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 type of home we were intending to build and I under estimated the cost in this initial stage, so had to revise the budget slightly. 

Then one day I was reading a home magazine at the dentist of all places and there was a really cool article on a high performance airtight  home being built in Raglan. The owner being the architectual designer!!

Well I then got wisked into the dentist, reluctantly leaving the magazine on the table. As soon as I came out (Yay, no fillings!)  I asked if the receptionist if they could photocopy the article for me and instead they let me take the magazine home with me. 

The archtectual designer in the magazine who was building the home in Raglan name was Alice and she sounded perfect so all it took was  a phone call to arrange a visit to her nearly finished built home and site visit to my section and that is how I found my archtectual designer.... Rubix Architecture ... here is a link to her website if you are interested in taking a look. 

https://www.rubixarchitecture.com/

The very first design Alice came up with for us was really lovely, both my husband and I loved it, however we had to scale it down a bit and simplify the design to fit our budget. (I will go into the details on that a bit more on another blog.)

This is the design we are going to council with.. the first pic floor plan, secound pic Mezzanine. (pics are not to scale)











The storage mezzanie will be a massive plus.

North faces directly up the page, so as you can see, it has really good placement for the winter sun and the eaves give it enough shade in summer so we dont over heat and this placement is super important and a key component to making this high performance home work.

There is also so much more to building a home like this and we are really wanting to have a warm and healthy home, so I will go into what  we have decided to build the home out of and why, along with budget restraints.

Feel free to coment or ask questions.

Bye for now



 

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