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KEEPING WARM AND COOL

Old houses are known for having little to no insulation, limited heating and almost certainly no cooling! Annie's Farmhouse ticked those boxes. Over the years, rickity old split systems were in several rooms, none of which were sufficient to handle the 3.6m high ceilings. There was an old wood burner in the lounge room that had certainly seen better days and the sub-floor area just let freezing air or hot northerly winds right up into the home.

One of the first things to do, after experiencing a winter in this area, was to add insulation into the home. Underneath the vast home was open space, then floorboards. So to add protection and insulate against unwanted heat or cold, Expol Underfloor Insulation was added. A clever system of foam panels that fit in between the joists. That alone made a HUGE difference to the house. Off-cuts and left overs were re-purposed as wall insulation.

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Annies Farmhouse, country house facelift, expol insulation, underfloor insulation, walt co
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Annies Farmhouse, country house facelift, expol insulation, underfloor insulation, walt co

Given the extremes in the climate (-2c in winter and 40c+ in summer), maintaining comfortable temperatures is essential. And given the expense of electricity these days, the home needed a whole-house solution to the comfort factor. So a full scale, whiz-bang ducted heating and cooling system from Kaden Air was installed. This meant we could do away with all of the old hungry split systems and have a silent, powerful and customisable solution to the temperature. The Kaden system can be run via an app from anywhere in the world, you can zone all the rooms so you may only heat or cool the desired spaces... and its fully automated so you can program on and off cycles. 

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Annies Farmhouse, country house facelift, kaden, kaden air, ducted heating, ducted cooling
Mark ovens electrical, kaden air, heating, country house facelift, annies farmhouse
Annies Farmhouse, country house facelift, kaden, kaden air, ducted heating, ducted cooling

The final piece in the puzzle, was to install a brand new wood burning fire. What is a country house without a wood burner? The ambience on a cold winter's afternoon, with a glass of red and a fire. The existing fire had rusted through, had no fan function and took about 4 hours to get the room warm. We bought from Jetmaster, a brand new Kemlan fire (Super Nova Insert). This is a highly engineered unit, fan forced... and we couldn't believe how hot it made the living area. Remembering we knocked three rooms into one - it still pumped out so much warmth, we had to open the doors to the bedrooms! Absolutely brilliant. We did create a new stand-out floor to ceiling bulk head to house the new unit to make it a feature, rather than into the flat wall.

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Annies Farmhouse, Country house facelift, walt collins, kemlan, fire, woodburner, jetmaste
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Annies Farmhouse, Country house facelift, walt collins, kemlan, fire, woodburner, jetmaste
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