The Brick Veneer Home

You only need to drive around Canberra suburbs for a short time to realise that there is one common theme in Canberra housing. That is the brick veneer home. Old houses, new houses in almost every street you will see the same commonality. Personally, I can't stand the look of standard brick veneer homes, the only slight caveat is the houses made out of smooth Canberra red brick. 

For me brick houses represent one thing... a lack of imagination. Out of all the materials that could be used nothing says 'a project builder built my house' like a brick veneer house. Generally speaking the windows are small, the orientation is wrong and there is little insulation. There is no thermal mass in the inside of the house making them hot in summer and cold in winter.

This brings me to our new house. As I alluded to in a previous post, one of the reasons why we purchased our house was because it at least ticked two boxes and they were that the orientation is good and there is already some insulation. As for the looks... well I would say it won't be to long before there is a coat of render being applied to the brick work. I have been investigating a couple of products. The first one I am interest in is Rockcote Grey render. This looks reasonably easy to use and is more of a  traditional cement render. The other product that intrigues me at the moment is Dulux Full Cover Texture paint. It is an acrylic render that can be rolled on without the need to hawk and trowel like a traditional render. It may be more suitable to my skill set.

Front of the house

Front courtyard

The Floor Plan

One of the main reasons (apart from budget and location) we chose this house was because of its floor plan.The living areas are all north facing for solar passive orientation, which is something that was seldom considered in the 80’s brick house and there is scope for more windows in the dining area to take full advantage of the winters sun.

The other advantage was the separation of the bedrooms. The master bedroom is well away from the other bedrooms and there is a sizeable ensuite with a spa.

The only structural plans at this stage are to knock out the wall between bedroom 2 and 3 so we can create a good sized gym room. It isn’t a load bearing wall so if we ever need to resell the house we can always replace it if needed.

Welcome

Welcome to my first post. In this blog I hope to share the journey as we renovate and modernise our brick 80’s house into something that will hopefully end up looking entirely different. My impatience know no bounds and, as such, we haven’t even settled on the property yet, however that hasn’t stopped my wife and I doing numerous hours in planning how we can make this house our own. This will be our first go an ‘renovating’ we have designed and built a off-grid solar passive house before but never renovated a pre-existing structure. See my photo blog here for what we achieved.