The forty-year specification
Some decisions in a house are permanent and some are cosmetic. Budgets go wrong when people spend on the ones that can be changed and save on the ones that cannot.
The test
Ask one question of every decision: can this reasonably be changed in fifteen years by someone who is not rebuilding the house?
If the answer is yes — tapware, appliances, floor coverings, paint, light fittings, the kitchen benchtop — then it is a preference, and a preference can wait. If the answer is no, it is permanent, and permanent things are where the money should go first.
What is permanent
- Where the house sits and which way it faces. Free to get right at design stage, impossible afterwards.
- The structure. Slab, footings, frame, roof structure. Nobody revisits these without a very large bill.
- Waterproofing. Wet areas, balconies, retaining walls, roof penetrations. A failure here is the most expensive common defect in Australian housing, and it is entirely a function of workmanship and detailing.
- The building envelope. Insulation, sarking, glazing performance, air sealing. These decide what the house costs to run and how it feels in February and July, and you cannot get at most of them once it is lined.
- Ceiling heights, window sizes and openings. Technically changeable, practically not.
- Drainage and the fall of the land around the house. Simple to get right now, miserable to fix later.
What can wait
Almost everything you can see. Finishes, joinery fronts, tapware, appliances, light fittings, landscaping beyond the essential drainage and retaining.
This is not an argument for a plain house. It is an argument for sequencing: get the parts that are welded to the building right, and let the visible layer follow as the budget allows. A house with excellent structure and modest finishes improves every year. The reverse gets worse every year.
Where people go wrong
The common failure is a beautiful kitchen in a house with the living areas facing south, minimum-standard glazing and a slab that had to be redesigned on site. Every photograph looks good. Living in it is a different proposition.
The second failure is buying a fixed price where the savings were found in the envelope. Insulation, glazing and waterproofing are exactly the places a quote can be trimmed without a client noticing until the house is finished.
The standard does not move
Every Birch home is built to one standard, and it is a high one. There is one way to build something properly, and that is the way it gets built. Whatever the scope, the quality of the materials is never where the saving comes from — the size of the house can change, the standard does not.
A smaller house built correctly is a better forty-year proposition than a larger one built to a price. That is not a moral position; it is an arithmetic one.