Building site with a discarded single floor design in bamboo.

The site for our house before building began in January 2011. It is sort of egg shaped. In the photo below your are looking at the pointy end of the egg. At its widest point the site measures about 15m from one steeply sloping side to the other.



My wife and I spent several days on the land messing about with the pieces of bamboo you can see, experimenting with different floor plans and trying to imagine ourselves living in the house. In the end we decided that a single floor house would be too close to the slopes at each site of the plot. By doing a two floor design the weight of the house is less likely to cause the ground to become unstable.

The land is flat and ready to build on. We did a soil study to check how hard it was and how good the drainage was. The results were good enough - the site was cleared and flattened about five years previous so it has had time to bed down. I was still curious to find out what kind of drainage system the architect - constructor would put in place to ensure water did not collect on the land itself.