Country home build diary (part 1)

Meet the McCrosties

• Dominique and Daryl McCrostie (both 30) currently live in Kirwee, just outside Christchurch, with their two children, Shaun (4) and Jessica (nearly 2). They are building their dream home off SH63 in Marlborough.
• Their home is being designed by Hybrid Homes and will be built by Claymore Construction. Their budget for the build, including solar power system and amenities such as rainwater collection and sewage, is $530,000.
• Their aim is to get back to the simple life through being self-sustaining and having a minimal impact on the wider environment: “Our vision is to provide a clean and rich environment for our kids to live and grow, for us to live sustainably and responsibly, and to provide a legacy for our future generations.”

The site

Dominique: We were looking for land with a house already on it. I’ve always wanted to build my own house but Daryl had never really wanted to. We found a house and made an offer on it but they wouldn’t come down to what we wanted to pay. Then we looked right next door and there was a big block with more usable land, good views and everything we were looking for. We realised that for about the same price, we could actually buy and build and have exactly the house that we wanted. And that is what spun our decision to build.

Daryl: I spent over a year looking for that land – I have always loved Marlborough and Tasman but Tasman was a bit too far away for our contract linehaul business. Any chance I could get I would jump in the vehicle and head up there to look at properties. I met I don’t know how many real estate agents. Every second weekend or so, I would be meeting a different real estate agent on sites all across Marlborough.

Self-sufficiency

Dominique: We were always going to have solar power. We wanted to be self-sufficient and prepared for anything because where we are now, half an hour out of Christchurch, we are rural and with the earthquakes and the snow dump that we had, there were power cuts and although they weren’t major, we couldn’t use the gas fire or the water pump. We were basically left with nothing.

We discovered how much it would actually cost to get power to our build site – we’re talking about $100 a metre from the nearest power source and that didn’t include the transformer or anything like that. We are about 700m from the source, so we were thinking: ‘Okay we could pay $70,000 just to lay the cabling, and that doesn’t include the transformer or anything like that. Or we could pay the equivalent and get our own solar power’.

We were planning on using an architect to design the house. We looked at a lot of plans and nothing was what I really wanted. So we thought the way to go would be to get an architect.

We started going to the home shows and seeing what was out there, and we started learning about passive energy and things like aluminium windows that are thermally blocked so heat can’t be conducted from inside to outside – things that struck us as really important.

Green know-how

It started to get a bit tricky. Because although we had an architect designing the house they weren’t really thinking about how to make a passive house and keeping the energy costs low and all that sort of stuff, which was where our heads were at.

Daryl: Because of where our block is, it gets down to in the negatives like –2°C and I’ve seen it right up to 38°C. So we want to build it right for generations to come, so it wouldn’t cost a heap to cool down and heat up.

Dominique: We want to have a home that is comfortable and good for the environment. We’re going to live in it until we’re old and decrepit – we want family history and traditions in it.

We went to The Star Home Show in Christchurch. We got there late, a couple of hours before it was closing on the last day, and we were just walking past Hybrid Homes. We stopped and had a chat with them, and they seemed like the one-stop shop. The focus was just like ours: solar hot water, solar power, thermally blocked homes, with designs that we wanted.

Daryl: They said right from the start that they don’t do the standard house. That’s not even an option, really. If you want to have a nice passive house, that’s really what they do.

Dominique: So now we will have a solar hot water system and obviously the solar power. We’ll have a gas cooktop and gas oven. We will have a gas tumble dryer and all LED lighting, which uses a lot less energy. And we have requested a heat transfer system, which will take the heat from the fire through to the bedrooms to provide heating on the days when we are really snowed in.

Catch the next country home build diary where the McCrosties talk about their battle for building consent.

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