2026. That second permit also carries a consent for partial compliance with the energy efficiency provisions, granted on the basis that the work is minor and adds less than a quarter to the floor area of the house. That is something a surveyor has to be asked for and has to grant. It is not something you assume and deal with later.

What was priced before it happened

The contract carried provisional sums for four things nobody could price honestly up front — patching and repairing render, upgrading the posts, cladding the beams, and earthworks — because none of them can be measured until the work is opened up. Two variations were raised over the life of the job and both were written, priced and signed by owner and builder before the work went ahead: the stacker door, pine lining to the carport ceiling and the render and brick touch-ups in January 2026, and the splashback tiling and rangehood install in May 2026. A carport and a window is a small job. It got the same paperwork a new home gets, which is the whole point.