Northeasterly oriented 1970's public housing house in Canberra. The only insulation was some old R2 ceiling batts and that was it, so it was 4 degrees inside in the wintertime when we moved here. There was an old gas heater which took up one wall, lots of doors and the whole inside of the house was butter yellow everywhere with a completely overgrown garden.
Over the last nine years I have slowly worked from one room to the next taking out plasterboard and recycling it through Corkhill Brothers, adding R2.5 Earthwool batts into the walls, replastering them and painting them, R4 was added on top of the R2 batts in the roof space. The house is now consistently about 10 degrees warmer in winter.
Double glazed windows have been added over the years, some with low-e coating to prevent ingress of the morning sun in summer and to help maintain warmth in the bedrooms in winter.
Over the years I have slowly reduced the gas appliances, first the heater, enabling me to put in a builtin bookcase made from my living room floorboards, then the stove and finally the hot water system which is now a heat pump system. The gas connection has been removed completely. Currently we use oil heaters as our heating system.
The garden has been cleaned up. I have taken 15 heaped trailer loads of green waste to the composting centres here. There are fruit trees in the back and a vegetable garden fed by a rainwater tank. The front has been terraced with a lot of broken concrete which I uncovered in the old vegetable beds in the back yard and is now planted with a mixture of natives and exotics.
This property does not have wheelchair access.
