After living in copious rentals, picture how exciting it is to be designing a new coastal home that enables ageing in place.

That’s what June and her partner are doing on the coast of Western Australia.

Here more about it here.

Listen to the episode now.

Hello! This is Episode 325, and in it, you’ll meet HOME Method member June, who at the time of recording our conversation, is only a few weeks away from moving into her new home in Western Australia with her partner.

June and her partner are both researchers professionally, so when building a new home, you can imagine that their approach involved researching and getting informed so they could navigate their project confidently.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW.

After living in copious rentals as they moved around for work, June and her partner found their ideal lifestyle location on the coast of Western Australia, where they decided to build their new home. 

This is their retirement home, so it’s designed for ageing in place. They also wanted it to be low maintenance, highly energy efficient, and built using passive solar and Passive House principles. 

In addition, they wanted this home to be pet friendly, climate resilient, a haven to share with friends on their travels, and to be able to live off-grid in a minimalist way for a few days or for a couple of weeks if isolated by disaster. 

Listen in as you hear how they navigated all of their awesome and ambitious goals, whilst living remotely from the site, and managing cost increases in the industry. June shares some amazing information in this episode that I know you’ll find super helpful.

I love how much detail June and her partner have learned about the design, products, materials and processes they’ve utilised in their new home. Their skills as researchers definitely get put to good use in their project.

Before we jump in, let me give you some timing for context.

June joined HOME Method in October 2021. This conversation was recorded in mid April, 2024, with June only a few weeks away from moving into her finished home.

June said that her aims for joining HOME Method were to “avoid costly mistakes that are irreversible. Getting the best value for our money. Enjoying the process, rather than being stressed and worn out.”

It’s great to see that she’s achieved those goals.

Here’s Part 1 of my conversation with June.

This is the transcript of my conversation with June about designing a new coastal home for ageing in place.

Amelia Lee
Well, June, it is so fantastic to have you here, I’m really looking forward to having this conversation with you. You’ve actually been a HOME Method member since October 2021, and I know that you started planning your project in 2020. And, as you just mentioned before we jumped on, you’re a few weeks away from being able to move into your finished home. So this has obviously been a very long journey for you, as any project is. And it’s really exciting to be having this conversation with you at this point in time to get an understanding of the journey that you’ve travelled on, what’s been really important to you, and then being at the pointy end and being so close to being able to enjoy the experience of everything that you’ve planned and thought about and invested effort and time and energy into. So thank you so much for being here.  

I’m wondering if we can kick off by you just sharing what your project is, and who it’s for, and give a little bit of context about the kind of home that we’re talking about?

June
Sure. So my partner and I, we’re both in research. And because of that, we’ve lived in cities all our lives, because we had to be in universities and research organisations. And we’re nature people, we love the bush, we love the ocean. And we really want to escape the city for retirement. So we started looking around, and we found this little coastal village in Western Australia called Green Head, which we fell in love with. And so we bought a block of land here just as COVID was coming in, and so the final purchase of land was all done online. It was quite an interesting experience. And then we spent a lot of time designing it. We wanted something that would suit our lifestyle and suit our aspirations, something that would fit with the environment and be reasonably environmentally friendly, as environmentally friendly as a house could be, which is not that environmentally friendly. But we wanted to try and make it suit some better ideals. And so we spent pretty much all of COVID designing it. During our time, prices went up a lot so we had to change our design. And what we’ve ended up with, we’re very happy with. It’s simpler and smaller, but we like it a lot better. And we’ve just moved to Green Head now, and we’re staying in a friend’s house while our house gets finished off.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, that’s so exciting. Roughly when did the construction process start for you then?

June
September last year.

Amelia Lee
Okay, so you’ve been managing that fairly remotely, have you? Is that your experience of that?

June
Yes. So it is very challenging to do it remotely. It’s about a three and a half hour drive here from where we were living. And so we weren’t coming up as often as we obviously would have liked. It’s also challenging for the builder. He specialises in building remote areas, but he could be building anywhere in Western Australia at any point. And so he’s not appeared that often to supervise. So a lot of it is just been going on, ticking along, but it’s actually gone really well, we’re really pleased with the time. He promised us nine months, and I think it’s going to be a few months under nine months, which is going to be great compared to what most people are experiencing at the moment with house builds.

Amelia Lee
Oh, that’s fantastic. I’m looking forward to learning a little bit more about how you chose your team to navigate that kind of remote experience. Because I can imagine that that really came into play. I’d love, though, to dive into some of the priorities that you had when you designed your home because you had some really clear goals based on where you’re at in your lives, the decisions that you’re making about the kind of future that you wanted. You touched on some of those things that were going to be really important to you. And when we were setting up this conversation, you said to me that you really were looking to future proof the home both from an ageing in place and a climate resilience point of view, you wanted to create an energy efficient home, and just thinking about that general climate sensitivity for where you’re located. As well as, I think you had a BAL rating to deal with, understanding that, and then also making sure that it was pet friendly, budget friendly. As everybody’s experiencing, they’ve all got their own dynamics that come into play as a bit of a jigsaw puzzle for their home design. How did you contend with this in how you were thinking about pulling together your brief, and then navigating that design process, because some of these goals can compete with each other a little bit, so how were you thinking about this as you navigated your design phase for this home?

June
Yeah, so obviously, we had to make a lot of compromises, especially living in the country. For example, there’s no sewage where we are. And we were thinking of going for one of these, they call them ATU, which actually processes your waste to the point where you can use on the garden to water it and Westroads stay dry. So this seemed like an ideal solution to us. Until we actually looked at it in detail and discovered that actually it requires a huge amount of maintenance, you can’t go away for long periods of time, and it costs a lot of money to maintain. So we ended up just with a simple septic system. 

Similarly with the hot water system, we thought, “Oh, we’ll go for a heat pump hot water. That’s the new technology, and it’s meant to be really efficient. But when we started looking into it, all the local plumber said, “Don’t touch it. Coastal area’s really bad, it won’t last more than two years.” And you look at the warrant, the payback time on them is about 10 years, but the warranties are only about 2 or 3 years, which is a bit telling. And I thought, “Well, maybe you never reach the payback time.” Yeah, and the plumbers just said, “Don’t do it.” So we ended up with a really conventional rooftop hot water system in the end. 

So there were quite a few ideals that we had when we came in that we actually had to compromise. And of course, with budget, you can’t always have exactly what you want, it would have been nice to fund full Passive House. But we went for sort of half Passive House, to Passive House principles. But again, we live in a really nice mild climate here. So full Passive House was probably not necessary. We had some consults with a Passive House consultant. And he was really good, he understood that a lot of people couldn’t go full Passive House. And he gave us the best recommendation that compromise of where we were going to get the best value for money out of that. And things like that we had to compromise on. 

The bushfire ratings, too bad really in the end. Because we’re building a Passive House and the house had to be really tight anyway, the bushfire, that allowed for the bushfire rating. Because the bushfire where we are, it was a BAL19, which is basically ember proofing. And if you’re building a really tight house, it doesn’t have gaps in it for the embers anyway. And then the only other thing really was to have a bit more toughened glass in all the glass, and we had to think a little bit more about where the windows were placed. Because if windows are near the ground, then they got to be a higher spec than that up off the ground. And every window has to have ember mesh on, which isn’t a big deal because you’re going to have mosquito mesh anyway. So it just means going for aluminium mesh, instead of fibreglass mesh. So a lot of stuff afterward are slotted into place. And we come up with some really good compromises.

Amelia Lee
How did you factor in the ageing in place? What were you thinking about with that as a design goal for the project?

June
Yeah, so that was mainly around not having stairs is one of the things to say. So we were just a single story, it’s just a two bedroom house, it’s quite small. And it’s also about having wider doorways and wide hallways. So we’ve got a really lovely wide hallway, which has a lovely white night feel about it being really wide. And all the doors had to be really wide. And one thing we had to do, we’ve got two toilets, we got toilet for vanity, and we couldn’t have a swing door because they wouldn’t be in the room to manoeuvre around it. You know, these little toilets where you get in, you have to just back climb on the toilet bowls around the door. So they suggested, “Well, let’s put cavity sliders in.” And they’re great, you open the cavity sliders, and they’re super wide. And modern cavity sliders, I was a bit reluctant at first, but modern cavity sliders are just so much better than those old things you get in rental houses which bang and clatter and leak. These are lovely and smooth, lovely clicky locks in them, and so we’re really happy with them. 

So I think they were the main age in places, just having space to move, having fewer rooms and making them bigger. So you really got space to move around the rooms was really important to us. There were a few other things that were interesting to read about. And for example, they said your eyesight gets worse as you get older. So they said the colour of your toilet should contrast with the colour of the floor. So you can see where the toilet bowl is and you don’t miss it as you’re sitting down. And there’s some really interesting stuff like that to think about, accessible switches, like a lot of dimmer switches are really smooth. And I found these really lovely knurled knobs which the electrician was very dubious about because he’s kind of an old school electrician, but we managed to persuade him in the end that they would work. So they’re really nice. Little things like that, taps with nice big handles on that are easy to turn.

Amelia Lee
Did you always intend to build a two bedroom home? Is that how you started out? Or was that a rationalisation through the budget process?

June
Yeah, we started with a three by two, thinking that’s pretty standard. And then we cut the guest bedroom. So we’ve got two bedrooms. They’re really big rooms. I like multi use rooms, you can sleep in it, you can do sewing, you can do yoga, you can do some Pilates, study. Because I retired but my partner still got a couple of years work to go, so part of his room will be a study. So there’s a lot of space in there to do through multifunction rooms.

Amelia Lee
That’s a great strategy. Because obviously when guests come to stay, they don’t stay for enduring periods of time generally. So having those rooms where you do have some of that flexibility can be a great way to manage your budget and get that multifunctional space happening. So that sounds like a really good strategy in terms of working that through for you.

June
The other thing we did for guests is because we live sort of halfway, sort of between Perth and where you would go north for holidays like Shark Bay, Ningaloo Reef, we made sure we had plenty of space to park a caravan, because a lot of people are coming through caravans. We were a battleaxe block, so to make sure there’s turnaround space and people could back a caravan in. Because we’re expecting a lot of people will just stop on the way up north or the way back down south. And that will be a really good way to catch up with friends without them having to make a special trip to see us. So that was really important to us to be able to accommodate friends like that.

Amelia Lee
I love that because that actually demonstrates you thought really intentionally about how the home was going to be used by the different people that might come to visit. We just make a lot of assumptions, I think, that we need to provide a home. But if your friends are largely travelling on the road, and they’re already taking their accommodation with them, then making sure that they’ve got somewhere that they can park it that’s not going to annoy all of your neighbours or be a big problem. And as you say, turning it around, those caravans need a bit of space. So I love how you’ve thought that through in terms of being able to accommodate that and not just assume that it needed to mean an extra room in the house.

June
Yeah, our friends are really important to us. And I think a lot of them are quite distressed that we were moving to the country and they wouldn’t see us very often. And so we had to reassure them, “Don’t worry, we’ll make it really nice to come visit. It’s a lovely place to visit, especially in summer.” So yeah, we’re hoping that we’ll get a lot of visitors passing through. A lot of our friends are into similar things like we are, windsurfing, diving, surfing, and so they’ll come up here for those things.

Amelia Lee
Oh, that sounds fantastic June. And in terms of thinking about the climate resilience and that future proofing aspect and the climate sensitivity, sensitivity generally, how have you gone about incorporating that into your home design and construction and perhaps material choices? You mentioned the heat pump and thinking about that. What are some of the things that really, you were considering in regards to that future proofing idea?

June
Yeah, so we’re expecting in this area that it will get hotter and drier. So we were thinking that’s why we wanted to go for a really well insulated house. Green Head is a typical coastal village. It’s asbestos shacks and fibre shacks, and nobody has really good insulation. Most houses don’t even have ceiling fans, you’re lucky to have an air conditioner up here. So the houses really aren’t well built for heat. So for us, building something really well insulated was really important. So people tend to spend more money on quantity rather than quality, they want a bigger house. So it’s not well built. And so we wanted to go the other way, we say we want something that’s really well insulated. 

We often have power outages here. Because in the country, the power is not so reliable. And we don’t want the house to heat up. If the power goes out, you can’t cool it for half a day or even a day. And we want the house to remain a constant temperature. So that was really important. Just being able to allow for the fact that in future it’s going to be even hotter. I mean, this summer has been a great example, it’s just so hot. 

It’s mid 30s at the moment up here, even though it’s well into autumn. So it’s unusually hot. And it’s going to be great to have just that really well insulated house that will get us through time. One thing we’re very aware of, you hear on the news that people losing power during storms or floods or bushfires. And sometimes they’re without power for weeks, and that was something that we were very aware of. When you live in the country, especially in a small town, you’re low on the priority list to get power back on. So we’re going to be the last people, we could be without power for a really long period of time. And so that was something we looked at and said, “Okay, well, we’re going to go for solar panels. But should we have a battery as well.” So we decided we get a battery as a backup for during the power outages. But when we looked into detail, batteries are really, really expensive. They’re not the most efficient way to store energy at the moment, because it’s so expensive. And so we decided in the end that we’re going to go for a hybrid system, we will also have a generator. So the nice thing about a battery backup is it kicks in automatically. So if you’re not at home, it will kick in, your fridge will keep going and lights will keep going. But then if it’s going to be long time, like weeks, the batteries are just not going to cut it unless you’re spending $100,000 on battery system. 

So that’s why we decided, even though I was really negative initially about having a generator because of fossil fuels, I decided in the end, that was really the only way to really allow for those long breaks when you might be without power for several days. I mean, even in Perth, we’ve had power breaks one time and we had four days before we were back on power again. And you wouldn’t expect that in a city. But if it’s that bad in Perth, then imagine what it’s going to be like here. So yeah, it was really important to me that we could still keep running off grid. 

And then the other thing, of course, is water. So we’ve put in a 25,000 litre water tank, even though we’re in a town. And we’ll make sure there’s always water in that so if there’s a bushfire, we’ve still got some water if we need it. Because apparently when there’s a bushfire, everyone turns the taps on, of course, and then there’s no water pressure. So having our own water with pump, and the pump can be run on a generator, we’ll still have water that we can deal with bushfires. And we can use that water for the garden. And we’re also putting that water through a hot water system. This was recommended by the plumber. Because again, because the water is very, very hard up here, it could be corrosive. So he said, “If we put it through your hot water system, your hot water system will last a lot longer having rainwater through it.” And it means when you shower, you’ll have 50/50 hard water, soft water, so you have much nicer water to shower in. So yeah, that’s some of the things we’ve been doing.

Amelia Lee
I’m just hearing how much detail you’ve dived into in terms of nutting these things out and weighing up the pros and cons. And it’s that thing, isn’t it, there’s never one perfect choice. It’s got to be informed by all of the different components that might drive the best decision for the situation, balancing your budget and your needs. Did you find that, generally, and I imagine your skills as a researcher certainly assisted you with some of this, do you find that decision making tricky or challenging? Or did you find that once you went, “Okay, well, these are our priorities, this is what we want to spend,” that having done that pre-work to figure that out helped inform that decision making to be a bit clearer for you? How did you find all of that navigation of those decisions?

June
Yeah, I mean, you’re right. As a researcher all my life, I naturally just want to do research. It’s what I like doing. So I really enjoyed the design phase, the build phase is a bit more like, “Ah, I’m just sick of it.” Whereas I loved the design phase, because I love that research phase. And, yeah, you can come in really idealistically at the beginning, but then you do have to compromise. And I think it’s really important to be prepared for the fact that you will have to compromise on what you really would like to be able to do. And a lot of it’s also about the Australian Building Industry not being very progressive, and that can be really hard. And dealing with trade, you don’t necessarily want to do anything different to what they’ve done before.

Amelia Lee
Especially in a remote location where it’s…

June
Old school.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, that’s a nice way of putting it.

June
So in that way, you got to be prepared for your battles. What do you want to fight for and what you don’t want to fight for? What are you just going to go, “Ah, it’s too hard. Just do it however you want it.” Sometimes you just got to go, “Well, okay, if you want to do it that way, just do it. Because I can’t be bothered fighting over that thing.” Yeah, there’s been a lot of compromises. But on the whole, we’re pretty happy with what we’ve had to compromise to.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, well, it sounds like you’re still achieving a really fantastic outcome. That 25,000 litre tank, is that an above ground tank?

June
Yes, it’s a big poly tank. Usually in bushfires, they recommend going metal. We decided to go poly because of being a coastal area, and we don’t want it to rust. So we’re trying to go plastic if we can, even though, again, plastic’s not a good product for the environment. My feeling with plastic is if you’re going good quality, and it’s going to last a long period of time, then plastic’s as a product to use. It’s those cheap plastics which don’t last very long and degrade under the sunlight and get brittle and go everywhere. I think those are the plastics we really should be avoiding, and using plastic where it’s a really good product. And especially if you get recycled stuff, like we’ve been looking at decking for the verandah using the composite stuff, which is made from 100% recycled plastic bags. I think that’s great. Because in Australia, we’re not recycling plastic bags, but if we have a product that they can go into, maybe we’ll start recycling plastic bags again. So I think it’s really important to form a market for those things. And then it becomes economically viable for companies to actually start recycling things.

Amelia Lee
Now, anybody who’s listening to this would go, “Oh my gosh, she’s all over it.” Like all of the details, all of the things that you’ve been thinking through… Can you think back to the very beginning, you joined HOME Method in October 2021, you’d had the land for a while and you’re thinking that through… Can you remember back to how you felt embarking on this project and thinking, “Okay, how am I going to get my ducks in a row? How am I going to wrap my head around this?” Were you overwhelmed? Or did you think, “Okay, I feel like I’ve got the skills and the tools to navigate this if I can access the right information and people”? You said in your onboarding form that you were concerned about keeping it in budget, dealing with tradespeople, not getting a great quality home… Can you think back to that time, what your biggest concerns were about with the project?

June
Yeah, it was very intimidating starting out. We were excited about the prospect of being able to design our own house, because I think being academics, we’re not paid very well, you have to move around a lot. So we’ve lived in lots and lots of really terrible rental houses. Everything, from a limestone cottage in Fremantle, to something falling down. You know when you’re a student, and you’ve got five people living in a two bedroom house and that sort of thing. So yeah, we’ve lived in a lot of different rentals, we’ve moved every few years.  

And then we finally bought a house in Perth, and that was the only house we’ve owned until we started building this one. And that was a really useful tip because we did some minor renovations, we did the kitchen up, improvements on the bathroom, we also improved the passive shading of the house because it was a very hot house when we first bought it, improve the insulation, and things like that. Having done even though small things really helped us understand a bit about what it’s like to deal with tradespeople, how long it takes to do things, what it involves, that sort of thing. 

Especially with the kitchen, when there were a few things I really, really stressed about… They hadn’t got the cupboard at perfect right angles to the ceiling. And I was really unhappy about that. But after they painted it, you couldn’t see. And I thought, “Oh, I stressed over something that later on, you can’t even tell that it’s not perfect. And you don’t notice, no one ever looks up there at the ceiling.” So I take those ideas when we’re building the new house, and I look at things and I go, “Oh, that’s not perfect.” And then I think, “But does it matter? Probably doesn’t.” Most of the time, it doesn’t matter. So that was really useful preparation for what we did, and didn’t want to do in the new house. And I started by listening to all your podcasts, I found your podcast, I just listened to more going, “Oh, this has great information.” And from that I found out about HOME Method. 

And I think that was really good for us because of that lack of confidence. It overcame some of that confidence thing. We don’t understand the system, we don’t understand how to navigate the system. Having all the checklists, like we found it really useful when we went to interview the builder that we had your checklist. We could go to them and say, “Okay we’re doing this course, we have a checklist for questions. Do you mind if we ask?” And he said, “Fine, no problem.” And so we sat down and went through the checklist.  

Whereas, I think, if we’d just gone in, we would have been very unconfident about what questions to ask, whether they were invasive questions or stupid questions, whether we should even ask them at all, and I think we wouldn’t have asked many questions. You tend to not ask questions because you’re scared of stuffing up somehow and making a fool of yourself. And so having your list and going in and going, “These are the questions we have to ask”, that was just so helpful. And it made it really efficient and quick, that we could just sit down and go through all these questions… “Yes, I have this, I have this, I have this.” And we found out a lot more about the builder doing that. So that was really good.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I mean, that’s the whole idea, isn’t it, just to streamline and make those steps that you have to take far more efficient. I always think that the quality of information you get depends on the quality of the questions that you ask. And as a researcher, I can imagine that that’s been your experience as well. And so having the right questions so that you’re not like a deer in headlights, feeling like you’re treading on toes, and can get the information that you need to make better informed decisions, I suppose it just equips you then with having a platform from which to operate in a much more informed way. So it’s fantastic that that was your experience of it. Thank you for sharing that.  

You mentioned that you worked with some Passivhaus certified professionals, and you were thinking about tackling this as a Passive House. But then through budget and other decisions, made a call to just use the Passive House principles and then seek for the home to be as airtight and energy efficient as possible. When you were selecting your team members, and being remote to the site, what was important to you? And how were you juggling who was local to you, who was remote to you, how much you were doing online, what you were going to have to commit to personally in terms of travelling to the site, how are you bringing all of those pieces together to get the right team for yourself?

June
Oh, when I say there’s a team, it’s really loose. And it’s not like team when you describe it, it’s more like people that we talked to. And then we tried to get them together sometimes, but they wouldn’t get together. Initially, we were thinking building the house out of SIPs, the Structural Insulated Panels. And the SIPs place recommended an architect to us. Her background was in commercial architecture, not so much residential. So we actually quite like that because it made her very straightforward and down to earth. She wasn’t into all the fancy, expensive stuff. She was just like, “This is what you need.” And she drew up the house we wanted, the original three by two house. And then time went by, end of COVID, and we got it costed and it was going to be too expensive, because everything had just gone up so much, like incredible prices. So I learned a lot from her. 

She was great, we’d meet and sit down and talk about it and talk about the ideas, and that gave me enough confidence to redesign the house myself, keeping the same principles there but making it simpler. Because one thing that the Passive House consultant really pushed, he said, “The house should be a rectangle” He said, “Every corner loses heat and costs a lot of money.” He’s going, “Why have you got this corner? Why have you got this corner? Why have you got this corner?” And I was going, “But that’s how houses are built, aren’t they?” In Perth, everything is kind of jagged, yeah, steps in and out. That’s just how houses are built. And he said, “No, that’s bad.” 

So we ended up with a rectangle, the four corners, simplest route, Skillion roof. So this roof is really simple. And I felt comfy enough to design that myself. So I just took the ideas that I had and all the information that I’d learned from the architect, and I drew it. And then by then, we’d selected a builder. And the builder had a draftsperson. So I went to the draftsperson, gave her my design. And she drafted that up, and we were really happy with the design. Yeah, that worked really well.

Amelia Lee
Who was local to you? Who was remote to you?

June
Yeah, so the architect came up to site, even though she was Perth-based. She said, “No, I won’t design it until I’ve seen the site.” She was great. She didn’t charge us for that, she said, “No, we’ll just come on one weekend just because I love that coast.” And she came up, and that was really good. And the builder is Perth-based. But as I said, he works rurally so he builds all around Western Australia, mostly in the southwest, as well as in Perth. And we used the Passive House consultant, he’s also Perth based. He built the first Passive House in Perth, and you can find out that information online. There’s lots of information there about the house he built, it’s really good. It was really good talking to him about that experience. So that was sort of our core team. 

And again, we were going to do prefabricated walls for the house and prefabricated roof panels. And there was a pre fabricator, they were robotics engineers, and they built a machine so they could build the walls and roof inside a building. And I thought this was great, because up here, it’s really hot, it’s really windy, there’s sand and dust flying around everywhere. When it’s not windy, there’s flies. It’s the most unpleasant environment, I’m just thinking if I’m a tradesperson where he doesn’t know nothing about it, I’m not going to do as good a job because I got flies crawling on my nose and it’s hot, it’s 35 degrees. And I really liked the idea that the house is built in a warehouse. He said, “I can get tolerance down to two millimetres, everything will be perfectly right angles.” Because I’m that very precise kind of person, I loved the idea of things being built very precisely. And so that was going to happen, then unfortunately, the guy who owned that company died suddenly, unexpectedly. And at the last minute, we had to find someone else to build more traditionally the timber frame walls. So they constructed the wall, the roof trusses, and the walls in the factory, but everything else was done on site. So last minute, we had to do a change. 

So some of the things we really wanted to do, you know, things change. And so pretty much all the main trades come up from Perth, the carpenters who did most of the work of the building came up from Perth, and they would come up here for a week or two at a time and just blitz at work really long days, and just work really, really hard and then get back down to Perth. But we did find some local trades. We got a local electrician, he’s great. Plumbers are not quite local, but they’re an hour’s drive away. Yeah, so we managed to find as much local trades as we could, because we really want to support the local community. I think it’s really important. When you’re living in such a small community, it’s really important that you become part of that community and that you work with the local people as much as possible. But they also understand that there’s a shortage up here, as everywhere, of tradespeople, and they understand if you have to bring people in from outside. But I think it’s really really important to support the community as much as possible, and if you can get stuff locally. Green Head, itself, only has about 300 people. So it’s really tiny.

Amelia Lee
Tiny, isn’t it? 302 now.

June
But we’ve got Jurien Bay, which is about 20 minutes drive away, and that’s a little bit bigger. It has hardware stores and shops. It has a supermarket and it has a medical centre, although apparently takes five weeks to get an appointment there. It’s not much easier to most people, but they do have the main facilities you need and it’s only 20 minutes drive away, so it’s not really very far to go. So yeah, we get a few trades up from there as well, if we want things as well so that’s good. Our kitchen was built in Jurien Bay. There’s some really skilled trades people, actually some of them are really amazing, so that’s great.

Amelia Lee
That’s fantastic. So what did you end up cladding the house in then? If you’re doing that timber frame, what did you end up choosing for your cladding and your insulation? Because I can imagine with that panelized process, you’re probably getting all of that in one component, as well as the air tightness and being able to build it in a factory, how did you try and replicate that with the material choices that you made for it to be built more conventionally?

June
Yeah, so we used the biggest panels we could get from the Hardie fibre cement on the outside, because I wanted as few lines as possible, just to reduce the cleaning. Another thing we were told to do is the size of the house should match the size of your cladding panels, because then there’s least wastage. So if you go for standard sized houses lay in, everything should be in at least one metre and better to be in three metres. So our house is in like either one metre or three metre components, which is quite interesting. Actually, the carpenter said, “You should make it slightly smaller than that, because if you don’t get it exact, if it comes out slightly bigger. Go a few centimetres under one metre or three metre length. So that’s better.” So we’ve got that planking on the outside, then we’ve just got very traditional Rockwool fibreglass insulation. 

In true Passive House, you have two ventilated cavities, one on the outside and one on the inside. So we’ve just gone for the external ventilated cavity, and not the inside one. So the Gyprock goes straight onto the timber frame, but on the outside, you’ve got the wrap around the timber frame. And then you have battens, which gives you the air gap, and then the cladding goes on the outside of that. And the battens have to run vertically, so if you get condensation, the water runs down and out. And then you have a gap at the bottom and the top for that airflow to come through, which is something we had to balance with the BAL rating because, of course, with bushfire, you can’t have gaps. So what they had to do was put a mesh at the bottom and top gaps just to seal that all off. And same with the roof, because it’s a Skillion roof and the ceilings follow the roofline, we don’t have a roof gap, much to the dismay of the electrician. It’s got no space to get into. So everything had to be done perfectly. 

But again, it’s exactly the same thing, you’ve got the timber frame, you’ve got the Gyprock underneath, then they’ve got a separate wrap that goes over the top, and then that’s all taped onto the wall wrap, so it’s just continuous wrapping. And then on the roof, they put two sets of battens before they put the roof metal on. So we have one which runs down the dip of the roof to allow the water to run off, and then another counter batten which goes the other way and you’ve got a bigger gap for much better airflow through that roof space. So that’s also to control the moisture condensation. Obviously under the metal roof, you’re going to get a lot of condensation. It will drip onto the wrap and then just run straight over again.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, such great strategies.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

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RESOURCES:

Air Tightness and Blower Door Tests with Jessica Allen, Climasure >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-blower-door-tests-jessica-allen-climasure/ 

Building Science 101 with Jesse Clarke, Pro Clima >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-building-science-101-jesse-clarke-pro-clima/ 

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