Carland Constructions

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Carland Constructions

Licensed residential building and construction company, specialising in renovations and extensions in Melbourne and the Inner West

High performance + Passive House builder specialising in healthy architectural homes in Melbourne
4 x certified passive house completed

Healthier, Optimised, More Comfortable
Built responsibily and simply built better
We build homes that just feel better

06/09/2026

Sick of building rubbish houses?

So were we. That is why we stopped, and it is why we are hiring.
We only want people who genuinely want to build better homes and are proactive about getting better at it. If you think the Australian standard is already good enough, please do not apply. If your attitude is that the plaster will cover it, please do not apply. We are not going to convince you, and you are not going to enjoy working here.

If you are not passionate about the trade, this is not for you. If you do not like collaborating, this is not for you. If you cannot work in a team, do not bother. We are looking for skilled carpenters who want to be part of something, not blokes who want to put their head down and get through the day.

If you are tired of throwing up another house built to a standard that went out of date twenty years ago, and handing over a home you already know will be cold in July and hot in January, this is the conversation. If you want a job to pass the time and collect a pay cheque, it is not.

What we are after is a carpenter who loves the trade and is proud of what they put their name to. Someone all round and proactive who wants work that actually pushes them. You have delivered architectural projects. You get things done. When something goes wrong on site you sort it out rather than building a case for why you could not.

The work is Passive House and high performance construction in inner Melbourne. New builds, Passive House and EnerPHit renovations. Subfloors, frames, lock up, windows, internal and external membranes, high end fit out. Precision work with a team that cares about it.

The role is full time and permanent, on the tools, with a genuine path to project lead carpenter. We promote from within where we can.

You need a completed apprenticeship with two or more years post apprenticeship, your own vehicle and tools, a current white or red card, and full working rights.

Know a carpenter who should see this. Send it to them.

03/09/2026

Everyone has a building horror story.

That is the part that should actually bother us. Not the individual stories, though some of them are genuinely appalling, but the fact that having one is treated as completely normal. Mention that you are building or renovating and someone will immediately tell you about their cousin who lost eighty grand, or the mate whose house leaked from the day he moved in, or the job that ran two years over and finished with half the scope missing. Nobody is surprised anymore. That is the problem.

We have collectively accepted that building a home is meant to be traumatic. That you will fight with your builder, that the budget is a work of fiction, that defects are just part of the process and you will spend the first two years of ownership chasing someone to come back and fix things they should have done properly the first time.

None of that is inherent to construction. It is the result of an industry that has been racing to the bottom on price for decades, where margins got squeezed so hard that cutting corners became the only way to survive, and where the people paying for it have no way of knowing what was done behind the plasterboard until something goes wrong.

Building a house is hard. It should be demanding, it should involve difficult conversations, and it should cost what it actually costs. But it should not leave people financially and emotionally wrecked at the end of it.
The fix is not complicated. Price the job honestly, document what you build, test what you claim, and tell people the truth when something goes wrong. Most horror stories start with a builder who did none of those things.

02/09/2026

Champion Passive House. What all the nerdy stuff actually gets you.

Below 0.6 ACH means no draughts. Not fewer draughts. None. The house does not have a cold corner or a room that never warms up.

140mm walls means you can put your hand on the wall in July and it feels like a wall, not like the outside is right there behind it.

Insulated floor means your feet stay warm. No cold slab, no socks required, no part of the house you avoid in winter.

Triple glazed windows mean inside and outside are properly separated. You stop hearing the street, the traffic, the neighbour’s dog. The house gets quiet in a way most people have never experienced.

No steel where we could design it out means fewer cold spots running through the structure like a metal spoon left in a hot pot.

Continuous insulation means constant temperature. It sits around 20 degrees without you doing anything at all. No heater cranking in the morning, no thermostat battles, no wondering why one room never gets there.

Windows sitting inside the insulated wall means you can sit next to the glass in winter and feel nothing coming off it. No cold radiating at your back while you read.

Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery means the air is filtered and constantly fresh. No stuffiness, no stale bedroom in the morning, no pollen, no smoke haze in summer.

Fully electric with solar means the home costs next to nothing to run. The bills stop being something you think about.

Tested, checked and verified means you get exactly what you paid for. Every claim above was measured by someone independent, not promised in a brochure and forgotten about once the keys changed hands.

That is the whole point of the nerdy stuff. Nobody living here thinks about ACH or R values or thermal bridging. They just notice the house is quiet, the air is clean, the bills are gone, and they stopped thinking about the weather.

If you are building or renovating and you want a home that does this, start the conversation with us early. The decisions that make a house feel like this get made long before anyone picks up a tool.

Link in bio to start the conversation

31/08/2026

Nobody sees this once the cladding goes on.

The WRB gets detailed before any external beam goes in, and the order matters more than most people realise. Once a beam is sitting in place, you are working around it. You are taping into corners you cannot properly reach, cutting membrane to fit rather than running it continuously, and hoping the detail behind the beam is as good as the one you can actually see. It never quite is.

So we do it first. The membrane runs continuous, every lap is taped properly with full access from both sides, and the detailing at every junction gets done while there is still room to do it right. Then the beam goes in on top of a layer that is already sealed and verified.

This is the sort of thing that adds time on site and produces nothing anyone will ever look at. It does not photograph well, it does not sell a house, and no client will ever walk through and comment on it. But it is the difference between a water and air control layer that works for the life of the building and one that has a compromised detail sitting behind a structural member where nobody can inspect it or fix it.

Sequencing is not admin. On a high performance build it is half the job. Get the order wrong and you spend the rest of the project compensating for a decision you made in week three.

27/08/2026

Over 3000 photos on one house.

That is what it actually takes to certify a Passive House properly, and this is only a snapshot of the ones from Pigeon Passive House in Yarraville. Membrane laps before anything covered them. Window installs showing exactly where the frame sits within the insulated line. Tape at every pe*******on. Slab edge insulation before the pour. Service cavity depths. Airtightness continuity at every junction that matters.

None of it is visible now. All of it determines whether the home performs.

The reason we document like this is not the certifier, though it certainly helps when the assessment comes around. It is that once the plasterboard goes on, the only proof that what was designed was actually built is the photos you took before it disappeared. A blower door report tells you the number the home achieved. It cannot tell you whether the insulation was installed correctly or whether the airtightness layer is genuinely continuous behind the wall.

This is the level of documentation we produce on every single project, not just the certified ones. Most builders would look at 3000 photos and see a waste of time. We look at it and see the record that lives with this building for as long as it stands.

None of these photos are beautiful. They are just the ones that matter.

26/08/2026

Everyone loves to tell us our walls are too expensive. They are wrong, and here is why.

Yes, a 140mm stud costs more than a standard 90mm stud on its own. If you stopped the maths there, you would think we were adding cost. But that is not how a building works. Because those deeper, stronger studs let us carry structural loads that would normally require a steel column. And once you start substituting timber for steel, the numbers flip. In nearly every case we have done it, the 140mm framing has actually saved money across the project, not added to it. Fewer steel members, less engineering, less labour handling heavy steel on site.

Then there is the other complaint. The one about losing space. Framing at 140mm instead of 90mm adds about 100mm to the outside of the building. That is it. One hundred millimetres across an entire home.

If you are genuinely worried about losing a single square metre on a whole build, you might be a little too precious. Especially when that extra depth is what lets us pack in nearly double the insulation and design out the thermal bridging that makes standard homes cold.

25/08/2026

Steel is the default answer in Australian construction, and it is costing homeowners more than they realise.

Almost every home relies on steel to hold up the structure over big openings. Garage doors, large windows, open plan spaces. It is the standard solution and most builders never question it. The problem is that steel is one of the most conductive materials you can put in a wall. It pulls heat straight out of the home in winter and drives it in during summer, and it is extremely difficult to insulate around properly. Every steel member becomes a highway for heat to bypass your insulation completely.

On this build we took a different approach. Using an engineered timber portal frame system, we were able to carry the same structural loads with large timber members instead of steel. The engineering stacks up, the strength is there, and it removed a significant cost from the project at the same time.

The bonus is what it does for thermal performance. Because our external walls are framed at 140mm and the portal frame sits at 90mm, we have the depth to wrap rigid insulation around the outside of the frame. That means no cold bridge cutting through the wall and consistent insulation across the whole building envelope.

This is the part of building better that nobody sees and everybody feels. It does not show up in the finishes or the photos. It shows up in a home that is cheaper to build, holds its temperature, and looks after the people inside it.

Better outcomes do not always cost more. Sometimes they just take a builder willing to think differently.

20/08/2026

Queen High Performance retrofit is moving along and this is where we are at.

The frame is coming together nicely and we have started getting wood fibre board onto the roof. This is actually the first time we have used this product and we are already big fans. External insulation on a roof is something we feel strongly about because it keeps the insulation layer continuous, it sits outside the structure rather than within it, and it deals with thermal bridging in a way that internal insulation simply cannot. Wood fibre does all of that while also managing moisture intelligently, which on a retrofit is not a nice to have, it is the whole point.

We are also starting to work through the airtightness detailing, which on a retrofit is always the most demanding part of the process. Every junction, every pe*******on, every connection between old and new has to be thought through carefully before anyone picks up a roll of tape. On a new build you design the airtightness layer from scratch. On an existing building you design it around what is already there, and that requires a different kind of thinking entirely.

This is the stage of a retrofit that does not photograph beautifully but sets up everything that comes after it. Get the airtightness detailing right now and the blower door result looks after itself. Rush it and no amount of insulation makes up for what you missed.

More updates to come as this one progresses.

Address

Opening Hours

Monday	08:00 - 16:00
Tuesday	08:00 - 16:00
Wednesday	08:00 - 16:00
Thursday	08:00 - 17:00
Friday	08:00 - 16:00

Telephone

+61425854025

Website

http://www.carlandconstructions.com/, https://linktr.ee/carlandconstructions

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