New Year. New House Build. New Project List.

Hello and welcome to 2025 at Valle Laguna. This year is going to be a big year! Having build our house and the 2 villas 10 years ago, I declared that I never wanted to build again….but guess what? We are building another house!

If you have been following my blog you’ll know that in 2021 we expanded Valle Laguna by purchasing the neighbouring property. (You can catch up by reading that blog here).

It goes without saying that we are huge fans of passive solar passive design. Our current house and the villas are living proof that building homes suited to the environment is a smart decision. In short, the buildings are positioned so that they take full advantage of the winter sun to warm the concrete floors, and are shielded from the scorching summer sun by extra wide eaves, high efficiency glass and high tech insulation. Here in Australia that means generally a north facing aspect. Unfortunately the site for the new house didn’t have the perfect position. It wasn’t too bad, but it did required a lot more effort in the planning and design stages to counter balance the site restrictions.

Aside from blog updates I’ll be posting the journey over on my Youtube channel so if you’d like to see the house site, and catch up on our other building projects pop you can do that here.(You can also subscribe to get notifications when I post a new video.)

Whilst the house is a new build, it shares some infrastructure like water, electricity and waste treatment with existing buildings. These were not up to standard so we’ve had to upgrade and in some cases install entirely new systems. Anyone who has renovated an old house will understand the domino effect. The job that starts out simple, but ends up a complex series of jobs!