We are Mike Coe and Lizzie Stoodley and this website will document the creation of our new home in Portree. It should be the first truly passivhaus dwelling on the Isle of Skye - if no one beats us to it (for an explanation of what a passivhaus is and how it works, see the Design pages).

This isn'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 . For a highly experimental first build, with rainwater-harvesting and composting toilets in addition to the non-standard passivhaus building techniques, it was a great success. There were no 'Grand Designs' style disasters, the house performed very well and there was nothing we wished we'd done differently. It was a delightful house to live in. We said, many times, that we would never again want to put ourselves through all the stress, hard work and uncertainty that goes with building a house. And yet, here we are... 

To find out what motivated us to move, why we're building again and why a passivhaus was the obvious choice, watch the first two Video Reports and visit the Design page.

You can follow the build - almost in real-time - on the Live Webcam (see below) and in the slideshow of this month's highlights (see below). We also try to post regular updates on Twitter (see below). 

For a full timeline of the build in pictures, with captions, take a look at the Gallery page.