Author Archives: passivenotmassive

Eleven weeks into the build and one of the key components that will make our home a high performing energy efficient house arrived on site, and is now being incorporated into the structure. Three trucks delivered 150 cubic metres of Pavatex, a wood fibre product that will provide two layers of insulation. Insulation is oneContinue reading “Insulation: keeping us cosy and cool”

The top level of our house is cantilevered over the car port. It creates a good looking house! However, it means there needs to be super strong beam to hold the house up in the air without a pillar of some kind. The architects originally specified a steel beam, but we’ve had to swap thisContinue reading “Big Mumma LVL”

We’ve been asked a few times by friends and family to see the plans for our house. Here they are! We’ve been impressed SDA’s clever use of space on a small block ever since we first saw the postage stamp for sale.

Our builders arrived on site late March, five weeks later things seem to be moving along at quite a clip. Here is a quick summary of the last five weeks. The builders arrived on site and marked out the excavation areas for our house in the last week of March 2020. A few days aContinue reading “A lot can happen in five weeks”

In a perfect world we would have designed our house to be a passive house from the very beginning. They are design principles after all! However, as I’m sure you know it’s not a perfect world and we were lucky enough to buy a vacant postage stamp piece of land with approved house plans. AlthoughContinue reading “Imperfect process”

Between purchasing the land and the builder digging a hole we’ve been busy getting to know our postage stamp and tidying up in order to hand a clean site over to the builder. Between the summer heat, bushfire smoke and torrential rain we found time to: prune a few trees (someone was very keen toContinue reading “Before digging a hole – What we’ve been up to on the postage stamp”

We get asked this a lot when we tell people we’re building a passive house, and that’s fair enough as it’s not yet common in Australia. Passive House is best explained by the experts which I’ll link to at the end of this post. We’ve had to create an explanation that works for us whenContinue reading “What’s a Passive House?”

Using the Force to find a builder. As you know finding a builder to build our passive house was a roller coaster ride. Turns out the perfect builder for us was just around the corner. Literally. Feeling flat about all the conversations that weren’t eventuating into an arrangement for us, Gav went out for aContinue reading “A builder, found we have”

It made us both laugh when I compared the emotions of finding a building to online dating. You search online, shoot off an email to one or two who look good, swap a few messages back and forth about your dreams, it feels like you’re on the same page, or they at least sound prettyContinue reading “Who knew finding a builder is like online dating?”

You bought what? How did you find vacant land on the Northern Beaches? Gav has been talking about wanting to build a passive house ever since our first date. How and where to find land on which to build occasionally came up, but I didn’t hold out much hope of finding something locally, especially afterContinue reading “The postage stamp”