Easy tips for materials: designing your home

If you’ve decided to design or renovate your own home you’ll have very particular ideas about how it will fit the needs of you and your family. These tips will help you pick the right materials and expertise for your home.

In order to choose the right material for your house, take a look at what most houses are made of before considering your choices. Most houses are built by professional builders and their shapes and materials have developed from the form of traditional structures, refined over many years, and are now engineered to the extent that they are quite predictable.

These houses rely on components produced in factories, computerized mills and production plants.

Before planning in detail the construction of your home that, after all, will be a little different to the ordinary, run-of- the-mill-style dwelling, it helps to have some background knowledge of the terminology of conventional building.

Brick veneer houses became common after the Second World War.

• They combine a brick outer skin known as the veneer with a timber or steel frame to support the roof and internal walls.
• This gives the house a brick appearance without the cost of a double-brick walls.

Timber or steel frame houses are made of relatively light wall and roof framing built off the ground on a floor frame, or more commonly, on the ground on a concrete slab.

• The frame supports timber or metal exterior cladding and interior linings, together with a tiled or iron roof.
• Depending on timber prices, such houses are easy and relatively cheap to build.
• They are popular with owner-builders because of the relative simplicity of construction when compared with having to lay brickwork.
• Timber is much more popular than steel.

Cavity brick consists of two walls of brickwork separated by a cavity of about 50 millimetres.

• This offers you the advantage of solidity and a mass which absorbs and stores heat without waterproofing problems.
• Aerated concrete blocks, which are an ideal material for owner-builders as they are light and can be cut by a handsaw, are a practical replacement for bricks as the inner wall.
• Masonry internal walls provide the best soundproofing.

This type of building has become "formalized" after being used for centuries as the answer to a specific problem; it is suited to hillsides and other sites where the ground is unsuitable for construction on normal footings.

There are two types:

• Through-pole construction uses poles that go from the ground up to roof level and that are incorporated into the house structure.
• Platform-pole construction uses poles as a floor-supporting structure or platform only, on top of which a conventional timber-frame building is built.
• With care, minimal disturbance of plants and earth is possible.

Building or renovating your own home requires pretty specialized knowledge on the types of materials and models available. These tips will help you make the perfect decision on what type of home you want for you and your family.