About

22 years ago, we bought Tanglewood, a bush block in Victoria, as our retirement dream. We planned to build an off-grid, self-sufficient home when we retired.

I’ve finally retired, and we are now on the journey to realising the dream.

This website & BLOG is about capturing our journey and learnings. It will be our record of the build, but I hope it might inspire or help others on a similar path.

We want to demonstrate that you can be carbon neutral/negative without compromising your lifestyle and living arrangements.

We must get to carbon neutral, preferably carbon negative, ASAP. We can do it without changing our lifestyle, and at relatively low incremental cost. We’ve sold our house in Perth, and can build our large “normal” dream home, install our standalone systems, and still have money in the bank to help fund our retirement, particularly since we won’t have many bills to pay for the rest of our lives.

A lot of things have changed since we bought Tanglewood – climate change, bushfire risk, planning rules, improved renewable technology, COVID…. The site contains tips for negotiating these changes.

I’m a chemical engineer – the wrong kind of engineer for this type of project – but I tend to be quite detailed and have done a lot of research to get to where we are now. I’ve summarised it here, with my interpretation, so that hopefully others won’t need to spend quite so much time bouncing around the internet. I’ll keep adding as we get through each stage of the process. I find it useful to summarize the learnings, anyway, to clarify our decision making process and to warn others of what we could have improved.