Carland Constructions

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Licensed residential building and construction company, specialising in renovations and extensions in Melbourne and the Inner West

High performance + Passive House builder specialising in healthy architectural homes in Melbourne
4 x certified passive house completed

Healthier, Optimised, More Comfortable
Built responsibily and simply built better
We build homes that just feel better

08/11/2026

Yep, we’re picking a fight with every builder, architect and energy rater still putting foil under the roof, because it’s one of the biggest cons still being sold in Australian housing.

The foil itself has next to no insulating value. Any R value you see on the packaging depends on a perfectly clean, perfectly still air gap sitting right next to it, installed exactly as tested. That almost never exists on a real roof. The gap gets squashed, the foil sags, dust settles on it within a few years and the reflective surface that was meant to do all the work stops working.

Then there’s the moisture. Most foil is vapour closed, so it can’t breathe, and any moisture that gets into the roof has nowhere to go. It sits there, condensation builds up underneath, and the timber and insulation that are meant to last the life of the house start breaking down instead. Even the so called breathable foils give the game away, because the only way they let vapour out is by punching holes in them, and at least one of the big brands is officially classed as a non water barrier.

It isn’t built to handle the sun either. UV testing is optional under the Australian standard. And while we’re at it, the foil faced blanket under the roof is no better. It’s thin, it gets squashed flat over every batten and purlin, and it’s still got the same foil face trapping moisture against the roof. People swear it helps with sound, but a properly airtight house with thick insulation will do far more to keep the noise out than a thin blanket ever will.

We don’t use either, and we never will. A roof should be properly insulated, properly wrapped in a membrane that keeps the water out while letting moisture escape, and built so it can dry if something ever goes wrong.

So if you’re building and foil or blanket shows up in your spec, question it. Ask your builder what R value it’s actually delivering in your roof, how it handles condensation and how long it’ll keep working. If they can’t give you a straight answer, you’ve got yours.

A huge thanks to everyone who sent through photos of their foil sarking failing. You’ve made the case better than we ever could, so keep them coming.

03/11/2026

Most builders install a solid timber lintel that runs the full depth of the wall above every window and door, and leave it at that. It holds the load up fine, but it also leaves a strip of bare timber where there should be insulation, and timber lets far more heat through than insulation does. Do that over every opening in the house and you’ve built a line of cold spots right around the walls.

So we insulate behind our lintels and keep the insulation running continuously over every window and door. It’s a small detail that disappears the moment the plaster goes on, but it means there’s no weak spot above your windows for heat to escape through in winter or pour in through in summer.

Nobody will ever see it, but you’ll feel the difference in every room.

30/10/2026

People always ask us what it’s actually like to live in a Passive House, and after nearly a year in the Pigeon Passive House in Yarraville, the honest answer is that you stop noticing the house at all, because it just works.

There’s no running around closing doors to keep the heat in, no blasting the heater on cold mornings and no stuffy bedrooms on hot nights. The temperature barely moves from room to room or from morning to night, so the house feels the same when you walk in from a freezing Melbourne winter as it does on a 40 degree day.

The air is the part that surprised us most. We built in Yarraville on purpose, where the outdoor air quality is far from great, and yet inside the air is filtered and fresh around the clock without us ever having to open a window. There are no draughts, no condensation on the windows and none of that musty smell older houses get, and with triple glazing it’s quiet enough that you forget there’s a street outside.

29/10/2026

To every builder who asks whether you really need a back dam, whether the sill really has to slope, or who just says “whack the window in, who cares”, this one’s for you.

We had a slight leak on one of our windows recently. It happens, and anyone who tells you every window they’ve ever installed is perfect is kidding themselves. The difference is what happens next, and on this one the back dam did exactly what it’s there for. The water that got in hit the upstand at the back of the sill, stopped there and had nowhere to go but back out, so not a drop made it through to the framing or the inside of the house.

Without it, that same small leak would have run straight into the wall and sat there quietly for years. Nobody would have known until the plaster bubbled, the skirting went black and someone was pulling the wall apart trying to work out where it all went wrong.

That’s the whole point. A sloped sill and a back dam cost very little and take hardly any time, and you don’t put them in for the day everything goes right. You put them in for the day something goes wrong.

So yes, you need the back dam, the sill needs to slope, and yes, someone should care.

26/10/2026

Help your trades

Nobody sees this once the plaster goes on, but it makes a big difference to how a Passive House performs and to how easy the job is for our trades.

In a standard build, the electrician and plumber run their cables and pipes straight through the stud bays, which means the insulation gets pulled out, cut around and squashed back in wherever the services go. Every one of those gaps is a weak spot where heat can slip through, and in a Passive House we can’t afford to have them.

So we keep the services out of the stud bays altogether, and before our trades turn up we set out blocking for them to run their services along and fix their boxes to. The insulation stays full and continuous behind it, and the sparky and plumber know exactly where everything goes without having to hunt for a spot or cut into our work.

It takes a bit of extra time up front, but it saves time on site, keeps the trades happy and protects the performance of the wall for the life of the house.

22/10/2026

Can your old house become a Passive House? It absolutely can, and it’s something we need to talk about a lot more.

The Retrofit R***e EnerPHit in Williamstown is the proof. It wasn’t a beautiful old heritage home to begin with, it was an existing volume built spec home, and we turned it into the first volume built home in Australia to reach the EnerPHit standard, which is the Passive House standard for retrofits.

That means you don’t have to knock down and start again to live in a Passive House. You can keep the house you have and the character of the street around it, and still end up with a home that is warm in winter, cool in summer and has its performance tested and verified rather than just promised.

Knocking down is often the easy answer, but a deep retrofit is very often the smarter one, both for your budget and for the planet, because you’re keeping everything that’s already there that doesn’t need to go to landfill.

If you want to understand how we did it in more detail, including all the nerdy stuff behind the walls, check out the full project on our website via the link in bio.

21/10/2026

The question we get on almost every retrofit is some version of “where is all the money actually going?” So we went back through four retrofits we have priced and followed it.

It starts before anything new is built. The first 8% goes on pulling the house apart carefully, so strip out, asbestos removal, skips, propping and protecting the parts you are keeping, often on a tight block with neighbours either side. On a new build that same stage is closer to 6%, because there is nothing to take apart first.

Then the linings come off and the old frame has to earn its place. Restumping, replacing rotten or undersized framing, bracing to today’s standards and steel to open up walls take around 11%. That is a little less than the structure on a new build, but it is far harder to predict.

Next come the services, and this is where people get caught out. Old wiring, plumbing and drainage rarely survive the upgrade, so services climb to around 9% of a retrofit, against 8% on a new build.

The fit out is where a retrofit really pulls ahead, at 13% against 11%. You are paying for all the usual finishes, plus the patching, relining, floor levelling and matching of old finishes that come with fitting new work into an old house.

Here is the part that surprises people the most. The high performance elements that make the house warmer, healthier and cheaper to run take only about 6% of the total, so an older home can still be brought up to a really high standard without blowing the budget.

So the money on a retrofit does not disappear into the shiny new parts. Most of the difference goes into the things nobody sees, and that is exactly why you need to know what you are keeping before you start.

This is part two of three. Next week we answer the big one, which is whether it is actually cheaper to retrofit or knock down and build new.

Address

Opening Hours

Monday	08:00 - 16:00
Tuesday	08:00 - 16:00
Wednesday	08:00 - 16:00
Thursday	08:00 - 17:00
Friday	08:00 - 16:00

Telephone

+61425854025

Website

http://www.carlandconstructions.com/, https://linktr.ee/carlandconstructions

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