Sustainable house renovation

[background music] -What we’ve done to the house is basically accommodate our needs as a growing family. When we first moved into the house, it was just Lucian and I. We now have a home business and three children. We needed an office and some extra bedrooms. It was really important for us to keep the same footprint for the house even though we wanted a bigger house. We just wanted to change the way that we used it. -It’s very open and airy. You feel like you’re in the environment rather than in a closed-up box. -The first thing we did was just make sure that we had cross ventilation. We’ve got ceiling fans in all the rooms. We didn’t really need air conditioning and the vergola not only can you allow the air to come through, you can change the light when it’s winter and keep the last minutes of the sun coming in, warming the house. We’ve complimented that on the other side with a deciduous vine.

00:56 - You’ve got the greenery, which also cools that part of the house, but it drops its leaves in autumn and so that winter sun comes here. -We got a very energy-efficient fridge. We are looking at two door things but they’re not very efficient. We decided to go with the LED lights because they’re the most energy-efficient. A lot of those lights, they don’t look like they’re LED but they are. -Everything that we removed from the house, we wanted to find if possible, another way to use it. We recycled a lot of the bricks.

01:26 - Then they became part of the feature of the house. We got a water tank that was not only able to catch the water from our extended roof but plumbed into our toilet and shower. We actually ended up with more garden space. We could grow more food, we could take advantage of the position of the house in terms of where the sun comes up and where the sun comes down and where the breezes are. Once you’ve decided on a philosophy or how you want to do things, it actually makes it easier to make choices.

02:06 - I think the thing that I liked the most is that it’s still got its story because it has all the things that it had when we first came here and however many years before that, but it’s also got the story of us. It’s got our values and our style and how the way that we use it in here as well. [backgroundmusic] .