126 | Bringing in a new approach MJ Blown Builders has successfully completed numerous high-quality historical restorations, alterations, new builds, and increasingly, design- and-builds. MJ Blown Builders T T Virginia Wright BUILDING Malcolm Blown has been building for 36 years, establishing his own company MJ Blown Builders Ltd 12 years ago. Over the years he and his team have successfully completed numerous high-quality historical restorations, alterations, new builds, and increasingly, design- and-builds. Based in Martinborough, the business has seen these become a big part of its work in recent years as the area’s popularity has surged with sizeable subdivisions established locally and in nearby Greytown. Last year, new builds more or less ground to a halt, with sections and subdivisions sitting empty, when it became clear that Martinborough’s infrastructure couldn’t cope with more houses. “Our town’s infrastructure, and Greytown’s, have suffered from a lack of investment. Central Government regulations around water and effluent have changed to ultimately improve the systems, but it’s a $50million project and we’re a small town without many ratepayers. So for now, we can’t build any new houses. If you want to build a new house you have to demolish or move an existing one and build in that same spot, because the wastewater systems aren’t coping,” Malcolm explains. As a result, their design-and-build work no longer starts with a blank canvas: by council edict you can’t build a bigger house than was already there, and if it is zoned rural special you literally have to build on the same footprint to the same capacity. That, plus budget concerns, is why one of Malcolm Blown’s clients asked him to bring his builder’s expertise into the design process. “I’m designing a house for a client at the moment under those guidelines, so we’ve moved the existing house away, which of course impacted the budget, and then the council gave me a plan with the restrictions shown with a dotted line outlining the previous footprint and the number of square metres.” The client already had architectural plans costed at $1.5 million. Malcolm expects his reverse-engineering, budget-conscious approach to bring that down to well under a million. “Because it had all these big skylights in it and big open beams and minimalist elements with lots of steel and big glass, but you can still achieve light, open spaces, opening onto a big view, relatively easily while staying within more budget-friendly realms of timber framing and standard trusses and smaller pieces of glass, which is where reverse-engineering has an advantage,” he explains. Keeping the design as a light-frame construction within pre-framing parameters means once everyone’s happy with the design and it’s been drawn up, it goes to a pre-framers. “They have a computer program that puts it into a big jigsaw so they make up all the frames and trusses and walls ready for us to put the pieces together,” explains Malcolm. Thanks to Mitec’s latest tech innovation, the builders then reconstruct the puzzle using a 3D plan on their phones, which is a massive improvement on its 2D predecessor. It allows the crane deliveries to be exactly placed within the build and the builders to piece it all together quickly and accurately. On-site wastage is cut by as much as 50% and the labour savings are up to 30%. While putting their design-and-build skills to good use in the meantime, Malcolm hopes that within a year or two consenting might come back to some semblance of normality, allowing MJ Blown Builders Ltd to once again work on the sections and subdivisions waiting for houses to be built on them.
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