Member Project: Christine Doan Flat Pack House

Transcript

Hi everybody, I have some news for you, and it’s a lot of news, so I’m going to only put it out in dribs and drabs because I’m a little tired of making news.

But I want to announce that we’ve made a decision.

There is so much interest in this development approval that I have for a flat-pack Chinese house that looks nice and feels good to be in, and has 2 bedrooms.

It’s pretty small, but it’s pretty affordable.

And there’s so much interest, we have to open up a new space to do the, to do the announcements and the information and to let everybody know what we’re interested in, what you might be interested in that we’re interested in.

And we’ll do things like some Zooms out of the Facebook page, events, and this and that.

So be sure that when we’re able to announce where to go, you jump right online and find the flat-pack Chinese IKEA, whatever you want to call it, Lego house building project information.

How’s that sound?

A deal?

Talk to you over there.

More soon.

Transcription

So we started over at my house, the one I live in now, which is 12 Rifle Range Road, right on the edge of Atherton, right next to all those beautiful walking tracks.

Beautiful quiet neighborhood. I love my neighbors, they’re so cool to me.

Great place to establish our pilot project number 2, and I’m going to show you the back of that house in a minute, but this is to get the to sort of get the feeling of where you are.

Look, you can’t see my house from here. So we’re not neighbors packed up against each other and we’re making the tableland something that it’s not.

We’re doing what’s called gentle densification. And that’s what the Chinese house is partly meant for because it’s basically a granny flat. You can attach it to the back of any house.

I’ll show you in a minute how we’re going to attach it to the back of the house that sits right next door to the one I live in. So, here we are on site.

This is the proposed first site for the Chinese flat-pack house to be constructed by Doug Rolfe and his building company. Doug, as you may remember, is going to specialise in building these kinds of houses, because now that we’ve gotten through this amazingly long process of getting the development approved, and that requires all kinds of things, because this is a cyclone-rated Lego house.

Well, how did that happen? Hard work, let me tell you, and it took forever.

But here’s the site where we proposed to build the first one of those. It’s close to the road, it’s close to town, it’s easy to find ways of having people invited to events. To look at the whole process as the house is being built.

And we really intend to have these open houses and to invite everybody here to see how this house gets transformed into a house and a granny flat.

And eventually I’ll move into this first house and we’ll find out what all the bugs are. We’ll renovate that one too, but that’s down the road.

Let’s get this granny flat built out here, added to this, this innovation in affordable housing that comes out of a container off a ship and from those clever Chinese, and it’s going to be put together on this site by locals for locals.

Transcript

Hi everybody, we’re just about to do a series of fortnightly shoutouts to local businesses, and I just want to let you know that that’s what we’re aiming at.

And if your business has done— it had anything to do with the Gin Road project or with the upcoming projects in Atherton, you let us know that you want to be part of this.

Shout out to local businesses because we think that the way that we can encourage the whole economy to move forward is to collaborate and to shout out for each other.

So that’s what we’ll be doing, and I hope you enjoy what we’ve got planned for you.

Transcript

Hi again. The, uh, some big news. But first, let me just say, you know, some things take forever to get started, and they take forever to get all the preparation, and then all of a sudden everything happens.

And it seems as though that’s what’s happening with Pilot Project 2, Pilot Project 3, with the Chinese flat pack Lego IKEA house. Don’t lose the Allen key.

So I hardly know what to announce at this point without making this a half-hour video that nobody wants to watch. Our Chinese flat-pack house has come off the production line.

Very soon, we’ll have news about it getting on the boat. That means in 3 months it will turn up in Townsville.

How about that? Now, a lot of you have wondered, where is this house going? Well, that is the subject of another video.

I’m going to show you the first site that we have picked out for it, which is in Atherton. Nothing to do with Melanda.

And people have asked, who’s going to be in that first house? Guess who? Moi. I’m going to move into it and find out everything that’s wrong with it, and then I’m moving out again so that it can be rented.

But first, we have to make sure that this thing actually functions the way they say it functions and find out all the soft spots in construction, in getting it from the ordering point through the oceans, not through the Strait of Hormuz, thank heavens, but to here, and then all the failings in the first bit of technological, how do we put this puzzle together?

And then what’s it like to live in?

What’s missing?

What works and what doesn’t work?

I’m going to be the first victim.

And the first house is going to be built right here in Atherton, not in Malanda, not anywhere else, and there won’t be anybody moving into it. That’s the plan today, except me and of course my doggie,

Transcript

You know, there have been lots of questions about so many aspects of our projects, and I’m going to start to pick through the questions.

But get on Facebook, ask more questions, we’ll answer the questions on these videos, and then you’ll start to have a bigger, better, clearer understanding of how all these different entities fit together, what the plan is for Pilot Project 1, almost finished in Milanda.

Pilot Project 2, just about to be built. That’s my house over there. Next door, I also own number 8 on Rifle Range Road, and that’s where we plan to build our very first flat-pack house.

Let’s see whether it actually works out that way or not, but that’s where we’re going now, is to look at the site where we think this first, very first, Tablelands Chinese flat pack cyclone-rated, cheap, nice-looking house is going to be built.

We’ll see if it all works out that way, but that’s the plan. More soon.

People Purpose Place is excited to shine a spotlight on an inspiring member project from Christine Doan, investor and director of PPP. While this initiative is Christine’s own independent venture rather than a PPP project, it aligns beautifully with PPP’s mission of making housing accessible for everyone — and that’s exactly why we want to celebrate it.

Christine has secured the first development application approval in the Atherton Tablelands for a Chinese flat-pack house, priced at $115,000 for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom home. Cyclone certified and coming off the production line now, this is an exciting new approach to housing affordability on the Tablelands — and Christine will be documenting the entire journey from China to the site along the way.

Transcript

Hi everybody! I’m just going to let you in on a secret that is so obvious that it isn’t a secret – I can’t keep my mouth shut! [laughter] As soon as I’ve got some news, I want to blabber it all over the place. So what we’ve tried to do now is do a little teaser. I’m not really good at that.

So here’s the announcement, because I’ve been dying to announce this.

We have a new way of promoting affordability on the Tablelands, and it’s not a promise – it’s ready to go. I now have the first development application approval on the Tablelands for a… wait for it… Chinese flat pack house. That costs $115,000 for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom, lounge and kitchen. You need to stick an extra veranda on it so it’s nice for the Tablelands. Extra cost.

You’ve got to build the rotten thing, because it comes like a Lego thing or an IKEA thing, and you have to figure out where to put which Allen key and which monkey wrench where. But that only doubles the price, maybe triples the price. It’s still cheap.

And these are cyclone certified. Imagine that – you get something off a production line out of China that’s cheap enough for Tablelands people to actually build, and it’s also cyclone rated. I’ve got the first DA on the Tablelands, and we’re ready to go.

That wonderful flat pack house – we hope it’s wonderful! This hasn’t been tried before. It’s coming off its production line in China now, and I will keep you posted on where it is, whether it’s come off the production line with my name and the Tablelands on it. Yes!

And we will follow its journey by sea here to Australia. We hope it’ll be here in three months, and we’ll be telling you all about how it works to put this thing together. I’ve got a builder who wants to go in this direction, we’ve got the backing of the people who organise these bits of accommodation that are cheaper than cheap compared to anything else you can build. And we’ll see where we go. Try something new. Thanks!