ollibees

Grand(er) Design

• By Julia Pankratova
• 2013, 8 September
• 2 Comments

Kevin McCloud would have loved us! We would have been the perfect Guiney pig project to televise. Kevin would have smirked and laughed and raised his eyebrow not once, not twice, but all the way through the one-hour episode! We would have ticked every box on the qualifying list:

• Too ambitious
• Self-project-managed
• Hands-on
• Unrealistic budget
• Unrealistic time scales
• Eco-friendly
• Job redundancies
• Coming-up winter

You can just hear Kevin saying at 00:52:00 : “Three years ago we met this couple… I told them… They wouldn’t listen…. And here we are… ” 🙂

Grand Designs, I recon are to blame for our grand aspirations…. All these years watching poor sods struggle and then eventually get there at the expense of blood, sweat and tears… Wise people learn from the mistakes of others. We thought we would come up with a bunch of our own cock-ups!

This of course is not to mention Kevin’s Man Made Home with him building a wood cabin… We now have our own wooden shed and two wood sheds too built out of our two old sheds and lots of other old and new bits and bobs. It might have been February, -5C, cold, wet, gusty and miserable at the time of the build, but we are super proud of it and it serves many purposes, one of which incidentally is NOT our sleeping quarters… well, not yet, anyway.

Back to the house.

The past three weeks mainly involved building a shell to fill in the void that was the result of some major demolition works four weeks ago. Eighteen more steels of various shapes and sizes went in to support the mezzanine floor above the kitchen and the rest of the glazing. We now have nearly as much steel as B&M Steel down the road! All the welding was done by Tom, who is a car mechanic and who was initially employed as a labourer. He’s done a sterling job and we may have to bring him back to do our staircase for us!

Three tonnes of scalpings and eight cubic meters of ready-mixed concrete finished off the floor base in the kitchen / diner / hallway. The family bathroom is the only room in the house that’s still missing floors. A Clive-Owen-lookalike cement-mixer driver brought his vehicle within inches of our front porch which was rather too close for comfort since that is more or less the only habitable part on site as it stands!

All went well and Malc and the guys spent the rest of the days in wellies raking and tapping down the concrete. Great job well done, all flat and level, so much so that when it rains – it just creates one huge puddle all over rather than one somewhere in the corner! 🙂
All brickwork is nearly finished with the exception of the second fireplace and chimney and a few other bits and pieces. The UK has now officially ran out of concrete blocks! Travis Perkins guys helped us out big time pulling all the resources to sort us out. Any open orders are currently on a nearly two-months leadtime! We are not taking personal responsibility for the market collapse…

The mount of rubble in our front garden has been reduced considerably by two muck-aways, to a delight of us and our neighbours I am sure! And there was 6 more tonnes of soil deposited and rolled to finish off our lawn, which has since been seeded with grass seed and is showing the first signs of sprouting.

Three stumbling blocks we came across in the past few weeks is the choice and supply of roofing slate, wood-burning stoves and special glazing to be installed as part of the main roof at 45Deg, which is a specialist job that very few seem to be willing to do.

The slate choice is now the Canadian Glendyne slate, which is according to the geologists is as good as the Welsh slate at half the price. Apparently it was deposited (is that what slate does?) in the earth when Canada and Wales were one before the continental splits, meaning that it’s all the same stuff with the same density properties. Why the Canadian slate, shipped half-way across the globe is cheaper than the Welsh one is baffling. Higher labour costs or perhaps the mining process costs are to blame. Anyhow, as long as it’s as good as or nearly as good, we are happy. Our roof should last for 75+ years without us or the next couple of generations to have to worry about it. The first lot of slate will be ordered over the next week and hopefully the first part of our roof will at last start looking less like a spaceship and more like a normal roof! 🙂

The wood-burning stoves are a saga of its own, either due to our constantly changing minds as to what we want, or due to the lack of comprehensive information from the manufacturers on dimensions etc. Charnwood Cove 2B was our original choice for the living room and which would not only heat the space, but would also be one of our hot-water sources. We have changed our mind last week however and at this point of time Stovax with a back boiler is the wood-burning stove of choice for the living room, and the kitchen and snug will share a Stovax double-sided insert stove, all going well and if we are to rely on the dimension off their website.

Forty-five-degree glazing…. Not sure I am prepared to discuss this in much detail without starting to fume! In short, we seem to have found someone in Southampton who seems to be more than comfortable with the design and is due to come back to us with a quote. Bizarrely, it turned out that that same guy (company) did the glazed porch and the lean-to conservatory on this same house 12 years ago! Must be fate!

Another bit of research that is doing our head in at the moment is the thermal solar panels for the dormers. I hope we can get those in time for when the slate arrives.

This weekend and the next few weeks will be all about finishing off the brickwork, putting rafters and noggins in for the pitched and flat roofs and insulating and waterproofing the whole roof. The remainder of the glazing will need to go in soon too and then the house should be at last weatherproof if not yet warm and cosy.

The man power team we have on site is a bunch of great characters. It all started from meeting up with a brickie Jason at the allotments, who was up for the job and who then brought another brickie Bluie and a man with two big diggers and a dumper truck Eugene, who then brought labourers Josh and Tom and a chippie David… They are all brilliant and always have a handy mate somewhere who can sort us out being it top soil or sand or scalpings, whenever all other resources fail. “It’s not about what you know but who you know”, as one of our friends, Viv, said.

Three months (not years!) down the line here we are… not on time, not on budget… it’s pretty cold and wet this weekend… and I am writing this blog in between the sporadic downpours. Malc and I were sitting one evening a couple of weeks ago with a glass of wine admiring the demolition work aand it hit us that we have about 3.5 bricks left of the original house. Something that was meant to be an extension turned out to be a near-complete rebuild. We did so well with our wooden sheds recycling and reusing old materials. It all went downhill from there. If we were ever to do anything of the sorts again – we would do it differently. With this one – we shall just draw from the experience and cherish the memories without any what-ifs and regret!