We are pretty close to our final payment, and as a few people have been asking me, I thought I'd post briefly about money. We're still fiddling with our spreadsheet of costs, so the absolute final cost is yet to be confirmed, but roughly speaking, we've paid about $2,500 per m2 for a house of approximately 160m2 of usable floor space (i.e. not including the voids and the crawl spaces upstairs on the south).
That price includes everything but the land: design, fees, permits, all materials and the build itself. Not bad for a bloody beautiful house in this day and age. I will ultimately post the spreadsheet, and try to quantify some of the variables, such as the reverse brick veneer.
In other eco-financial-domestic news, we're about to install 18 grid connected solar panels, which will actually save us a small amount of money every year. It would save us even more if we didn't already have 100% green power.
And finally, we're yet to install thermometers and temperature logs, but the house is performing really well. I imagine most readers in Melbourne will have a heater on by now. We have no heater at all, and (at 9:15 at night) Rodney is in a t-shirt. I'm quite comfortable here downstairs in a t-shirt and medium weight cotton knit top, but will need to take off my top layer when I go upstairs as it's considerably warmer up there.
Since the cold descended, it's been around 19 degrees in the living room when we get up at 6:30am.
Of course, we're yet to see how we go with several days of low sunlight in a row. That - and the 35 degree plus days - will be the big test. I'm starting to feel optimistic that we might not need a heating system. The oven pumps out a fair amount of heat, so maybe we'll just resort to more oven baked meals in the dead of winter! :)
e.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I am half way through building my new house. It should end up about $35,000 all up. $400,000 is far too much to pay for a new house, sorry.
Hi David, thanks for reading my blog. I've been following the growth of the tiny house movement for almost a decade now and I very much cheer it on. But one size definitely does not fit all! We are a family and while I am aware that families in many parts of the world live in very small homes, my family's reality is that we need more space than a Tiny House can offer. Tiny homes are certainly part of the solution to global warming and over-consumption, but so too are homes like mine.
Elizabeth
Post a Comment