Final drawings nearly

We had a spate of meeting last week with Harry trying to thrash out details, possible costs and internal layouts.  For me in one way it's going pretty well as the design he has come up with is very pleasing to the eye i.e. not a glass box and certainly fits in well into the garden.  Harry has somehow managed through I suspect a great amount of charm and experience to persuade the conservation officers to build a two storey house rather than their preferred option of a bungalow all in short space of time.

Harry thinks it will be more cost effective to build the whole structure on site and essentially buy the standard materials from the local builders merchants.  I can understand this advantage of flexibility and employing local builders for more of the time but at the same time I really do have concerns which are: -

• Airtightness is more difficult to achieve if there are lots of piecemeal layers rather than a prefabricated structure or monolithic idea.

• Weather dependency as apposed to a SIPS building where you can a achieve a water tight building in a 5 days building from traditional block and brick will take considerably longer and more importantly be at the mercy of the weather.  It's not a good idea to work with cement if it's very cold and if it's raining how do you keep the masses of insulation from getting wet?

My life these things are keeping me thinking at strange times of the day which might be considered a bit sad!!

Anyway we also met up with Phil Neave director of Brilliant Futures www.brilliantfutures.co.uk
He seems a pleasant professional chap who is going to help us achieve the most amount of insulation and airtightness that the design will be let us.  I think this will balance well with Harry's lack of experience in the latest building regs and possible other products on the market.

Things to do today at some point ha ha ha when I find the time, is to re-look at this company
 Natural Building Technologies

Wind farm? Yes we've got a small one at Mill on the Brue