Builder | Healthy Spaces | Sustainable Homes

Have you checked out our episode? If you missed it, you can still catch it on ABC iView, episode 10 of Grand Designs Australia Honestly, we had a ton of fun filming this, and were very keen to get the message out their around the importance of building better, educating the industry but giving people the confidence in an industry that can sometimes be a bit of a minefield to navigate. The whole idea of our home was to try build Australia’s healthiest home, and we gave it a pretty good crack and after living in it for nearly three months now, we can tell you it’s been a game changer. I really didn’t know what comfort really looked like before this, well I thought I did and it’s been totally flipped on its head. Anyway, I won’t spoil to much if you have not seen it, but hopefully you can take something positive away from this episode. PS - huge shout out to the whole Grand Designs Crew - it’s totally not like the block where they try drum up all this drama, and really support and cheer you on to succeed. Never once did we feel like filling was a burden on the project or timeline and super grateful we got to document this part of our lives.

How it’s going vs how it started! Yeah, it’s a little different. Few years fighting council to allow us to build on this site slowed us down, but we eventually got there. In the end we were able to knock down a shed, that use to be the home of the Yarraville Pigeon Club (hence the now name Pigeon Passive House), and build a new home that is one of the healthiest and most comfortable homes going around! Anyways, jump on the most recent series of Grand Designs Australia, Season 12, Ep 10 if you want to check out our Episode called Yarraville Pigeon

Our hypothesis was correct. You can turn an old volume built home, constructed in 1993, into a certified Passive House without removing the roof or wall cladding! Ohhh, and it can look sexy too! This home demonstrates that we can improve existing houses rather than knocking them down. It’s a home that hopefully gives people the confidence to realise that it’s possible to renovate the millions of homes already in existence and bring them to this level of comfort, and it doesn’t need to break the bank. This also challenges the notion of what comfort is. It’s not about running a heater to warm up your home; it’s about not needing to, because your home is able to maintain a stable indoor temperature on its own. True comfort is having high-quality indoor air and a consistent, comfortable temperature without the need for excessive energy use. Maybe comfort is defined as wearing shorts and t shirts in winter and having to convince the kids that they need to put a jacket on when they go outside because it’s cold! So check out the new issue (it’s a 20th anniversary special) of @sanctuarymag where you can read all about our Rifle Range Retrofit project plus many other amazing homes that are pushing the boundaries of what is possible! Builder: @carlandconstructions Interior Designer: @hehedesign Passive House Modelling: @passiveanalytics Passive House Certifier: @hipvhype Feature Timber: @craftedhardwoodscom Windows: @binq_windows Mechanical Ventilation: @passive_tech Styling: @hannahnowlan Magazine: @sanctuarymag

Most people assume their home is losing heat through the walls. It is not. It is losing it through the ceiling, and pulling freezing cold air in through the floor to replace it. Every hour. All winter. This is called the stack effect. And it is working against you right now. Warm air rises. In a leaky building it escapes through every gap at the top, around ceiling penetrations, exhaust fans, downlights, roof junctions. As it leaves, cold air is drawn in through every gap at the bottom. Under doors. Through floorboards. Around power points on external walls. The colder it gets outside, the stronger the pressure difference. The stronger the pressure difference, the faster the air moves. A leaky two-storey Melbourne home in winter is essentially a chimney, and the same physics that makes a chimney draw is draining the heat out of your living room continuously. Downlights, exhaust fans, pipe penetrations, unsealed top plates. Each one is a hole the stack effect uses. And in a standard build, almost none of them are sealed. The answer is airtightness. Not door seals. Not gap filler. A tested, whole building airtightness result that proves the envelope holds.

Huge win for the construction industry For years, accessing Australian Standards cost money. The documents that tell you how to build correctly — behind a paywall. Think about that for a second. The industry wonders why the standard of building in this country is so low, and the baseline rules for doing it right were not even freely available to the people building. That is not an accident. That is a structural problem. Last night’s federal budget changed that. Mandatory Australian Standards are now free. For builders, for trades, for anyone who wants to understand what the correct way to build actually looks like. This matters. Not because the Standards are perfect — they are not, and the NCC has a long way to go before it reflects where the rest of the world is building. But removing the barrier to access is a step in the right direction. You cannot educate an industry on documents people cannot afford to read. We have always believed that education is the only thing that genuinely moves the building industry forward. This makes that a little easier. Not solved. Just easier. Access was never the only problem. But it was a convenient excuse. That excuse is gone now.

The condensation on your window is telling you something. The condensation is on the outside. Not the inside. Most people see this and think something is wrong. It’s actually one of the better things you can see on a window on a winter morning. In the average home, condensation forms on the inside of the glass. That happens because the heat inside the house is escaping through the window and hitting the cold surface on its way out. The glass is cold because the heat is leaving. That moisture you wipe off every morning is your heating bill disappearing through the window. That’s where mould starts. Not on the surface you can clean — in the structure you can’t get to. Our condensation is on the outside. Not the inside. When condensation forms on the outside, it means the opposite is happening. The inner pane is warm because the heat stayed inside. The outer pane is cold because none of that warmth made it through the glass. The dew forms on the outside because that’s the only cold surface available. That’s triple glazing with a thermally broken frame doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. One window. Two completely different outcomes. You won’t see the difference from the street. You’ll feel it the moment you sit next to it in July.

We could not find a HRV duct outlet on a recent project. It had been closed in and no one could pinpoint exactly where it was sitting behind the wall. Instead of pulling off plaster and hoping we got lucky on the first attempt, we pulled up the pre-plaster scan on the Ricoh Theta. Found the outlet in under a minute. Opened up exactly where we needed to. Done. That one moment paid for the camera. This is why we scan every project at demolition phase and again pre-plaster. Not because it is nice to have. Because when you need it, you really need it. Every pipe, every duct, every cable run is locked in before the walls close up. Accessible to the whole team from anywhere, at any point throughout the build. Most builders are still relying on memory and marked up plans that never quite match what actually got built. When something goes wrong, it costs time, it costs money, and someone ends up wearing it. A camera that prevents one plastering mistake pays for itself many times over. The fact that this is not standard practice on every site in the country is a problem the industry needs to sort out. Ps - if you want to get one of these cameras hit up @crkennedybuild - one of the best things we have purchased!

No scripts. No fluff. Just real talk about building science (and a few drinks along the way). 🍻 This month, we’re diving into uncoupled slabs, and the gap between building science theory and what actually happens on site. It’s not just for builders. If you’re an architect, designer, engineer, consultant, or even planning to build your own home, you’ll want to pull up a chair for this one. All you need to do is register, grab a drink, and tune in as our experts break down the nitty-gritty (and occasionally disagree). 🗓️ Thursday, 28th May— 5:00 PM AEST 💻 Free Online Event 🔗 Sign up via the link in our bio or at Join the conversation and be part of a community that’s not afraid to question, learn, and laugh along the way.

We have built a lot of subfloors. This is the best one we have ever done. The biggest failure we see on site is insulation getting saturated during construction. Builders throw the batts in, drop chipboard over the top, and move on. By the time the roof is on, the insulation is full of water and has nowhere to dry. That moisture does not disappear. It sits there and starts doing damage no one can see. We have tried a lot of solutions over the years. Plastic sheeting, waterproofing coatings, all compromises. The Adhero Visto from Pro Clima is the first off-the-shelf product that actually solves it. We had serious rain on this build. No water entered the subfloor. Not a drop. But the membrane is only part of it. Here is the full picture. We install a WRB upside down on the underside of every joist before the insulation goes in. Think of it like a wall rotated 90 degrees — it holds the batts in place and stops wind washing from gutting your R-value before the floor is even closed up. We use 190mm joists because they fit an R5 batt perfectly. No compression. No performance lost. We use green tongue over yellow tongue, better sheet sizes, comes squarer off the truck. Every board gets poly glue on the tongue and groove, then screwed down. The amount of sites still using liquid nails and hand nails on flooring is a concern Once the deck is clean, the Adhero Visto goes straight over the top. Transparent so your markings stay visible. Watertight so the structure underneath stays dry. Water is the thing that kills buildings. Everything above is just us refusing to let it win.

Every morning the windows are dripping. You wipe them down, but they are back tomorrow. Most people blame the windows, but they are just the messenger. Warm air inside your home carries moisture. When it hits a cold surface and in a standard build, the glass is almost always the coldest surface in the room, it cannot hold that moisture anymore. It drops it. That is the dew point. That is your condensation. The real problem is what you cannot see. The surfaces behind your plasterboard, in your wall corners, and at your ceiling edges may already be below the dew point too. The window makes the problem visible; the wall cavity does not. A correctly specified window with a thermally broken frame, high-performance glazing, and an airtight install keeps the glass surface close enough to the indoor air temperature that the dew point is never reached. The condensation stops. Not because you managed it, but because the building stopped creating the conditions for it. Your home should work for you, not against you.

The new part of the house is so comfortable they don’t want to go into the old part. That is not a sales pitch. That is a client who now lives in both worlds at once and has stopped choosing the old one. This is what a retrofit done properly actually delivers. Not just lower bills or a better blower door result. A part of the home that feels so different from what came before that the contrast becomes impossible to ignore. The air is cleaner. The temperature holds. The noise drops away. And at some point, crossing back into the old section starts to feel like stepping outside. That feeling does not come from one decision. It comes from every layer working together, the wall build-up, the windows, the ventilation, the airtightness. When it all clicks, the home stops feeling like a building you manage and starts feeling like a place that just works. Most people do not know a home can feel this way until they are standing in one. The standard is not good enough. We are.

We have not done one of these for a while hey! So what has been happening on our sites? - We got approval to get started at our Keilor Passive House that is targeting certification - We have made huge progress in the demoltion of our Retrofit project in Altona - Our Wellington Passive House has been fitted out with joinery and painting has begun - Our Pigeon Passive House got the final tick of approval from the certifiers - We had three new team members start with us - We were in Adelaide recording a few podcasts which was a ton of fun - We have 4 projects that have moved on from our feasability stage to our explore stage where they will now get a full project estimation (3 of the 4 are targeting passive house certification) So yeah a fair bit has been going on and it’s been a bit to juggle but we have an awesome team who are able to manage it and pull rabbits out of hats.