The new episode of Grand Designs Australia features a house built from Canberra red bricks and the floorboards of the Canberra Centre.
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00:00These are Canberra red bricks, and they're an iconic brick.
00:04I think half of Canberra is built out of them,
00:07and as Canberra has, well, as people have renovated
00:10or knocked down and rebuilt houses,
00:13there's been these red bricks that are available,
00:16and for a while there, you could pick them up really easily.
00:19I think they were cheap,
00:21and now they're getting really hard to find,
00:24and they're expensive,
00:25because I think people are starting to see their value,
00:28both just in the beauty of them,
00:32but just the functional property, too.
00:34There's a lot of gumtree and Facebook marketplace
00:37and scouring.
00:39We needed thousands and thousands of them,
00:42which meant it's, normally you do a project,
00:45and you're gathering a couple of hundred,
00:46and you might build a pizza oven or build a path,
00:48but to build a whole house out of them,
00:50it's a whole different ballgame, so.
00:53People are quite precious about their Canberra reds, though.
00:55You do find that some people are like,
00:57I don't know, I'm saving those for a project
00:58that I'm gonna do one day,
01:01but no, listen, we've gathered them
01:03from a myriad of places,
01:05and it's been a labour of love for a number of years.
01:09So the top of this table is the old floorboards
01:12from the Canberra Centre,
01:14and they were picked up by a local craftsman
01:17who found them in a skip out the back,
01:20and many years later,
01:22I happened to cross the table on gumtree,
01:24and he'd made it, was leaving town,
01:27and I picked it up for the bargain price of $100,
01:31thinking that it would be a workbench for the shed,
01:33but it was far too beautiful for that,
01:35so it's found a place in our home,
01:37and I can't see us ever replacing it, to be honest.
01:40I think it'll be here for as long as we are.