Our prestart meeting yesterday meant that we had to make our first lot of selections, which meant committing to enough stuff so that the builder could start ordering construction materials. We struggled a bit with the facade colours. We wanted light colours for thermal reasons, but we didn’t want the …
Today we had our first prestart – woohoo! The aim of this exercise was to go through the addenda and address all the items that would be required for the builder to commence construction and through to roof cover. The meeting took 2.5 hours, and we got most of the …
To the north east of our kitchen is the alfresco area, which will be our main outdoor bbq/kitchen and dining area. It’s not huge, just 18sqm or so, but this will be our main all-weather outdoor room. We have an existing outdoor dining setting which we like, and will put …
With summer well and truly here, thoughts turn to the great outdoors. We’re lucky to have a reasonably large block, so we will have a generous back yard, around 400sqm. Our grand plan is to have several zones, each of which will have a primary purpose. Here is the (rough) …
So, apparently my preferred fan wasn’t good enough. It’s a shame because I really liked the design, but it apparently has noise issues. So I had a quick look at the Choice article and came up with the following decisions. Briefly considered the Haiku, which is gorgeous, but too exxy …
Oh the mundanity of it all! One of the approval conditions on our planning application is retaining all the way down the sides of the house. Ho hum. It’s a cost we didn’t want, and the retaining will mostly be below ground level anyway. As we’re trying to contain costs, the …
** Breaking news – our planning application has been approved! ** This post is also timely as Mr Trixee pointed me to this link about engineering cheaper LED bulbs. I’ve been a little bit obsessed with lighting throughout the design process, and I don’t think that’s going to stop anytime soon …
The library was something we always both wanted in the house. It’s to be an area for reading, relaxing, and contemplation, but also as a secondary entertainment area if the need arose. When I first showed Mr Trixee a bunch of pictures I’d found on the web, he didn’t like …
Work on the demolition has stalled. We had one exciting day of activity, then nothing. They said they hope to finish by the end of next week. Meanwhile, I thought I’d post about the kitchen again. As you may remember from this post, I’ve been quite overwhelmed by the kitchen …
Our demolition started on Friday! First stage is stripping the house of salvageable materials. This stage will take a couple of days, and then they’ll send in the bulldozer (probably on Wednesday). The old house had decorative cornices – nothing too fancy, and certainly not worth getting upset over. But …
Eco Home Style is a blog about building a sustainable and stylish passive solar house in the inner city fringe of Perth, Western Australia.
It's my hope that by sharing this experience, you have some insight into the building process. As the build comes to an end, my focus will shift to what it's like to live in a passive solar house.
