HISTORY OF KEN AND HARRIET’S HOUSE

HISTORY OF KEN AND HARRIET’S HOUSE ... We live in a special house built largely of demolition timber and stone, built twenty seven years ago in 1981.

HISTORY OF KEN AND HARRIET’S HOUSE:

At 1606 CHAMBERS FLAT RD ......

.... As at 1981 – 2009 = 28 years on .....

..... How to build a house for $A31,000.00 in 1981 and buy 5 acres of land for $A13,00.00 in 1977 ......

Where does House, Garden and Bush End?
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The First Photograph shows the interior of the house ... the stone wall of the living room, the bricks on the floor, the big beams, the glass windows looking into the bush, the red cedar timber doors, vertical timber walling and undressed cypress pine ceiling.

The Second Photograph shows the Amphitheatre in front of the house.

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HISTORY: 1977 to 2009

We live in a special house built largely of demolition timber and stone, built twenty seven years ago in 1981 for a fraction of the cost of a new house. Some of the stone is very old from the late 1800's. Australia as a whole was only settled after 1788. Compared other countries, the 1800's is very old to us. The house is on five acres of light open Australian bush which we bought very cheaply when we came out to our bush block in 1977 ..... four years earlier. We were way out thirty five kms. south of Brisbane then in the countryside. Now we are in the middle of everything .... not that we want to sell. Acreage land has become very valuable around us now.

We initially came here to Chambers Flat in 1977 after spending the first two years of our married life in a small rented cottage at Taringa, one of the suburbs of Brisbane for $A25.00 / week from some older friends. In those days, the area was still very much bush. We came to this bush block where wallabies grazed on the side of the road down around the corner. Across the road, was a 1000 acres of bush with no houses whatsoever. Trees crowded and overhung the narrow road which had been an early stock-route from Beaudesert to Waterford / Beenleigh in the late 1800’s. You could then buy 5-10 acres of land for about $10,000-$15,000.00. Land was out in the middle of nowhere, 35 kms. from Brisbane. Now in 2007 it is in the middle of everything with land being in great demand.

Right from the beginning, I had a dream to build a house that seemed as though it had grown up from the ground. We had an architect friend draw some initial plans. With more discussion, the plans were changed to accommodate demolition stone, beams and bricks which had been recently been acquired. The idea was to create a total concept where bush, house and garden flowed together. The architect submitted the plans to the Beaudesert Shire Council enabling us to live on the block whilst the house was being built. A builder was eventually contracted in 1981 to build the plans for $32,000.00, about 1/3 the price at the time with using demolition materials.

In 1977, we came out to live in a 27 foot Caravan and Annexe in the hot dry bush in the middle of a December drought. The van was like a sauna during the day. We had no power, water or telephone. The power was several kilometres down the road. Candles were all we had for lighting. We were fortunate to have friends across the creek in a small house. It was a welcome break to go over for a shower every night, a bit of black and white TV and social contact.

Unknowingly, I had always had an artistic, innovative creative side from my farming background. I could pictorially visualise things in detail long before they were constructed. That I understand is a special gift in life. I had grown up in the rainforest country of Wilson’s Creek, up in the mountains out from Mullumbimby, Northern New South Wales. This meant I had developed a special affinity to nature and the natural environment. My father had taught me by example, how to make things from the bare minimum of scrap, to turn unwanted scraps into useful items He had come through the Depression days of the 1930’s. This was recycling things long before recycling was a fashionable term. I had put this knowledge into good effect in the building of the future house. See the following posts as an overview of the house and garden.

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2 comments:

seer said...: Hi Ken, I am peter lawler with the boggo road gaol historical society and the government has just done a dig at the old gaol and we were wondering what had happened to the foundation stones? could you ask Neil to contact us and give us some background on the stones.
Peter Lawler; April 2, 2007 6:16 AM
Ken Aitken said...: Dear Peter, thankyou for your comment. Neil is uncontactable now. He is living permanently in the Philipines. I bought 10 of the foundation stones 26 years ago and have 5 of them in two stone walls of the house and five in the outside ... stone seats in the amphitheatre. You are welcome to come and visit us and see the house and our use of the stones. Phone us on 3297 0069.

Regards, Ken Aitken; April 6, 2007 11:08 PM

A Tip on Reading Blog Sites ....

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A tip on reading blogs: After you have read the main blog writing, remember to read all the separate posts .... they do not automatically come up the main blog writing. To view photographs with a larger screen size, just click on the particular photograph and will come up a larger screen size. You can the save them if you wish by clicking 'Save Image As' in your mouse dialogue box.

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HISTORY OF THE MATERIALS ......

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STONE FROM THE SUPREME COURTHOUSE IN BRISBANE: In 1979 I had a small landscape design office down the highway at Park Ridge Shopping Centre and I had a part time fellow designer called David who told me about the old stone building in George St. in the City which was being pulled down. Did I want some of the stone? I went and ordered two truckloads for $150.00 ….. just enough to pay for cartage on the stone. The stone was really free as I found out later on the rest of the stone was dumped as fill in a school. Today such stone would highly prized and would worth a lot of money.

TIMBERS FROM THE REX THEATRE: At this time in 1979 I began chasing some large timber beams for the construction of the house. I went into this demolition yard in Salisbury and found a stack of very large beams 0.300 * 0.400 mm * 14 metres long. These were to be the horizontal beams in our house I traded for $3.30 / metre delivered on our land. They were from the Rex Theatre in Fortitude Valley in the City of Brisbane. I put down a deposit on the timbers … Neil, the demolition contractor delivered the beams and trusted me from the beginning I would come back in time and finalise the balance ….. even after delivery. He became a good friend of mine over the years and still is to this day.

These beams had been broadaxed by hand in the late 1800’s. The Rex Theatre had been a warehouse before the turn of the century. In 1980 Jo Bjelke Petersen was premier of Queensland and there was a lot of development in Brisbane going on. Brisbane Heritage didn’t amount to much then and old buildings were coming down everywhere. In 1997, I found out from a firm in Brisbane that supplied these sized timbers, that these same sized beams were in great demand. Eighteen years on they were worth $100.00 / metre ….. if you could get them. The timbers were stacked on our land ready for sorting and removing the burn marks and white paint on some of them. I soon sorted them into two piles with a crane ….. these to be used for our house and a pile of rejected ones.
The Beaudesert Shire Council has asked us to get a covering certificate from a consulting engineer certifying the strength of the beams. I was away at work when the engineer turned up one day and as Harriet didn’t know which pile he had to check, he certified the rejected ones !! The architect designed the whole house on the size of these beams. I however didn’t have any matching vertical posts.

TIMBERS FROM THE SEAFOAM FLOUR MILL: We were still in the caravan when my friend Neil, the demolition contractor phoned me up in early 1981. He wanted me to do some landscape contract work for him at his acreage property at Kingston. Our firm had grown to a two man outfit. I was the designer in our landscape firm and I had a very practical construction partner called Harvey. I went over and we eventually agreed on a simple design around the house with much open space and existing eucalypt trees.

There were some: new driveway renovations with a demolition timber arbour over the driveway, a central circular fishpond (using a radiating circle of demolition stones he had on site), some new garden beds with new plantings among bush boulder placements and some 2.00 metre long timber seats we had to cut from a pile of large demolition timbers stored in a paddock on the road to Brookfield, on the opposite side of the City. These had been stored there from the Seafoam Flour Mill where South Bank is now. I have found the Flour Mill existed in the 1940’s telephone book (records from recent research in the John Oxley Library). They were all pit-sawn posts so the mill was probably built in the late 1800’s.

Read about the actual history of the flour mill at this website.

Nearing the end of the job, over an outdoor lunch under the trees in the garden, Neil said to me, ‘what would you give me for all that timber out there?’ I didn’t have a clue. Off the top of my head I said ‘$2000.00’. He then said ‘You do ‘$2000.00’ of additional landscape work here and you can have the lot. ‘Agreed’ I said. We were about to start on our house and we had the finance but I still didn’t have any vertical posts to match the horizontal ones. Soon after that I took a crane truck out to the paddock to select the vertical posts. The ones I selected were fifteen posts of 400 mm * 300 mm size and of ten metre lengths ….. sufficient for the vertical posts in the house.

STONE FROM THE COBB AND CO COMPANY: at time of our building the house, I was passing one day in 1981 down near the corner of Albert and Margaret St. near the Botanical Gardens. I was with my landscape contract business partner at the time, in our truck. We passed a corner block with a big pile of earth and square cut stone. There was a big drott working on the site. We stopped the truck and I went over and asked the driver what he was going to with the stone.

It was from the foundations of the old Cobb and Co. Depot in the Stagecoach days of Brisbane. We were in the middle of building our house. I said to driver, `What do you going to do with the stones?’. He scratched his head and said `I will probably dump them’. `How much do you want for them?’ I asked as the inveterate scrounger. He said `Probably $50.00’. I said `I will give you $75.00 for the lot’. I paid him then and there and had him load on one load of dirty stone. We came back the next day to collect the other load. This is how you recycle waste materials or scrap into useful and very valuable items. Those stones became the main wall in our bedroom and also initially one large one as an inside coffee table.

This was a handcut stone 120 mm. long * 55 mm. wide * 33 mm. deep. In the last three years, the rooms in the house have been redesigned so that now what was initially a dining room has become a small sitting room with the TV and DVD sitting on the raised stone. The stone was moved by hand on bricks and a crowbar with two of us working on the moving of the stone some fifteen metres from one place to the other.

With recent research in the John Oxley Library, I have since found out that the Headquarters of Cobb and Co. were at 71 Albert St., The City. The Company had moved headquarters in 1866 from Melbourne. It had initially been formed to run from Melbourne to the Victorian Goldfields It was in operation in Brisbane for seventy years till 1924. It didn’t survive the Great Depression and caused the Company to go into voluntary liquidation. Competition from rail and the newly invented motor vehicle, had also produced a contracting of the extensive mailruns which ran all over Queensland and down south. At these new headquarters, there were large offices, a coach building factory and stables for the team of horses which drew the coaches. In 1866, the coach building business, was moved to Charleville. It is wonderful to know our stone has been part of early Brisbane history.

STONES FROM BOGGO RD. GAOL: At the time of completing the house, I took delivery of ten large cut sandstones in the size of 0.90*0.90 metres on the top and 0.50 metres in height from the foundations of the earliest part of Boggo Rd. Gaol. They were delivered for $30.00 each from my friend Neil, the demolition contractor in 1981. Big Stones used at the front entry plus in the in the Amphitheatre Walkway : I found out these also had a history. The first gaol in Brisbane was established at Humpybong, Redcliffe in 1824.

Then between 1860 and 1883 the gaol was in Petrie Terrace where the old Police barracks are. In 1883 the gaol was transferred to Boggo Rd. Gaol. Capital punishment (hanging) was abolished in 1922. Boggo Rd. Gaol was closed in the late 1970’s and is now used for periodic cultural functions. This finally means our ten stones date from 1883. The BBQ Stone Table was the odd one out and came from the foundations of one of the big cast iron pillars at the front of the Rex Theatre.

TIMBERS FROM THE WOOL SCOUR SHEDS AT STAFFORD: I scrounged also some timber floor joists (400*300 mm) as wall boarding from the late 1800’s Wool Scour Sheds at Stafford for $0.33 / metre We began a substitution of quoted materials with the builder.

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THE GARDEN .....

The Combined House Garden: I planted the garden out in zones flowing out from the house as a total concept that flowed the house in with the surrounding bush and vice versa. Where did house and garden actually finish? ….. they tended to merge in hard landscape and soft landscape. Tall eucalypt trees nearby merged with new low planting to create a series of open flowing rooms off the house. The view of the exterior came into the interior through all the glass of the windows ….. on the outside the bush was reflected in the glass. There were some open spaces and others were closed planted spaces. The open spaces were thinly planted or had low shrubs to look over into the surrounding bush but sometimes they were planted to enclose the spaces as open rooms.

On some of the garden edges I had planted an informal line of storm lily bulbs that would give spontaneous colour with the flowering of lilies after storms. This was characterised in recent times when we had two very big thunderstorms which was a refreshing change to our dry Australian bush and garden for this time of year at our property at Chambers Flat. Within a few days, the numerous dormant storm lilies around the garden began to throw up new pink flower stems out the nest of drab green straplike leaves. Over a few days, the swelling pink bulbous end of the stalks began to swell further to reveal a rolled tubular flower that suddenly unfurled in a day to a soft pink trumpet like flower of indescribable beauty. Six soft pointed petals are expanded towards the sun with varying shades of soft pink and soft white. Each petal was softly streaked with pink from point petal to a whiter centre. A cluster of yellow stamens is at the centre of the corona of petals.

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