It was a very rough quote Astrid - came out and had a look - told him that we wanted a deck, with some sort of space underneath. At that point we were undecided about what the space underneath would be used for - whether it would be for a garage plus workshop (eg. quite rough and ready) or a granny flat. We would need to pay $4K for a better idea of price with drawings etc. which I'll do, just not with that guy, who had the personality of a slug and if I've learnt anything over the years it's that you have to get along with your contractors.

So ... just putting this out there. Will go to another architect within the next few weeks and weigh up our options which boil down to having some sort of usable space underneath the deck and hooking into the house's utlities (ie. gas, plumbing) but copping the cost of excavation or building a new strawbale workshop/granny flat at the bottom of the garden which we thought would entail bigger costs to get plumbing, electricity down there but have since done some preliminary research into making it self-sustainable with solar panels, composting toilet etc. etc. We could also build a weatherboard cottage with a kit but strawbale looks like it would be cheaper to heat and cheaper to build.