October, November and December were busy months for us, with students joining us from Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, Newcastle, Prague and the UK, helping us get our building out of the ground, with the steel frame being finished in time for our Christmas break.
We were also joined by new sponsor partners James Hardie, Bluescope Steel, Great Lakes Windows, Wood Solutions, and Active Hire.
Our sock tans got worse, our muscles firmer and our smiles a little bigger as our building finally started to take shape. Its been an amazing experience helping put our building together piece by piece, watching as it starts to look exactly like those sketches we started with months ago.
We have had a great team of student labourers, with Mary Beatty, Luke Hallaways, Jess Summerhayes, Mark Tisdell, Ashley Pincham, Laura Harrison, Alice Boyes, David Neuhausl, Eleanor Tullock, Josh Matthews, Kelsey Shanahan, Nicole Larkin, Sascha Parkinson, Kriss Sogee & Kirsty Cadger all joining the egresS team.
We were also joined by Greg Schipp a lawyer from Bale Boshev, one of our great sponsors, who swapped his pen for a drill and enjoyed the chance to meet all of the students involved in the project.
A few brief rain delays in November allowed a spot of Aqua Golf and wine tasting and gave us a few early afternoons, a nice change from the usual 6pm finish! We visited sponsors, got our heads on NBN news and took the chance to work on some of the finer details of the build.
Wines (and beers!) were drunk over BBQs and pizzas, cards and games of Taboo were played. Dean learnt a little more guitar and Greg, Eleanor and Nicole shamed him with their banjo, mandolin and guitar skills!
Long 11 hour days on site were tiring but rewarding. 
We all learnt how to use angle grinders, drills, saws, nail guns and carried tons of steel. Columns were craned into place, bearers and top hat joists bolted into position. Ezy Flow, our steel fabricators allowed us to help with most of the steel installation, an experience we hadn’t anticipated getting. We helped carry, screw and bolt the steel together, leaving only the heavy steel for the crane and experts.
We also constructed our own light steel infill walls and sheeted the flooring in yellow tongue. This will be our work platform until our beautiful recycled tallow wood flooring goes down toward the end of the build. Bathrooms had villaboard laid, and joists were blocked out to help spread the load of our sliding doors and walls. Rafters went on, completing the frame and giving us a true look at the size of our building.
We experimented with concrete mixes for our kitchen benches (yet to be finalised) and watched as our plumbing went in.
Our 3 x 6m glass doors arrived on site and were man handled into place by the whole crew.
The windows have been a learning experience for me personally. We started with bi-fold doors, and engineered the building to allow these to be top hung. I decided to change to sliding, and made the assumption that the doors would also be top hung. I didn’t specify it in writing, assuming that no one would be silly enough to want 200kg doors that weren’t top hung! Result is doors that need a team of three to open, with no one to blame but myself. SPECIFY everything in detail!!!!!! We also neglected to draw or specify that the sills were to be flush with the flooring…we have still achieved this, but are now left with a gap at the top of the door which will need to be covered with some aluminium angle. Again, SPECIFY!!!
Dean and I took on a firmer role as contract administrators, expanding our architectual experience, keeping an eye on budgets, programming, design, and material selection. Weekly Monday morning meetings with our builder, Daniel Reitsma helped us keep on top of this task.
All students had the chance to be involved in some architectual detail decisions – do we pull the very heavy doors out and notch out 5mm from the blocking to ensure they sit as flush with the finished flooring level? This was physically a very difficult task but one that we decided would be worth the effort in the end. 
Future connections of cladding and window frames were determined, Daniel only wincing slightly when we chose the most difficult finishes!
Our cladding, cut from rafters sourced from an old wool shed in Western Australia, milled to retain their aged grey face, arrived on site along with our decking. We made a difficult decision to change our recycled iron bark decking to new 33 x 180mm plantation blackbutt. Nowhere near as pretty, but $45k cheaper.
Working with a real, and very tight budget has been a learning experience. Our university projects have token or no budgets, so we become accustomed to designing buildings that would be beautiful but very expensive to build. Our project forces us to try and find the best compromise between what we really, really want and what we can actually afford. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, we are able to construct a building estimated to cost $960k by our quantity surveyor for under $650k! Our aim is to save at least another $50-$100k before the end of the build. Lighting, plumbing fixtures, solar, paint, electrical and furnishing sponsors are still being sought to help us meet this aim.
Our year wound up with the usual giving of gifts, the answers to interview questions for Dean (yup, he chokes in front of a camera), rose coloured glasses for me ( I worry that every design decision I make will be a dud), and Nerf guns all round.
When we pick up tools again on the 17th of January we will be sheeting our roof and cladding our walls. We will be joined by new students and a few old ones will return. I can’t wait!
Jo xx
