On Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:01:35 +0100 Owain wrote :
We shall look forward to lots of posts about boreholes and roo-proof
fencing.

20 years ago I got to spend a day with a suburban Melbourne Building
Inspector - hugely interesting, thank you Box Hill City Council (every
suburb is a 'city' in Ozzie LA parlance).

The two most interesting things I still remember was the office block
being built on timber piles (so heavily treated with arsenic etc that
burning the offcuts on site was a no-go) hammered into the ground and,
secondly, their roof purlins: a piece of something like 6x2, underneath
it a wire rope shacked to the timber at either end and then jacked away
from the timber in the middle to force the purlin upwards, so it then
ends up straight when loaded. Structurally it acts like an RC beam with
the timber as the stress block in compression at the top and the cable
in tension.

And the other interesting thing was being able to build new houses
without planning permission! Lots of that area was developed in the
1950s and 1960s with the 1/4 acre plot beloved of Aussies. Of course
such a low density doesn't help sustain shops, public transport etc and
infrastructure maintenance per home is expensive. So they brought in a
provision that if you wanted to sell off half your garden for another
home you could: subject to basic rules PP was automatic - minimum floor
space, vehicle access and parking and something on the lines of all
walls had to be half their height from the boundary.

--
Tony Bryer SDA UK 'Software to build on' http://www.sda.co.uk