Getting started with blogging on inny RED

After a long time of saying that I should start a blog, I’ve taken the ‘leap of faith’ and am getting started with my first blog.

So why should you take time out of your busy schedule to read this blog and what is it’s purpose. Good questions but first some background.

Background

I started out a good few years ago as a mechanical engineer but quickly moved into software (Fortran on Vax’s) before moving to C/C++, Java and now PHP. Software has been a large part of my professional life and it’s been good to me.

In recent years I relocated home and decided to build a ‘Near Passive House‘ and to make it as Green as possible. I ended up building a Hempcrete House which won a national Green Award in 2012. I ran the project myself and sub’d out the main work. It was a great experience but it was also very stressful because;

1. I had never build a house before
2. I had no experience of the various building technologies involved
3. I didn’t know many skilled professionals people who could help me

And so I spent a lot of time researching what I wanted to build, how to build it and getting the materials and skilled labour to build it. I made a lot of mistakes along the way but it turned out pretty good at the end. We moved in at the end of 2011 but I still have a list of jobs to finish including painting, light fittings, flooring, utility room.

So back to the questions;

Why?

During the design and construction of my own house I realised that there were very few good resources and tools to help guide  me building my own home. Sure there are various self-build blogs, tradesmen sites and even some UK sites which have lots of good information on the latest technologies, products and fads. However most of this seemed to be an amorphous mess which would take a lot of time to sift through. There is minimal structure to how you should go about designing and building your own house and that’s where the problems start.

The idea then struck me that there must be an easier and better way to do this where everyone can learn from each other and where best practice will come to the fore.

What?

My goal with this blog is to discuss some of the issues I see with the current design/construction process and then attempt to extract out possible solutions. While I’m a Certified Passive House Consultant I currently don’t work in the industry and so will rely on you the reader to fill in the gaps for me.

I don’t see the issues we have as specific to Ireland. A read of any of the UK self-build websites will confirm this fact.  Discussing the problems without proposing solutions would be a waste of everyone’s time including my own.

Next

We’ll kick off next week by focussing on the current design/build process as I see it. Comments are welcome.