Peter and Natasha

Welcome to our website. If you are planning on coming to see our house as part of Sustainable House Day, check out our directions.

We are owner builders in Merrimu, 55 km west of Melbourne (near Bacchus Marsh), passionate about sharing our experiences in sustainable building and sustainable living. We reckon if we can do this building thing, anyone can, and our intention is to inform, entertain, inspire an educate others as we go through our journey.  We've got heaps of photos and blogs of the whole journey.

If you are looking for something in particular, use our search facility - just click on a word on the 'keywords' panel on left hand side of this page and it will take you to a search page.

Many thanks to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , our amazing friend and website designer extraordinaire who has set up this website for us. If you would like to see more info or would like to make comments on our blog, please register. Please note: If we don't know you, please send an email letting us know what your interest is, when you register.

NEW SECTION under Straw Bale House section - Learn from our mistakes and experiences

NEWS:

* We are opening our doors as part of the ATA's Sustainable House Day on Sunday September 12th - woohooo! Click here for directions

We've been published in Earth Garden Magazine.... part 1 was in the Winter edition, part 2 has just come out (big thanks to Earth Garden for publishing it and providing the PDF).

SUMMARY:

* Owner Builders, started building 20 October 2008, obtained Certificate of Occupancy 2nd March 2010
* Over eighty people have contributed to building our house (and counting!)
* Still to finish before we get our Certificate of Completion:
- install wood heater! DONE - wooohooo!
- get driveway done
- 3rd coat render on external walls (almost done now!)
- finish bathroom
- install calico on ceilings
- lots of finishing type stuff on inside
- shelving in WIR, pantry, and bedrooms
- 3rd coat render in office/storeroom, WIR, bathroom and bedroom 3
- decking on south side
- get recycled tasi oak flooring installed