Who Are We? Why Passivhaus?
And Why Skye?
We are Mike Coe and Lizzie Stoodley and, back in 2017, we set up this website to document the creation of our new home in Portree on the beautiful Isle of Skye. There were no passivhaus dwellings on Skye at that time, so this was to be the first - if no one beat us to it. It's certainly the first passivhaus to be built in Portree. But this wasn't our first building project. We moved here from Worcestershire, where we built one of the UK's most energy-efficient homes, The Cropthorne Autonomous House . The Cropthorne house was highly experimental for a first build, running on harvested rainwater, with no connection to mains water and drainage, and with composting toilets that dealt with all our waste. In addition, it was built using non-standard passivhaus building techniques. It took four years to complete and we put in a lot of hard work ourselves. In the process, we learnt a great deal about building houses - and about energy-efficient design. The finished house performed better than our expectations, was comfortable and pleasant to live in, saved us a great deal of money in energy costs, and we expected to remain in it for many years. Building houses is stressful and exhausting and many times we said that we'd never want to put ourselves through all the stress, hard work and uncertainty again.
So, what motivated us to leave a house we loved, to move all this way north, and to put ourselves through a stressful build once more? The answers to this - and to why passivhaus was the obvious choice for our second build - can be found in the first of two Video Reports that Mike made. The Design page also contains information about passivhaus, how our house was designed and will (eventually) be updated to show how the house was built and why certain materials and techniques were used.
The build moved much more slowly than we'd hoped. The building company's resources were stretched between our house and work on a large local hotel extension that started at around the same time. Our mid-September 2019 completion date came and went. By the beginning of March 2020 our project was running just over five months late. However, work on the hotel was winding up and April 2020 should have seen the start of a big push to finish our house... but, the Covid-19 virus had other ideas. Its rapid spread took the whole world by surprise.
The first UK pandemic lockdown was announced at the end of March 2020. Building supply companies closed, and all construction work ceased. To fill the lockdown vacuum and keep the project moving forward, Mike continued to do what he could, installing cables, wiring junction boxes, and doing any electrical jobs that he could find. He built a mixing desk for his new studio from upscaled shuttering-ply and timber offcuts. Then he constructed a support frame in the attic for the water tank and the timber framework for a wall in the storage cupboard in the kitchen. He was just beginning to run out of materials and things to build with them when, on May 29th 2020, Scotland entered Phase 1 of the easing of lockdown restrictions. Construction was allowed to restart and the builders returned. But we were then seven months late.
At Christmas 2019 we had assumed we'd be in well before Christmas 2020, but it wasn't until March 2021 that we were able, finally, to begin moving furniture in and live there while finishing off internal decorating and wiring.
The final building inspection took place in early July 2021 - all was well, and Portree Passivhaus was now our home.
For updates on how the house is performing, see the short blog on this page and take a look at the slideshow.
We also post updates of any significant events on Twitter (see below).
During the build an (almost-in-real-time) webcam recorded the action on site. This has now moved to the roof of the finished house to become the almost-in-real-time CuillinCam (see below). Enjoy the view across our work-in-progress green roof to Portree harbour, The Lump (Am Meall) and its Apothecary Tower - site of the Skye Games and Skye Live Festival - and the distant Cuillin Hills.
In the second video report Mike shows you the Isle of Skye from his own unique perspective, and explains all about the site and what drew us to it. Plus, there's a full rundown on the design of the new house. But not everything in the garden is necessarily rosy...
Click here to view Video Report: 02