Mandy Knebel's Journey

 Hi all, Sorry this is a bit delayed as I wanted to get a pic of the house design/plan up on this blog. So as we all know there is a few ways of getting a design or a house plan, most commonly, engage an architect or a designer  (amongst other ways) or  do what I did and draw up hundreads of plans. (Litterally hundreads of plans!!) After spending months of doing just that,  drawing plan after plan after plan, I finally came to my senses and started searching for an architect that was experienced in high performance / energy efficient homes. This was not a particually easy task even though I found some on sites that were registered for this type of house design but when talking to some of them, I would be there first one!!! EEK and seen as this was my first one I wanted someone with a bit of experiance. I also found some very good, experienced architect/designers but they were out of our budget. There is a lot of hours that goes into the design and drawings of the typ...

  Hi Everyone , so blog 2...  Today as I mentioned on my Mandy Knebel The Journey face book post today, I found very useful information on a what I think is a NZ Government site..... "Smarter Homes". Here is the link if you want to take a look... https://www.smarterhomes.org.nz/smart-guides/siting-and-location/house-orientation/   This reminded me of a manual I read some years ago now. I came accross it before starting my design or  looking for an architect. I read this manual more than once in fact a few times it was called  "Design for the sun", it was very useful. Lots of information from including orientation along with layout design, Insulation, heating, over heating, and much more. So Orientation... This was one of the first items in the manual and this is a biggy, when I say a "biggy" I mean very important for a high performance or energy efficient homes ect. We allready have the land and it was perfect as long as we designed and orientaded the hous...

 Hello to everyone, reading my very first blog! This is my first attempt to write a blog, and it has taken me a while along with a few generouse helping hands to help set me up as I am a techniphobe!! The reason I want to do this blog is because I am very passionate about warm, energy efficient healthy homes that don't cost the earth and this blog, is my journey in building just that.... A warm, healthy home on a tight budget! It feels like so much time, researching and learning about how to do this, it would be sacriledge not to share it with others. Just as brief back ground how I became interested in this type of home building... About 6 or 7 years ago my husband brought me a book on small houses in NewZealand as I loved tiny homes. This book led me to colect other books and I learnt about Passive houses, high performance houses, eco houses, energy efficient homes ect, which gave me the first introduction to wanting to build this type of home or something similar, so the seed wa...