WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE !!! (Our research journey thus far)

 

Where do you start??

In our case we decided that we would be doing this renovation using good environmental practices from recycling materials already available to us to installing green technology such as green hot water systems, no dig vegetable gardens, low or no VOC paints and finishes, no MDF, insulation, grid interactive solar energy, and so on.

To start this a plan was needed. What should we do first and how do we get most “bang for our buck”

When we started to look into the options available to us, mostly on the internet, it became clear that in Tasmania there were quite alot of options available but not always easily found. That is one of the reasons for this Blog. To bring together all the links that we used, looked at, discarded, to make it easier for other people to do a similar thing, be it on a smaller or larger scale. It can be done, it just takes more perseverance and time.

The logical place is at the beginning, break down the massive jobs down into manageable bits, prioritise, budget and then get on with it. So that is what we did.

It was very obvious that the fascias and gutters were cactus, in fact on the western side we did not need downpipes as the gutter went straight to the ground at one end.

gutter western side of house

 

Since the fascias needed attention then we thought that the roof might as well be replaced and at the same time sisalation and insulation put in under the roof.

rear of house original tin roof

We originally thought that the windows should be replaced with double glazed units

 

The hot water service was only four years old but was a hungry electric model. We were originally thinking of solar hot water.

original electric hot water

So these were the first improvements that we would research and get on track.