let's go around here i'd like nothing more than to just rip my house apart right now
but we can't do that and we can't do it because jess and i face three challenges
when it comes to renovating our own house
foreign
welcome to another exciting episode so the first one building consent the reason we need building
consent is because of a couple of things but first and foremost we need to put a big beam in now none
of this is a problem i got so many small jobs to do around the house as much as i'd love to do the
renovation i know that this process is necessary and if you haven't done this process before maybe
you have like a wall in your house that you want to knock down and put a beam well you have to go
through building consent in order to do that they need to check that it's structurally sound it's
not going to fall on someone's head while you're watching television and it's safe so the first
thing that we've done to get this process going is to get an architect and the good news is
despite all the difficulty in the building industry right now we managed to get an architect
man good there you go how are you matt all right good good today
welcome to the show always a pleasure to be uh here with you guys good morning cameron
is this the lifestyle is that yeah filming it for me everything that moves all the time
so i'm here with one half of fine line architecture matt giorda is that a good
intro you look too bad yeah yeah i like it now the issue today is this office here is
supporting the ceiling so we're going to determine exactly what's happening up there and then um
hopefully there's enough info of you to dream up a solution when we pull the room out yep for
sure so i've had a bit of a think about this one and since our last conversation and i think it's
going to be simpler than we first discussed well that's some of that that sounds good
and so the big question for us is having a look seeing what space we've got in there and then
doing a calculation with someone like design i.t and trying to specify an lvl beam that'll
um span from the far wall to the wall yeah yeah it's quite a big beam yeah yeah so seven meters
i i might my again my intuitive mind would take me to a steel beam all right back to
the present scott brown here so with the beam there's two options steel and timber
with the steel you can go further lengthwise and remain compact so it's less disruptive on the
structure of the building you cut less things out in order to get the steel beam in with the timber
it has to be higher thicker more mass in order to be able to span the distance if we go steer
which it looks likely we'll have to because it's seven meters long um i have to pay an engineer
which isn't a problem it's just you know a bit easier with timber but the other side of the
timber and i hope i haven't lost yet but the other side of the timber goes into our next thing which
is building materials and that is lvl beams in new zealand uh you're waiting months to get them
but more on that later let's go back to matt so yeah might be a big piece of steel could be
oh you're looking prepared matt i'm looking the part yeah man so this looks super tidy
eh yeah it's not bad though no i love it with some insole so that's um fluffy pencil fluff
under there yeah so we've got that so we'll just make sure as we walk around up here
step on that that's the ceiling joist there the ceiling joists are running this way our old wall
has been taken out from here and these two strong back these two lines are just giving additional
um lateral support to those ceiling joists as they span from wall to beam to external wall
is a tube of silicon down there oh yeah that'll come in handy free materials yeah yeah
and that's all asbestos okay i love it so over here is the problem room right yeah and then
that is the end of the beam there which ends on the corner of the problem room a pfc is a channel
i think it's called a preformed channel or something that's what the pfc stands for
yeah you add another bit of blocking in the same dimension as that um coming all the way across
to our top plate over here and then you're just bolting the pfc through into that timber member
in this room and the new room we create we're going to have to add some additional bracing into
the existing walls to to keep the whole thing nice and stable and steady and yep i've got to
ask matt yeah where do you get your our rolling accent from uh gore really yeah born and gore
left gore at about age 10 i think wow and yeah still and that's how strong the uh the rolling
is in gore yeah there's a bit of our rolling in in gore and i think i've got it um i've got a good
dose of it but yeah gore dunedin invercargill that southland a lot of scots turned up and
um yeah it's definitely a carry over from from that bit of new zealand history yeah yeah ipoh
probably just shared a few years off our life not uh wearing masks up there so
yeah let's improve on our mistakes totally scott i agree better late than never i agree hold hardly
get a trade behind you son you can always fall back on it
so matt and i under the house here we're trying to figure out what's happening with the foundation
whether the foundation is sitting under the location of the beam because that's important
let's use this garage as an example right you've got this roof truss here you've got a roof truss
here and they are going across the whole area and all their weight is being transferred
to the wall behind me and the great thing about a wall is it spreads the weight evenly there's
no point where the weight is pressuring in one little area it's spread across the whole garage
by putting a beam in this garage wall if we were to put a big door
in the wall here the opening or something would then be adding a beam just like the house
and then we would have pressure points the weight would be hitting the beam transferring down to
two pressure points so it's important that those pressure points are strong so what matt and i are
doing under here is we're checking a is the post in the right place and thankfully it is and matt's
getting dimensions so he can figure out later if what is under there is strong enough for that new
point load that's what they call it by the way point lobes anyway i'm curious um have you had to
deal with us at your house if you've renovated and and if you're a builder i'm really curious to see
how you've dealt with it on previous jobs let me know in the comments below let's cut back to matt
so in a perfect world this beam will land right above this post yep and that post will do the load
bearing that we want to do hopefully hopefully yep that's it and and this perimeter concrete wall is
gonna only do us favors right you know what i mean it's sort of time this sort of it's almost like
ending like a foundation beam between right the two foundations so it's like a sink here
beautiful wow free sink and then what's this louis vuitton who would think all the dusty
work would be starting so soon exactly but i think it should pay off in the end you know yeah i think
so getting a bit of data on the house and the advantage of swinging a hammer always
helps yep sets us up the boiler suit will uh go back in the cupboard but great to see
you scott you too man yeah and um thank you well yeah we'll catch up in the near future
so
our second big challenge for renovating our house materials building materials building materials
are both hard to find and expensive to buy we're trying to find plasterboard my hopes are very low
a lot of plasterboard right there oh more over there oh look there's more over there
so this is the current situation in new zealand at the moment sold
so we're just leaving the fourth merchant into four merchants looking for jib and we
managed to find some but they are quarter sheets basically just patching sheets
and that's all that's literally all that was available every single piece of jib that we saw
there was pre-orders for people that had made the orders months ago and they're just sitting there
waiting to be picked up or delivered so what they said at the first merchant was july that's when
the next big shipment's coming but what they have to do with that shipment is give it to people that
have already ordered now and before now so july doesn't mean that we get jib so i'm speed bump
so i'm starting to think we'll be waiting until christmas
so yeah that's where we're at unless we can come up with a different kind of interior lining
not that um yeah unless we can unless we can get some sort of random batch that's available
i actually went online i went on to um trademe it's like a ebay i guess and i looked up jib
plasterboard there and i saw one auction for eight sheets and it was over a thousand dollars and
the auction was still going so there's people are making sweet profit of plasterboard at the moment
and one thing that you know if you're not from new zealand you might not know is we call plasterboard
jib and the reason we do that is because that is the biggest company that sell plasterboard
they have 95 of the market so it's like kleenex you know people say pass me a kleenex they don't
say pass me a tissue in america same thing tricky times with materials that's just the tip of the
iceberg the plasterboard prices have been going up like crazy i've been getting emails for months
now from my merchants saying this has gone up this has gone up and then you get another email a week
later saying the same product has gone up again so hopefully as we get through the design process
and the architect and ourselves figure out what we want in the house then we can start ordering the
stuff yeah as you can see it's going to be tricky so from building consent to building materials
to budget
budget budget budget it's uncomfortable to talk about money i know right it's uncomfortable to
think about money but i mean we all have to deal with it right and yeah how are we going
to fund this renovation so the reality is we don't have a budget we are going to self-fund as we go
we know what we want to do we want to make this house warm and dry and a pleasant place to live
and that will take as long as it takes hopefully within the next two years
but we're not flipping the property we're not it's not that kind of project we plan
to live in this so we want it to be we want it to be nice we'll save up our money we'll buy a
window or a door and then we'll start again we'll say that we'll buy tiles or bench top or showers
exactly so this isn't going to be done in four to six months like a lot of the previous renovation
projects that were filmed yeah so what that means is we have to make sure we have enough income
coming in to cover our bills and also to fund this renovation one of the ways that we are able to do
that is our sponsorships with squarespace who also sponsored this video these ads
help us so much oh yeah yeah we will most likely be buying a sliding or french door
that is sponsored by squarespace maybe we have to print the logo on the side covered in
yeah so let's take a minute to talk about today's sponsor which is squarespace
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also have great portfolios and galleries as soon as we changed our website to a squarespace site
it just made the presentation so much better made it easier to share photos of the work that we do
but don't take my word for it squarespace also offer a free trial so you have nothing to lose
then when you're ready to launch your website go to squarespace.com forward slash scott brown
carpentry save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain thanks again to squarespace
no one really likes thinking about money but i do like thinking about my plans
this is my propagation station what is that i have no idea i don't know what any of these
are no that's a lie i know no i don't know what that is and this is a heart shape for the gendron
everything else is a mystery uh my friend eva gave me a bunch of cuttings and i've been growing them
if anyone else is watching this who likes plants they'll understand how exciting it is to watch
things grow we took cuttings of these and they've now grown roots and i've planted them and see that
little thing there that's new growth new growth is like the most exciting thing for someone who
likes plants i guess actually maybe there's a there's some poetry in that somewhere not all
stress over here not at all i'm having a lot of fun playing with my plants scott has his workshop
but also we love it here yes yeah this is such a nice part of the country we've been going to the
beach we've been going for walks we want to do more hikes last weekend we went to abel tasman
scott brown here here i am in the paradise and uh we just caught a boat here then we're gonna
have a little walk around how do you feel about the wherever we are i can't believe we live here
we don't quite live oh no 40 minute drive 20 minute 30 minute fury ride and here we are we used
to have to fly like a rental car accommodation yeah we just pop here on a weekend day
you