What Smart Home System should you choose for a new build?

In this podcast episode, we share the design, selection and coordination process for Cindy’s project.

Learn the selection criteria and considerations Cindy had for determining the best Smart Home System for her new build.

You’ll also hear how Cindy considered Wifi vs Hardwired, and how the Smart Home System has been built into her new home.

Listen to the episode now.

Hello! This is Episode 343, and I’m back with Cindy, HOME Method member, designer and Thermal Performance Assessor, giving us an update on her new build.

We’re talking about her Smart Home System design, selection and specification, as she shares the details of including this in her new build project.

And we also discuss how she’s worked with her build team to ensure the sustainable details – even those they may have never done before – are being correctly included and built in her home.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW.

If you haven’t had the chance to hear the first part of this conversation, you can head back to Episode 342, and hear Cindy share details of how she’s navigated having the timber frame of her home exposed to the elements and wet weather for longer than anticipated. And what that meant for mould growth and remediating the frame before the project could continue. 

This can be a big problem for many projects given we build outdoors and can experience wet weather conditions over long periods of time. You don’t want your project to continue and a timber frame to be lined internally and externally if it’s damp or has any mould growth on it, as it’ll cause long term issues for your health and the home’s durability as well.

You can find that episode and its transcript by heading to Episode 342.

In this episode, I pick up the conversation where we left off Part 1, and my question to Cindy about how she’s worked with her team on site to manage their newness to some of her requirements, specifications and sustainable home goals.

We also have a great discussion about the Smart Home System that Cindy decided to include in her project, including how she chose the system she’s specified, the team members she worked with to coordinate the design, and the various considerations that led her to make the selection she did.

And lastly, Cindy will share a fantastic piece of advice for anyone who is navigating their renovation or new build journey to help you maintain your sanity and stress levels, so stay tuned to the end of the episode for those insights.

There are some big take-aways I want to hone in on for this conversation for this episode, and the previous one. 

The first is Cindy’s discussions in the first part of our conversation in Episode 342 about documenting her discussions, the project process and keeping written records of what was going on. 

This is incredibly important for protecting your future self, managing risk on a project, and ensuring you have what you need should you need to clarify communication, argue your case or pursue more serious legal endeavours in your project. 

Inside HOME Method, we share a sample agenda for a Site Meeting, encourage you to have a dedicated email address for your project, and to take notes on any verbal conversations or anything shared over text and Whatsapp, so you have dated, recorded notes about progress, conversations and important project information, as your project progresses. 

I can’t emphasise the importance of this enough! It is so essential to keep those written records.

Secondly, Cindy’s comments about retrospect and 20:20 hindsight are SO true. It is a luxury and it can be hard to recognise before you’ve dived into this that this WILL feel big, that your mindset will play a big role in managing challenging situations, as will your knowledge and education level. 

And so ensure that you’re surrounding yourself with the right knowledge, the right team and the right community so you can navigate these situations with more grace, less stress and feeling supported overall. 

Before we jump in, let me give you some timing for context. (It’s like an audio version of Grand Designs where the date is flashing up on the screen as we travel through the episode!!)

Cindy joined HOME Method in October 2021. 

Our first conversation on the podcast that’s featured in Episodes 321 and Episode 322 happened in February 2024. 

In those conversations, Cindy shared the first update on her project, and we discussed her design phase and early construction experience. So you can check out those episodes and I’ll pop the links in the resources if you’d like to hear more of Cindy’s project story.

Then, the conversation I’m sharing in this and our last episode in July 2024. 

At the time of talking in this chat, Cindy’s home is due to be finished in late 2024. 

Here’s Part 2 of my conversation with Cindy.

Now, let’s dive in!

This is the transcript of my conversation with Cindy about managing her wet mouldy timber frame and its remediation before construction continued, and what it meant for her project progress overall.

Amelia Lee
Now, the other thing that I think has been really interesting about your project is, like you said, you’ve got a builder who is open and receptive and working really well with you in the level of communication and collaboration, which is really awesome. That just, I think, underpins a really great foundation for a great project. Because when you’re working with somebody who is like that, and then is solutions-oriented, it does just make the custom process of coming up against hiccups and hurdles a lot easier to contend with. Of course, though, you’ve had particular things that you’ve wanted to do from a sustainability and a longevity and a condensation management point of view. And you’ve got a builder that isn’t necessarily experienced in doing all of those things, which I know lots of people in the industry are experiencing, because we’ve had such a massive exponential uptick in everybody needing to upskill for what we’ve been learning about how buildings perform. Can you talk me through how some of those decisions that you’ve made about the detailing and the materials and the construction of your home? How you then navigated that with a team that haven’t necessarily done this before to make sure that you’re still getting a good outcome?

Cindy
Yeah. So, our build team, so there’s a core team of guys that are on our site all the time, so I’ve gotten to know them really well. And then we’ve got the specialist contractors that come in to do different bits and pieces. So, it was really interesting at the start, because wearing all these different hats – I’m client, I’m designer, I’m thermal performance assessor, I’m project manager. So when I first stepped on site, I think they saw me as the client. And so they definitely react to you differently, like you’re there to check on things and that kind of stuff. Whereas they’ve gotten to know me now, and they’re like, “Oh, thank goodness she’s here. I’ve got all these questions to ask.” So that’s been really good. Because builder and I are both across everything, when he goes away, he’s just like, “Yeah, call Cindy.” So, that’s really comforting to know that there’s that level of trust. 

And he knows that if I’m unsure or I’m never going to make a final call on anything without his input, it’s more exploring things with the team. And if he’s not around, I go, “Okay, well, this is what we think. Let’s see what Justin thinks at the end and he can make the final call.” So, I think having that trust in how we work together is really important. And then, working with the build team, it has been a particular learning curve for them in terms of the ventilation cavities and how they’re working on this build. It’s very different to what they’ve done before. We’re trying to keep that 20 mil ventilation cavity between our wall wrap and the cladding, but that also extends all the way up underneath the roof sheeting. We’ve got that wrap over the roof, and then we’ve got our insulation layer for the roof and the walls all the way around that. So it’s just a completely different way for them to work. 

And it’s been coming to the fore, probably in the last couple of weeks particularly, because we’ve just been doing the external cladding. So they’re battening out all of those cavities and then putting the cladding on. They’re working with different cladding than what they normally would do. They normally use James Hardie, but I’ve got them using Cemental. So it’s just a slightly different way of working, but it’s more about how those cavities get sealed up at the bottoms and the tops, and in the eaves and with the starter strips, and all the different pieces that they need to put in there. 

And it was just really serendipitous, about two weeks ago, I turned up on site, because I only live five minutes away from site, so quite often I’ll just drop in when I’m driving past. And I dropped in, “How you going guys? Where you up to?” And the apprentice sent me down the side. He’s like, “Oh, they’re just about to lay the first weatherboard for cladding.” I was like, “Awesome. I’ll go and check it out.” Just as they were about to do it, I tapped my fingers under the bottom bit, and I was like, “Well, where’s the little strip that vermin proofs that bottom cavity?” “Oh, hadn’t done that before.” Like, they’d never had to think about that before. So then we’re all scurrying around all the products on site to try and find it. So, just little things like that seem little, but they’re actually quite big. So, being able to catch it at that point was really important. And now, they’re totally across it and know exactly what to do with that. And actually, this week, we’re talking about what we’re going to do with the eaves at the top. So that’s totally different to what they’d normally worked with as well. So yeah, it’s just those little details that are different. And often, when there’s a question like that, it’ll send me down a research rabbit hole at home, pulling out more detail from the installation manuals and all that sort of thing, printing them all out, taking them to site, going, “Right, let’s sit down, have a look at this, work out what we’re going to do.” And then we agree and move on from there. So yeah, everybody’s learning through this process, and they’re loving it. They’re going to be upskilled at the end of this build. So they’re quite happy.

Amelia Lee
That vermin proofing little section, had it been ordered and they just overlooked installing it? Or it had not been ordered yet?

Cindy
I’m actually not sure, to be honest. Because I went back a couple of hours later and there was a packet of it sitting on top of the cladding out the front. And actually, I’m not sure whether they just ordered it, whether it was there and we hadn’t seen it. Because there’s two different ways you can do it. You can just direct fix it to the wall wrap, which is probably what the supplier had assumed that they were doing, and therefore not supplied that. Whereas, yeah, we hadn’t specifically ordered it. So either way, it was only two seconds away. All they had to do was give them a call and ask for what they needed, and it was there. So, it was just being able to catch that. That was really important.

Cladding installation [SOURCE]

Amelia Lee
It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because I can hear homeowners going, “Well, how the hell am I supposed to pick that up if I’m not there, or I don’t know that it’s needed?” And, I think, it then goes to, okay, well, if you don’t feel like you’re confident enough or able to be on site with that regularity, as you said, you are wearing a lot of hats in terms of the professional side of what you’re doing and the project management side of what you’re doing, as well as the client side. And so then, it’s a case of, well, it’s just got to be detailed in the drawings, and it’s got to be detailed in a very specific way, where it’s like a one to five or a one to ten section. And you can see the little vermin channel, and you’ve got the name of the product, and you’ve got it in the spec, and all of those kinds of things. I think too, it’s one of those things that because of your role in the project, there’s flexibility, I think, for your documentation to not need to be as significantly detailed as if you were not going to be there, or you were just the client, and you didn’t have your architect or designer involved, and you were just relying on the builder to get it right, versus your ability to be there on a regular basis. And I think too, because that happened, they’ve now gone, “All right, okay, what’s our next junction that we’ve never done before that we need to chat with Cindy about and make sure we’re getting it right before we do it? So that we make sure we’ve got the parts. We make sure we’re all across the detailing.” And that, I think, is a learning curve that any builder needs to have in their business. And it’s really good that this builder is thinking proactively like that, so that they can then make sure that it’s not just happening at this detail, but they can get it right in those other details.

Cindy
Yeah, for sure. And I’m already getting questions like that from the build team. They are starting to think ahead, and “What do you want us to do in this corner?” Or, “What do you want us to do with this connection between this material and this material?” And I remember having those conversations with Justin during the design phase – how we’re going to connect these two things up together. And because I was going to be on site all the time, and we knew that, it was like, “We’ll work that out when we can see it and when we can actually physically work with it.” But, yeah, I guess it’s a luxury, in some ways, that I can do that and I’m learning along with them. But yeah, if it was my next project, I definitely will pull those details out and make sure that’s all in the construction documentation, so that it’s very, very clear how these ventilation cavities and stuff like that will work.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, well, you’ve always treated this project like it’s going to be the opportunity for you to prototype and test and experiment with the things, which is, as a designer doing your own project, there’s things that you’ll do on your own project that a client may not be willing to adopt or explore. And so, you being able to do it like that… And I know when we’ve done our own renovations, there’s things that I’ve gone, “No, we’re just going to wait till we’re at that point, and then we’ll be able to see it and touch it and feel it and get a better sense for it.” Because you do have the luxury of being a professional inside the industry doing your own project to be able to do that. 

I think that the danger is that some homeowners who aren’t professionals treat their projects like that, and the process with their builder doesn’t accommodate it. And so, if you are, as a homeowner, navigating it like this, and you’re thinking, “Well, I just want to be able to wait until I see it on site and then have that conversation with my builder”, then you need to be really frank with your builder before you start, that that’s what you’re going to do. And then, also, make sure that you’ve got the budget and contingency for any potential variations that might happen if you do change your detail that’s beyond what they anticipated it would be. So, I think it’s really lovely, the collaborative relationship that you’ve created with your builder, and that you are treating this like, “Okay, what do I need to learn from this project to be better?” And that the builder’s doing the same thing in terms of navigating future projects. With the wrap, the Proclima, was that the first time that they had wrapped a building like that?

Cindy
Yes. And funnily enough, Proclima brought out a product, well, they advertised it about two weeks ago, there’s a clear, protective sheet that you can put over your yellow tongue flooring to protect it from the weather. I’m like, “That would have been fabulous last year.”

Amelia Lee
I know, I saw that come out. And I was like, this is somebody thinking, these frames are sitting out in weather. It’s funny, isn’t it, you look at Grand Designs in the UK, where they don’t start when they know that they’re not going to have enough runway before winter. And, I think, in Australia, we just go, “Well, it’s just sunny all the time, and we’ll just build when we build.” And nobody’s going, “Let’s actually look at the weather and make sure that we’re going to be in a particular stage.” But I do know, a lot of Passive House builders that I speak to, or builders that use those Proclimba wraps, they do work very, very quickly to get their house to wrap up stage so that they can get the wrap on, and then they know that it’s got some weather resistance. And, literally, the scheduling is about racing to that point. And so, I think, this builder, now that he’s seen this, I think it’ll be really good to see if that’s how he starts approaching future projects. So with the Proclima wrap… Proclima has a strategy where they sell through a lot of builders, and those kinds of things as supplies, and then those builders can often provide training to the builders that are installing it. Did that happen with your project?

Cindy
Yeah. So, there’s another builder in Port Macquarie, who is doing green homes now. So, he was looking at doing Passive House stuff up here, and then moved into a green homes kind of area, and he’s been great. He’s supplied all the wraps and the tapes and all that kind of thing, and advice to me about how it all worked. Because I wanted to get my head around it before I started talking about it on site and that kind of thing. And he had the nice model in his office of the wall and the roof connection, and talked me through that. We did lots of detailing on his whiteboard. And yeah, it was really, really helpful. And I know that he has been out on site maybe once or twice, just to have a chat to the guys. And he’s there if Justin’s got any questions and that kind of thing. And he was super interested in what kind of windows we had chosen, and just really interested in what we were doing with our project. So it’s nice to have a growing community of builders here in the area that are starting to talk about the same things. And we’re all trying to work together and upskill each other. So, yeah, it’s been really good.

Amelia Lee
Fantastic. So it’s mid July 2024, where is the site at now? Like, what’s been done? And where are things situated in terms of completion?

Cindy
Yeah, well, I was on site this morning. So, today was a very productive day. We’ve got the plumber on site. We had the electrician on site. We’ve got the tiler on site doing some bedding on the rooftop terrace upstairs, because we got to get all that finished so that we can close up the nib walls up there and get it absolutely watertight, because we still are getting rain. If it rains, we are still getting water in through those walls. So we’ve got a massive, big tarp over the top of it, so it looks like we’ve got a tent on top of our roof. But yeah, the plumbing has pretty much been roughed in. And yeah, the electrician and our Smart Home Designer met on site today. So, yeah, getting our electrical team together to start work in a couple of weeks to rough all that in. 

Walkthrough with the electrical and Smart Home Design team [SOURCE]

So, we’re still not at lock up. We’ve got a bit of work to do with the windows. There’s a few of our timber reveals around the windows that copped a bit of the weather, unfortunately, as much as we tried to protect them. So we will replace a few of those. So we’ll wait for the timbers to come in for that. And the bigger windows that are around the pool, we can’t even put them in until we’ve got those reveals in. We’ve got a bit of drainage to put in for those, bit more slab work for the alfresco. But yeah, we’re close. We’re getting close to lock up. And I kind of feel like once we get to lock up… Sometimes, projects tend to slow down after they’ve got to lock up. I feel like this project’s actually going to speed up once we get to lock up, because everything else is done. It’s all planned, it’s all there, half of it’s sitting in my garage. So it’s kind of like, bang, bang, bang, bang. We’ll just get it in, get it done, and hopefully, we’ll be moving in in November. So, fingers crossed.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, well that’s the thing, you’ve made all of your decisions. There’s a couple selections that are outstanding, in terms of just finalising things, but it can then just be just straight execution. So it’ll be really interesting to see, and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for you that you’ll be able to move in in November and get settled in before Christmas comes. So, the smart home stuff, can you talk me through? Because I know you were backwards and forwards about what you were going to do about that. What did you end up deciding with the smart home and how’s that gone about?

Cindy
Yeah. That took me months and sent me down a massive rabbit hole, again, of learning about the different options with smart home. Because there’s just so much. There is so much, and it is, again, a science unto itself, which is why I really wanted to find the right person to work with that could help me design the whole system along the lines of what we were wanting. So, again, I’m coming at it from a healthy home perspective. I want to reduce the amount of Wi Fi we’ve got in our house. I suffer from migraines, so I’m really sensitive to all of that. And so, our electrician is definitely on board with that in terms of the wiring for PowerPoints and that kind of thing. But then, my husband’s really keen and I’m really keen to have that smart home technology in the house, to have it functioning really well, but also future proofing it in terms of adding on different elements and those kind of things. We want it to perform well. So, the only way that I could meet both of those things was to do a hardwired, smart home solution, which sent me down the C-bus route, which then sent me down the Control-4 route, which is basically the user front-end to the C-bus wired system. So, that’s essentially what we’ve ended up with. So, our electrician is going to do all of the networking wiring, all of the C-bus wiring, based on the plans that our Smart Home Designer has put together. And then, he will come in later on and plug it all into the distribution systems that are needed, and program all the switches and all that kind of stuff. So, I’ve done the lighting and the electrical plan with a bit of input from Caribou. They helped me with the lighting plan, which was fabulous. And yeah, they’ve taken that and added to that what they needed to. And yeah, they met for the first time today, and just so nervous. I was like, these two people really need to get along.

Amelia Lee
I know you said in the group, it was like the parents meeting for the wedding.

Cindy
Honestly, I felt like the wedding celebrant, getting the parents together the night before the wedding, and it was just like, “They’ve got to get along.” And they did. And I knew they would, they’re very similar people. And they’re very professional and very skilled at what they do. So, it was great to be part of that conversation. And I can just see it all coming together now. And yes, it is going to be a bit more of an investment. But at the beginning of this build, we had known that we were going to have a bit of a bucket of money for variations and other things that were going to come along. So yeah, this is just part of that. And so that’s pretty exciting.

Amelia Lee
It is. How did you go? Because those C-bus units, particularly when they’re wired, can take up a fair amount of space when they come to their hub and their network. How did you find accommodating that in the floor plan, when you hadn’t started the design with necessarily that in mind?

Cindy
Yeah. And that was something that we spoke about this morning as well. And I had asked Gavin about that previously, that thankfully, I’d already put a tech hub into our cabinetry plans, near the bottom stairs, and that was mainly to house a charging drawer and the old desktop computer that you can do bits and pieces on. And we had always envisaged having a smart home tablet there on that wall. So that’s what that was all for. Thankfully, the comms rack and one of the distribution boards will fit into that tech hub, and that’s going to serve as the back of the house. And then the front of the house, which is the other side of the stair void, so that was the other challenging part, was actually getting everything either side of that stair void is going to sit in the back of the upstairs store room, which is where our HRV system is. So, I’d already had space up there in mind for that anyway. So yeah, it’s just going to sit up there with that. So, there is the space, and it’s going to follow the same paths that the HRV system duct work is going to follow anyway. So, I had thought through it from that respect. But yeah, it takes up a lot more space than you would think, but we can’t put it in the garage. The garage is covered with block work and steel and all that kind of thing. So, it’s much easier to keep it within the footprint of the house or within the habitable areas. So yeah, that’s what we decided to do.

HRV Mechanical Ventilation System [SOURCE]

Amelia Lee
Yeah, and I actually see some builders prefer to keep it in the house and have it more readily accessible, so that it’s part of the homeowner’s experience of the home, rather than being tucked away somewhere that’s not visible. 

I used to work with a builder that I did several projects for over a period of 12 years. He would build houses and then live in them for a while and then sell them. And he was very big into the wide C-bus systems. And yeah, he always wanted them in between the living spaces. He always had a particular cupboard that then had the vertical shaft. And yeah, the design of the floor plan, trying to not sever the floor plan somewhere. The staircases in those homes were always to the side somewhere, so that the C-bus system could run vertically and not necessarily need to split. So it’s quite interesting. We’ve talked inside HOME Method, the smart home thing is always a tricky thing, because you talk about future proofing, and then there’s some things that we just don’t know what technology is going to do in the future. 

Somebody asked about AI, and another person in the group said, “Do you want to use AI? Do you want to protect yourself from AI?” It is, it can be this great, big black box of uncertainty. And, I think, if it’s something you want, you have to draw a line in the sand. And then, as you say, get that impartial advice that’s going to help you understand all of the available systems, and then figure out what’s going to work for you based on those priorities that you’ve established, which for you was that healthy home and the sensitivity to those electromagnetic fields and all of that kind of stuff. So, I think it’s a really great lesson in how do you navigate something. That is a big area of knowledge, that you can feel completely overwhelmed and paralyzed by, and then not make a decision to instead go, “Okay, well, I know these are my criteria. These are my priorities. This is what we have in the house. This is where we want to go. What’s going to be the ideal solution?” And I’ve seen Wi-Fi systems on very high-end homes where the internet’s gone out and they’ve not been able to do anything. Like, they don’t have lights at the house, no override, nothing available to them. They’re totally beholden to when the internet comes back online. So, it swings around abouts, isn’t it?

Cindy
Yeah. And in retrospect, it’s almost like a whole nother design phase in itself. And you approach it the same way that we did to the design of the house. Like we talk about in HOME Method, we’re putting together a brief of what we want, and had to be really clear about that. And in every conversation that I’ve had with any of the industry professionals, particularly for this part, I’ve had to start with that so that they knew exactly where we were coming from. Otherwise, they just throw us, “You want your Wi Fi to be as strong as possible, so it’ll reach the entire house.” Or, “You can do all of this wirelessly”, and all this sort of stuff. And it’s like, let’s just not even bother talking about that, because that’s not what we want. We’re actually looking for Wi Fi points that are as concentrated and as narrow as they possibly can be. And yeah, that’s it. I don’t want anything else to be wireless. So yeah, you got to get really clear on what you need, and then explore from there. But it was a real minefield. Yeah, it was interesting.

Amelia Lee
Well, congratulations on coming up with a resolution.

Cindy
I just feel like I’m just so grateful that I found Gavin, someone that will actually just bring it all together, just give me a plan to work with.

Amelia Lee
That, again, that’s a credit to you. You knew what you needed, went about looking for it. Those people do exist. And so, it’s that thing of being clear about it. So, it is definitely a credit to you. So, before we wrap up, is there anything that you want to share, or anything that you’re navigating right now, or anything like that?

Cindy
I guess, retrospect is just such a luxury.

Amelia Lee
20/20 hindsight, hey?

Cindy
20/20 hindsight, yeah, absolutely. And I know a lot of homeowners feel like this, and I’ve seen a lot of my friends go through builds, and everybody in HOME Method. And there are those roller coaster moments of that anxiety that you just can’t shift and you’re not sure why, and then months down the track, you’re like, “Oh, what was I worried about that for? It’s all okay.” So yeah, I think, knowing that the people around you are knowledgeable, are trustworthy and are on your side, and are working with you, that’s really important. I think, if you don’t have those people around you, that would make it really challenging. So, you talk a lot about finding the right team. But, I think, that’s got a lot to do with how you vibe with those people as well. It’s not just about finding the experts in the area. It’s about finding people that you can connect with and that you can work with, and that will be an advocate for you on what you want to do. I think that’s vital. And then, being able to, I guess, trust and relax into that when you do have those anxious moments is really important.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, that’s fantastic advice, Cindy. I think it’s tricky, because people can feel like choosing the right professional is a matter of pot luck or getting the right referral. But time and time again, I see when you know the questions to ask, you know what you want and need, you can then have different kinds of conversations with these potential team members. You can see if they’re seeking to understand where the expertise gap is and meet you where your needs are and expand what’s possible for you. And also, as you say, be like minded, be vibing with you in terms of how you communicate, how you look at life, shared values, alignment of those kinds of things. And then, because you’ve done that work of sifting, filtering, embedding and selection, methodically and proactively, then you can trust the decision that you’ve made with the people that you’re working with. 

And I say, “HOME Method members, you can spot red flags.” You can go, “This isn’t meeting my expectations, and I’m going to call this to account,” like you did with your engineer, and navigate that still and know that it’s not ever just a fixed point in time, it’s something you got to keep working at and keep building that relationship and working in that relationship, like in any relationship that you have. And particularly with something like this, it’s such an intimate process. It involves a lot of cash. It involves a lot of emotion. There’s, it’s like you say, that roller coaster. Even with all of your preparation, it’s still an incredibly emotional experience, creating your own home. And it blindsides a lot of people. And I think that, yeah, it is so critical that you have people in your corner who can normalise that for you and go, “Hey, yeah, you’re going through what every homeowner goes through. This is completely normal. You’re not crazy. We’ve got your back. We’re going to help you do this. And yeah, we care about this.” So, yeah, it’s really, really great advice. 

So, thank you so much, Cindy, it’s been so awesome catching up with you. I love hearing about how you’re navigating everything. You’ve got such a great approach to your project. And I think you’ve taken on the challenges. Because it is challenging being the professional, as well as being the client, and particularly with your learning and growth as a professional. This is an enormous opportunity for you to be testing a whole heap of things. And then it’s also a nerve wracking experience, because it is your first real foray into this, and being able to explore this healthy home approach to your project. So I love that you’ve just been so generous in what you’ve shared in our conversation. I know that there’ll be loads of people that find this super helpful. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Cindy
Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure, as always. I look forward to our next chat already.

Amelia Lee
Cheers, Cindy.

RESOURCES

Cindy’s Project Instagram Account >>> https://www.instagram.com/shindysbeachhouse_build/ 

Cindy’s previous project updates:

• Episode 321 ‘A New Home Build with Family and Sustainability in Mind, with Cindy’ >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-a-new-home-build-with-family-and-sustainability/ 
• Episode 322 ‘Choosing Materials when Building a Sustainable Home, with Cindy’ >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-choosing-materials-when-building-a-sustainable-home/ 

Access the support and guidance you need (like Cindy did) to be confident and empowered when renovating and building your family home inside my flagship online program, HOME METHOD >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/courses/the-home-method/

Learn more about how to interview and select the right builder with the Choose Your Builder mini-course >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/courses/choose-your-builder 

Access my free online workshop “Your Project Plan” >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/projectplan