We spent most of the summer languishing on the couch, under the fan, in our new house, playing games and drinking frozen cocktails. I think we were well and truly exhausted, and a little bit burned out, trying to recover from the shock of spending so much money all in …
Tuesday was a momentous occasion – that was the day we got our keys! Key handover is the time when the house passes from the hands of the builder back into the hands of the owner. The culmination of all the hard work over the last 3 years! We picked up …
One of the biggest milestones in building is what’s called “Practical Completion” (PCI). This means the build is basically finished, and all that’s usually left is a few minor fixes. At this stage, we undertake what’s commonly called a Practical Completion Inspection (PCI for short), although our builder calls it …
One of the more banal sides of building is purely functional exterior paving. Using a thermal break between the paving and the house prevents the heat absorbed by the pavers from being transferred to the slab.
One of the most exciting parts of the build for me is happening right now. When you get your cabinets and tiling done, that’s when you start to get a real sense of how the decisions and selections you made all those months ago come together, and you hope it …
The title of this post might give away my feelings about our new marri floorboards. I think they’re beauuutiful! Here’s the scoop: we decided on Standard and Better grade, with the boards 130mm wide and 13mm thick. Why marri, you ask? I’ll be brutally honest with you – I don’t …
Some days, you just have to laugh. Thursday was one of those days. Nothing went remarkably wrong, mind you, just a few little missteps that make you at once groan and chuckle at the stupidity of life in general. We decided to get our marri floorboards from Chelsea Flooring, and since …
The lovely Jo at House By The Water has been stalking following my building progress remotely from Brazil, and has been sending me updates of my own progress using Nearmap aerial photography. Isn’t she a champ? I’ve been secretly hoarding these images so that I could do a time lapse of sorts, a …
This is what every home builder dreams of – the day you are locked out of your own home! Ordinarily, I’d try and write something meaningful, but today I’ll let the pictures do the talking… OK that didn’t last long, I can’t keep quiet any longer. This is the …
One of my biggest building neuroses centres around ceilings, and this came to a head when we started talking about built-in pelmets and curtains. I nearly had a meltdown over this trying to explain what I wanted, because I simply did not know the right terminology. I tried to find pictures, …
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.
