Why why why?

We've just bought our first house and want it to be warm and energy efficient within a limited budget. I have lots of clever (or crazy) ideas that I might use on the house if my dear wife will let me and want to share my experiences.

We've just bought a fairly typical three bedroom 1960's weatherboard house in Palmerston North, New Zealand. As with almost all older houses here, this was not built with thermal comfort in mind. About half of the year over summer the temperature is comfortable here without needing heating or cooling to be comfortable and that kind of house is fine at those times but in winter it gets pretty cold. We don't get snow here but it's still pretty miserable to live in an uninsulated house when the temperature is 10 degrees C outside and 12 degrees inside... as it was this morning! I'm still shivering right now. We're still in the old house that we've rented for several years and it's just the same as the new house - a thin inadequate layer of insulation in the roof, none in the walls or under the floor, lots of gaps in the windows and doors for air to blow through, single pane glass windows, no consideration to passive solar heating (at least the living room in both houses faces north into the sun - I wouldn't have bought it otherwise). So any heat that is in the house escapes very quickly and currently we only have a rather useless wood fire and two oil column heaters that I've put in the kids rooms overnight. That's why the living room gets freezing cold overnight and frankly, we're sick of it. We get quite a few colds every year, my wife has asthma and just psychologically you get miserable in the cold.

Now that we own our own house we can renovate it achieve the levels of thermal comfort that we want. We'll retrofit insulation into the house as best we can and install efficient heating. Then there are my more unconventional ideas - hopefully I can put in some heat recovery ventilation as well and I have these crazy thoughts about a home automation system...

Hopefully it will be an interesting journey for us and be useful for you as well.
Benjamin