Why am I so Passionate about Healthy Homes?

It's become my mission to change the way we design and build homes in Aotearoa. I believe that every Kiwi has the basic right to live in a happy, healthy home.

Recently, I've gone from trying to save the whole world, to improving lives, one home at a time.

Why am I so passionate?

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time...

Seriously, there is no fairy tale ending, not yet anyway.

Formative Years

I can't really remember my first couple of years in Rangoria and Harwarden.

One of my earliest memories is living in a 1950's brick and roughcast house in Masterton.

Back then it didn't have the high fence and there was a big magnolia tree in the front lawn, but it seems not much else has changed from the outside, but I digress.

One winter weekend morning, I stoked the Kent log burner up with Totara posts and got the room sufficiently hot to melt Mum's wedding candlesticks, across the lounge, sitting pride and place on her piano. I got a hiding for that, as you did in those days.

Another, time a couple years later, I did the same with a firebox full of Manuka and near melted the firebox. (slow learner) It was well and truly bent out of shape. I survived that only because everyone was incredulous, that this was even possible.

On neither occasion can I remember the front two south facing bedrooms being much warmer than freezing.

Later on, my father moved a big old two storey villa from Clareville to Millard Ave. I remember it taking out the road signs as it crossed the Waingawa River bridge.

I could never understand as a teenager, why it faced the same way as it did at Clareville; West, towards the Tararua view, because the second south east lounge never saw a skerrick of sun, even in peak summer. That room was a step down chiller!

(Dad says it ended up there because that is where the truck got stuck in the boggy paddock. But I've never believed him.)

The upstairs bedrooms were no better, except the one with the chimney going through it.

Only the open plan Kitchen/ dining/ living room was warm and only if the Lady Kitchener log burner was stoked with dry wood. Mostly, the wood was still wet, hissing at you whenever you opened the door.

Building Out

In my early 20's, through shear hard work and will power, I bought two 1920's transitional villas, next door to each other and set about renovating them.

With their sash windows whistling in the winter southerly wind, they were freezing cold. So cold in fact that lying in bed dressed in balaclava and gloves, (very romantic), we'd watch a mouse or two scoot across the floor. We'd joke that the house was so cold that even the mice had to run laps of the room to keep warm!

We started by ripping off the scrim & sarking and insulating the walls and ceilings, before putting Elephant Board back on the walls, because at 15mm thick it was the same thickness as the sarking, allowing the skirtings and architraves to go back on without alteration.

I didn't know what the terminology was to create a warm, comfortable home back then, but I was doing it anyway!

The Big OE

One Christmas, friends living in the UK came back and over some considerable vineyard venom, convinced us to join them.

April 2001, found us heading to London! The above house still unfinished, but the adjacent one sold.

Flying over London at daylight, Anna said "turn around, I want to go home."

It was snowing outside.

It was warm inside.

What a revelation central heating with radiators were!

Eventually, we bought a house in a place call Welwyn Garden City. It snowed the weekend we moved in.

But with the gas fired boiler, supplying hot water to the radiators under every window, it was warm and welcoming inside.

Every room, the same temperature, all the time, all winter long. And spring. And Autumn.

uPVC double glazed windows, instead of single glazed wood, helped retain the warmth.

Ten teriffic years were spent in the UK, but we got worried that if we didn't come home soon, we, like many Kiwis never would.

Heading Home

In April 2011, we packed up and via five months overland through Africa and the Middle East, we landed in Auckland, just in time for the opening ceremony of the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

Some welcome home!

By this stage we had a house in Christchurch and in the aftermath of the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence, there was an opportunity for this engineer to assist with rebuilding the city.

So Christchurch became home.

Christchurch Post Earthquake.

I spent the following winter and numerous winters and summers following, inspecting cold, damp, dreary, draughty, mouldy old villas and bungalows. A style of building I once loved, I now hated.

In the meantime, I returned to the Kiwi idiom of turning things off when not in use, including the heat pump. It came on when I came home from a cold day spent inspecting dank damaged dungeons, it went off when we went to bed. It went on again for an hour in the morning to take the chill off while having breakfast, and off before heading out the door to work.

This was not the life of comfort, we had grown used to in the UK.

Eventually, we experimented with leaving the heat pump running at 16 degrees, 24/7 over winter, boosting it evening and morning, then 18 degrees, and now since 2022, 20 degrees, 24/7.

We turn the heat pump on at the start of winter and we turn in it off in Spring. We don't fiddle with it, we just leave it to do its thing of ensuring the whole house is warm and toasty all the time.

Last year, we had our lowest annual power bill since we began monitoring our bills in 2013.

It's now over 12 years since we moved back from the UK and it's not the just the heating that reflects our time in commonwealth comfort; the windows are uPVC too. Triple glazed this time for a quiet comfort, that must be experienced to be believed.

Like all the places we've lived, after a couple of years of sightseeing, renovations began.

The Feeling

I know what it is to feel cold in the morning. I don't enjoy that feeling. I don't wish it on anybody. It's an unnecessary feeling.

I know what it's like to have a dry towel for the morning shower, without using a heated towel rail. That's a feeling of luxury to me.

Now I work from home, it's even more important to feel warm while I work. I'm more productive that way. I bet I'm not alone in that regard. I've moved my office from the south facing room in the picture above, to the north facing bedroom, to work with the sun on my back.

I love that feeling.

I regularly get asked, "how much does it cost," "What is the return on investment," "what's the payback period." These things I can calculate.

What I can't calculate is the feeling of comfort. It's of incalculable importance!

The Mission

Herein lies the mission.

I want to share the feeling of living in comfort with as many people as possible, wherever and whomever they are.

I'd like to join and work together with others, who also share the vision and mission of promoting comfortable housing in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The building standard that has the most comprehensive tools for achieving comfortable, low-energy housing is the German Passive House standard. It is time tested and rigorously researched.

It also comes with an Excel spreadsheet that includes 42 sheets!

I think that I may have finally found my family and the foundations on which to engineer happy healthy homes for people and planet, whanau and whenua, right across Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond.