Mandy Knebel's Journey

 Yay we have gone to council with our house plans ...finally!! It will be worth the wait as the design stage of a high performance home is really important to get right but we are finally in council! But lets talk windows today... Exciting stuff, I am hoping to catch up with our window supplier (Fabian) and our energy efficiency consultant (Claudia Kaltenstadler) this week as they are both up from the South Island. So seen as Fabian is up this week seems like a good idea to go over why we picked his windows. I knew  we had to get thermally brocken windows but I had to do a fair bit of research to look into what that meant and in laymen's terms... thermally brocken window frames are insulated aginst cold and heat conduction. This is done by seperating the outside metal parts from the inside with a product/ material which reduces the amount of cold or heat transfered through the frames. This is know as the  " thermal break" . We also wanted to have really good airtight wind...

 Okidoki.. So tonight I finished my 3D model of our home that we are going to build. I am supposed to blog about big ticket items like windows or MHR (Mechanical heat recovery units) but I got to excited about my model building! so here is a video of it for you to see...Hope this works if it doesn't work I will load the video onto my facebook... So short and sweet today as its taken me probably around 10 hours to make my model over the last two evenings and its not perfect but I am pretty happy with it. I will be be back next week to go over some of the big ticket item decisions we made and why we chose the companies and the products they supply.

 Okidoki... So like I said in the last blog, this is the kitchen Story!! As I mentioned on yesterdays blog, I had been searching on trade me for few months for an exdemo or nearly new entire kitchen for sale for our new build and I found one and did a buy now. I love to recycle but I did not want just any old kitchen for our lovely energy efficient home! So the down side to my bargain kitchen was we had to get it out of the house in just under a week as the house was going to be demolished! So then the sleepless nights start worrying if the kitchen was goiong to be ok and how we were going to remove and pick up this massive kitchen with solid stone benches. So after swapping my work day about on the wednesday and my hubby doing the same we set our alarms tuesday night ready for an early start on the wednesday. I must have been really stressing about it because I got less than 3 hours sleep that night, I think I was freaking out that I hadn't seen it and was it going to be good enou...

 Hi all Well I did mention budget in the last blog... and our budget is tight and in this blog I will go into it a bit. Also my new build kitchen story and how it will help the budget! When we got the initial design through, there were a few things that needed tweaking and I had been chatting to a lady that I had met a few years ago who knows her stuff when it come to energy efficient and high performance homes.  This lady's name is  Claudia  Kaltenstadler and she kindly spent an hour on the phone to me going over different aspects of our build, all this time I had no idea she had a consultancy business and when I found out it was a no brainer to sign her up to be part of my build team.  It was clear to me Claudia's consulting fees  would be replaced with savings in other areas and Claudia's knowledge and understanding .... well I would be crazy to not to have Harakeke Consultants aboard!  Here is a link to Claudia's business face book page....sim...