Thursday and Friday marked the first anniversary of the bushfire disaster that razed more than 200 homes in the Blue Mountains, and Harrison counts himself among its more fortunate victims.

Only five months after the site was pegged out by the biggest project builder involved in the recovery, Hotondo Homes, Harrison, his wife and two children will move into their 270-square metre, four-bedroom, brick-veneer house next Friday. The old house would have sold for about $320,000 but the new one – with only $20,000 added to their mortgage – could fetch $700,000 or more.

Not everyone has rebuilt so quickly; not their homes and not their lives. In one cluster of five destroyed houses, four of the couples have since separated.

On the account of one building inspector, one-third of the victims have rebuilt, one-third are building or planning to, and the other third may never attempt it. Most will take a few years to reclaim a "settled life", says psychologist Rob Gordon, who has worked on disaster recoveries since the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires and who met about 100 Blue Mountains locals at Springwood last week.

Many of their favourite things will not have been missed in temporary accommodation and will only come back to haunt them in their new homes. "But they need to feel the pang, to register that  loss," Gordon says. It is healthy and they need to make an "inventory of losses".

Andrew and Tracy Curtis are about to move into their new home at Yellow Rock, but how will Andrew ever tally the emotional investment in his thousands of vinyl records, all destroyed with the old house? Still, he has Tracy, 12 months after she called at 3.15pm on October 17 to say: "I love you. I don't know if I'm going to make it."

"We have lost homes, not houses," says Katrina Schlunke, who attended Dr Gordon's community session. She bristles at the persistent question – will you rebuild? – because there are deeper considerations than bricks and mortar. She and partner Susan Brock are yet to decide whether to rebuild in St Georges Parade, Mount Victoria. None of the other six neighbours who lost homes in the same street is yet to commit.

Gordon says people who take time, and give priority to their emotional recovery, often fare better in the long run.

Back at Winmalee, Mr Harrison crouches by the grave of Oscar, the family's 17-year-old cat killed in the fire. The Harrisons will make do with their Salvation Army-donated furniture for the next six or 12 months, having spent their contents insurance on bricks, mortar and fire-regulation requirements that account for about $100,000 of their $430,000 rebuild.

Inside, Mr Harrison presses a button and an extruded aluminium external shutter whirrs down to block the view. These flame-resisting shutters, over every glass door and window, cost him $21,000. "Every day, it will be the responsibility of the last person out of the house to close those shutters," Harrison says.

"We still live at risk here … We came for the beauty 11 years ago, but we're mindful and respectful that mother nature can come and bite you on the arse again."

Each block must be rated for its "bushfire attack level", from the low-risk BAL 12.5, next to 19, then 29,  then 40 and finally Flame Zone, the Harrisons' rating. Fire-protection building requirements, and cost, rise accordingly – and it can come down to a fickle few metres or an arbitrary line on a map.

Andrew Carroll, from the local Hotondo franchise run by C & S Duncan Builders, mentions another of the 16 destroyed homes that it is rebuilding. The Rural Fire Service had deemed it Flame Zone, but by budging the building envelope just one metre forward on the block, the council agreed to make it BAL 40.

"Which is absurd," says Mt Victoria builder Rolley Clarke, because a firestorm or ember attack will not respect such delineations. "We need to use our brains, not simply obey dumb laws."

Blue Mountains architect and bushfire specialist Nigel Bell also has frustrations. Stepping outside the box, he says – even if it involves better and safer design – can create long delays in approvals. In Emma Parade, Winmalee, his clients Ron Fuller and Susan Templeman are still awaiting development approval for their bespoke, Flame Zone, eco-friendly and fire-smart design to replace their destroyed home.

The couple are understanding, saying the council has treated them well. One hold-up is the proposed sleek all-metal roof, minimising any gaps that might allow ember attack and "at least as safe", says Bell, but without the added costly layers of ply and blanket insulation in the Harrisons' roof and most of the other rebuilt homes.

Directly across the road in Emma Parade, Kim and Dave Bartush are about to move into to their replacement home, delivered by Dave's brother, designer/builder Philip. "For the first six months I was running on auto-pilot," says Kim. Ironically, she says, patience and tempers have frayed the closer to completion.

With an extra buffer from the bush in the gulley, the Bartush home was rated BAL 29 at the front and 19 at the back, although their old house was no less a ruin than that of their Flame Zone neighbours.

Bell and a Katoomba colleague, Ross Young, are among 11 local architects who gave free advice at open days for bushfire victims, but almost none of the recovery work has come their way.

Young says the speed and economy offered by the project builders – less than $2000 a square metre for the Harrisons against the likely $3000 for an architect-designed home, before adding for fire regulations – will have been attractive to people who endured the trauma of a fire.

The end result may be the difference between chalk and cheese, but he laments: "It also reflects the fact that only about 10 per cent of Australians choose to use an architect, in any case."

Young and partner Kim McClymont are close to finishing their own home on a ridge at Katoomba, which Ross designed for Flame Zone, although he might have had cause to argue that point. He reasons that Katoomba was spared in the last fires but may not be in the next. Looking over tree-tops to the Jamison Valley, he says: "That hasn't gone up for about 50 years."

His builder is Rolley Clarke, who lives with wife Robin at the end of St Georges Parade, Mount Victoria, a speckle of houses surrounded by dense bush. Clarke was out driving on October 16 last year, observing a distant blaze at Lithgow, when he came upon the beginnings of a fire caused by a fallen power poll. He uses his hands, as if sizing a fish, to indicate how small it was.

In seconds it was "the size of a table". He called the emergency number, but the fire took off in 100km/h winds towards his community, about a kilometre away. Firefighters were on the case in seven minutes but not soon enough to save his seven neighbours' homes – including that of friends Katrina Schlunke and Susan Brock, which he had built – or another two nearby.

He and two local men refused to evacuate and saved four or five houses.

But Clarke insists there is no way to negate risk, and he worries that a pedantic preoccupation with fire-proofing new homes amounts to fiddling while ignoring the burning issue: the Federal Government's "refusal to take climate change seriously".

Robin Clarke adds: "Only this week, Tony Abbott was saying how wonderful coal is for humanity. Dickhead."

Their neighbour Suzie Crosbie will not be rebuilding. A fireman dragged her from her blazing car outside her home. Husband Simon rescued her 86-year-old mother from inside the house, which then "went up in seconds". Their two dogs survived but their cats, geese, ducks and chickens died, and all they had spent 30 years building was lost.

Two weeks later, her husband – a "wonderful man and father" – decided it was time to move on. He ended their marriage.

"My whole life changed in a matter of hours. That kind of thing only happened to people on television, but there I was on TV. And yet a terrifying ordeal like that can make you a stronger person in the most unusual ways."

At 60, Suzie Crosbie has moved on, too, and opened a bed-and-breakfast at Canowindra, in central-western NSW.

Given the year she has had, she says: "I'm as happy as I can be. I'm looking forward."