MidsomerI've been having a look around the house i'm in now, a spec home built pretty quickly by the look of things, it's brick veneer, would this have an impact on the heat loss / winter effect? or are the windows the main factor in having a colder house? We've noticed some of the windows don't even open, also not to mention the garage door has an inch gap or so under it, makes for a cold breeze coming in!
Beware the conflicting information; it seems everyone's an expert & everyone has a different opinion (which includes people who work in the industry!). For example, Googling around has me finding Choice pages that reproduce recommendations from an official-sounding body that say to go for R2.5-R3.0 roof batts & R1.5 wall batts if you live in Sydney; yet talk to others about insulation & they suggest R3.5 is too low for Sydney and to get R4.0+ if you can afford it.
I am pretty confident, however, in saying that just being brick veneer doesn't necessarily mean much if the house is less than ... I dunno, 30 years old. Once upon a time, back in the olden days, having double-brick with a cavity in the middle was probably the best insulation you could get; these days there're better & cheaper ways of doing it. So a brick veneer construction house these days isn't necessarily poorly insulated; however, it's kinda optional how much insulation it gets (and rules forcing people to insulate aren't that old - meaning plenty of newish-looking houses aren't particularly well insulated). Don't forget that if something is an extra cost, and you're building a house to rent-out to people, decent insulation is probably going to be a waste of money (at least until renters start getting fussy about star-ratings
), and a place you rent is quite likely to have as few optional extras included when it was built - especially if they're invisible options like insulation (ie. hard to use it as a selling-point to renters if you can't see it).Everything adds up though. Windows can allow heat out if they're just a simple pane of glass, but windows can also be fitted such that there are gaps between frames & walls (which allows draughts as well as leaking heat).
One approach we're considering taking is to get a plan from a project home builder, modified to suit us (which isn't a super fast process), and then get an architect to spend a bit of time making suggestions (or completely writing it off - in which case I guess we'll start from scratch). We've had a builder & draftesman come up with a previous iteration of a plan for us ... and to be honest, I don't think I'd try that route, the result ended-up not actually fitting on the land legally & to look at it there was just something missing, it's hard to put my finger on but it sorta looked like Duplo compared to even project-home designs looking like Lego.
Just one extra thought ... if it's the all-wood interiors you see in the aforementioned (US)-New-Englandy-style houses you're after, then you could indeed be up for a fair bit of extra moulah. That stuff's fairly time-intensive to build/install; "unfortunately" in Australia we pay our tradesfolk & labourers enough money to live on (*grumble* regardless of whether they do a sh0ddy job), so getting interior trimmings & wood-panel stuff is disproportionately expensive ... if [i]that is the sort of thing you had in mind. But ... well, an architect should be able to give you an idea of the costs involved, I guess.
see what happens now..