Our fees

Initial site visit

If you are within an hour’s drive of Cygnet, we’re happy to do a complimentary initial site visit. If you are outside this area, we will charge you for our travel. No matter where you live, for subsequent site visits, our consulting fee of $60 per hour per OzEarth consultant applies, plus reimbursement for travel (see below).

Email or phone consulting

If we can answer your question in five minutes, we will happily do so at no charge. Otherwise – for design consultancy, detailed information, questions that require research to answer, and questions that are specific to a particular project or site – we charge for the time we spend on gathering information and drafting replies.

We charge $30 per half hour, with a deposit of $60 payable in advance. If your query takes 30 minutes or less to answer, we’ll refund you $30. We will provide a timesheet at the time of invoicing.

Work / teaching crew on site

We charge $60 per OzEarth team leader per hour. Work days are typically 7 hours long (or 8 hours, with a total of 1 hours’ break throughout the day, taken in three chunks). Please note that end of day cleanup is included in the work day. For work on your site, we will need to be reimbursed for travel – see below for details.

We also have a stable of people we’ve trained, and who we work with regularly.  Our team members cost $35 per hour, and we tend, for big projects, to work with between two and four of them.  This speeds the workflow and ends up costing you less.

We don’t hire out our labourers without at least one team leader on site to supervise their work.  Team leaders play a vital role in forward planning, optimising workflow, quality control, and quantity surveying.  We also administer all wages, including PAYG and Super compliance, and provide the umbrella of workers’ compensation and public liability insurance  and a guarantee of our workmanship for your peace of mind.

Traditional lime plastering is a multi-stage chemical and physical process, which takes expertise and attention to detail if it is to provide an effective skin for your building over the long term. Render is more than a merely aesthetic thing – it’s the skin of your building, and your building won’t work if it’s compromised any better than you would if your skin was. The potential cost to you if it isn’t done right is high – bales that aren’t properly weatherproof run a serious risk of attracting pests or incubating mould or damp. We’ve seen plenty of examples of badly applied render eventually leading to an entire bale wall essentially failing from the bottom up.

If you engage us as contractors rather than on a barnraising or course provision basis, and you want to get in additional workers / volunteers whom we haven’t trained, you’ll need to do that in consultation with OzEarth team leaders.  This is because it will slow the workflow to train new people, which can be less than ideal for you in a subcontracting situation; and even experienced workers may work to different standards and with different methods from ours, which will mean again that work will slow while we do the necessary quality control in order to give you a result that we can all be happy and satisfied with.

Travel

We charge 75c per kilometre for travel within Tasmania. (This is in line with the Australian Tax Office amount for travel, and covers on-road costs and maintenance as well as fuel.) For interstate projects, we will need to be reimbursed for flights, car hire and fuel for the duration of the project. Also, you’ll need to put us up somewhere – it doesn’t need to be luxurious, but warmth, a bed, enough power to charge a phone and a laptop, and some means of getting clean after muddy building days would be great.

If you can’t afford to pay OzEarth consultancy fees

You can attend an OzEarth course or barnraising relevant to your project. Our barnraisings are free, and our courses are priced very competitively. At the courses, you will get a wealth of information both on site and in written form for your reference. We also encourage attendees at both courses and workshops to ask questions and discuss projects throughout the course.  This way, you learn skills for your project, and can consult with us about it, all in one go.

Finally, we encourage you look at the resources we’ve made available on this site: our reading list, our previous posts, our facebook page, our links list, our Youtube favourites. The web in general also contains a wealth of free information for the perusing – let your search engine and your curiosity be your guide