Former Mud Brick Home

Architect Marcus Ward, from Kyneton Victoria, drew up the official house plans, based on my design ideas and specifications, ready for Pyalong council (now Mitchell Shire) approval in June 1989.

It was a simple mud brick house design. A 10m by 10m square with a surrounding 2m veranda, gives 100 sq metres of house and 96 sq metres of veranda! The wooden post and beam framework supports the roof and the mud brick walls were not load bearing.

The solar efficient design, combined with a layer of polyester insulation against the Colourbond roof plus a layer of polyester-wool insulation bats in the ceiling, means the house stayed cool in summer and warm in winter. With only a few rooms and 3 metre ceilings, the feel of the house was quite spacious.

Mud brick house under construction (late 1989, front)

Construction by the chosen professional builder did not go as planned. Everything was supposed to be completed by Christmas 1989. Instead we couldn't move in until Easter 1990. But the process was made enjoyable by "working bee" days on the weekends when we'd come out to see what had been done for the week, do some work ourselves, have a BBQ and go swimming in the dam.

Steven Adler (then the network specialist working with me at MicroHelp in 1989 and later with Microsoft in Redmond, USA), came out and helped me to run phone, TV and alarm wiring one Sunday. The job was relatively easy without the ceiling in place! Of course Steve wanted to run coax cable suitable for an Ethernet network. The thought was to perhaps create the world's first network enabled mud brick house. The Ethernet cable was run, but a network was never setup.

"Raydon" mud brick house (Jan 2000, rear)

"Raydon" kitchen (Jan 2003)

This mud brick house and the native bush property were sold by Lloyd in January 2008.