Our Low Impact House - the journey begins!
Moving from a townhouse into a house
We’re about to start a new journey in lowering our environmental impact. In the next few days we begin the process of moving from a townhouse into a new freestanding house. The challenge will be to see just how much we can lower the environmental footprint of the house, and the inhabitants living in it!
The house has good and bad environmental aspects. The medium size back yard faces about 30 degrees east of north, so there are reasonable prospects for passive solar heating, solar hot water, photovoltaic cells and vegetable growing (in the Southern Hemisphere, a northerly aspect is ideal for solar access - its the reverse in the Northern Hemisphere). On the negative side, the house is around 50 years old, dating it to a period when designing for the environment was practically unheard of! There is very little insulation, and a lot of the living areas are on the cold south side of the building. Come winter, the only heating is provided by a single unflued gas heater.
It’s been a while since the house had any tender loving care, with peeling paint throughout, and carpet that has well and truly seen better days. So another challenge will be attempting to give it a facelift with the least possible environmental impact.
There are going to be plenty of compromises along the way. Some of the “greenest” options are going to be out of our price range. We’re going to have to go through the renovation bit by bit, as we save our pennies. And, despite my best efforts, my attempts to persuade my wife to accept the introduction of a composting toilet appear to be in vain!
We’re expecting to make plenty of mistakes along the way. Our plan is to “think aloud” on these pages as we work through the various decisions, and we’d love to hear peoples’ thoughts and experiences in the comments.
Hopefully, it will prove to be an educational experience for those of you following our progress. All the fun of renovation without the mess!
(Image by “the truth about”, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)
Categories: DIY, efficiency, energy, environment, green, housing, recycle, reduce, solar, water
Tags: house, low impact, project, renovation
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November 25th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I’m looking forward to following along - we’re in the process of retrofitting our own 30 year old house.
Incidentally, how did you go selling the old house? Did all the environmental features make any difference to prospective buyers? What kind of feedback did you get?
November 25th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
The old house is a townhouse and pretty bereft in the way of environmental features. The lack of yard meant no water tanks. The shared walls meant no wall insulation. And the combination of multiple levels and a body corporate made solar hot water a problem.
(Its not all bad! Our lack of yard meant less water use spent gardening. Its smaller size meant less heating and cooling.)
The savings we made in the townhouse (like reducing our power consumption by 1/3!) were down to simple things like CFL globes, water saving showerheads, and turning appliances off at the wall.
Hopefully the “new” house is going to have a lot more potential. We can hardly wait!
December 22nd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
[...] Our new place had been a rental for the last few years, and a little TLC is definitely called for. So before we make any massive changes, we’ve decided to give it a bit of a “face lift” by way of new floors, fresh paint, and new light fittings. I’ll post about all these things over the coming weeks, and some of the things we’re factoring in to our decisions. But first stop, (and the first thing completed!) is the flooring. [...]
December 31st, 2008 at 4:35 pm
[...] isn’t rocket science, but is complicated a bit this year by our move to a new house. The new house is going to let us explore a range of new environmental options that weren’t [...]