The delights of having a blog

Well how to get on with your future neighbours! What should I say without deepening further comments? Well we don't live in London or even Paris but a small country town so you think that if someone had issues with the planning they would actually contact us for a chat rather than just send their comments online but unfortunately not! At least it seems that the vast majority of the local residents have offered positive support. It's a tense time for us as we don't want to hurt people's feelings but at the same time we would like to start building our house. I attended a Bruton Trust meeting this evening and had the chance to show drawings of the Ropewalk House and thankfully met a chorus of approval. We will apparently find out towards the end of the month so until then I'll be keeping my fingers crossed.

Tomorrow I'm hopefully going to be meeting up with Garry and Dave from G.W buildings? We're have a coffee and talk about how it could happen. My big concern is whether they are able to build such a high standard of green building. Which frankly would be the same concern about any building company! But they come with exceptional references which is a great start!

A decision has been made ....

Before I forgot when we made it and how we feel at the this moment in time I need to quickly get this down.  I finally received the QS's report in a format that hasn't let me understand the detail i.e. the labour and materials are not spilt up into different sections which I thought was what we had asked for!  Anyway it's all a learning curve and I can take lots of time trying to contact him again without any extra charge! whoope I can hardly wait.

The long and short of it was that if we wanted a house that was just to the building regs standard we could indeed manage to scrap the necessary money together just without important factors like having any type of surface on the yard or landscaping (ok that can certainly wait) or indeed anything to do with a sustainable house which completely missing the point of how we're trying to build this house.  So I made a long list of all the additional items that needed to be included some where more Rolls Royce solution but at this point I don't feel like I want to compromise in for example putting up solar PV when the Feed In Tariff is actually a far better investment long term than any savings account and more importantly we could reduce our electricity consumption /  independence on the grid.

So Harry is now working on a smaller design without a void which never really had us convinced.  How can you really have a truly environmental house when all the heat is going upwards?  I think we're have to take the original plans out of planning which will be ok as long as Harry takes them out apparently before four weeks into the planning process.  I feel much happier knowing that we're still have a wonderful house with all the right materials and still being true to our beliefs.

Garden party at the Ropewalk

Last week we went around the neighbouring houses (including all of Toby Mill estate) and dropped off invitations to come and look at the plans, have a glass of elderflower cordial and a slice of cake.  We had some people which was nice probably not as many as we would have liked but they've now had their chance!

Building projects just seem to swallow up time!  Before you've contacted someone and then got a response it's been at least one week.  I've managed to have a good chat to Keith the QS about getting surface areas of the house plan.  This is then hopefully going to enable me to at some point in the near future to ring up some manufactures i.e. porotherm and have some comparable costing for our next meeting with Harry. In short the QS price is within budget if we don't want to have an environmentally designed house!  So we've got to have an uncomfortable conversation about ways to reduce the total cost of the build which in my view just needs have the whole footprint reduced in size.  This is slightly irritating as Tom always said we needed a 200 m2 build which we did convey this to Harry who hasn't taken it too seriously so now the build which has been submitted for planning (there's another story) is about 30 m2 too big.  Surely it's better to resubmit with an amendment of size reduction? 

How many building shows do you go to?

Well one bit of advice do not go to the Exeter Home building and Renovating Show unless you've been given free tickets and the girls are being looked after by their Uncle!

Usually when I've been to something similar there is something interesting to learn or see but this was just a small uninteresting 'warehouse' half full of trade stands that I've either seen before or completely disinterested in what they had to show.  How many window stands can you have in one exhibition?!  I know a window take many forms but on the whole unless they're amazingly big or have interesting mechanics (note to self now sounding like I'm bordering on geek window enthusiast) there really what's the point?

Ok we're waiting for the Keith the QS to send us the paper that may or may not tell us we've got a chance of building our house for our budget.  It's now getting slightly frustrating as I know I'm going to mentally tear it apart as it's 1) using all the traditional / easiest to get to materials and 2) I'm going to have to spend ages typing it out onto an excel spreadsheet in order to then be able to send to prospective builders in the tending process and play with the other possibilities in our materials research.

I may have possibly said this before but it is rather simple trying to calculated how to build our house.

New material vs old tradition stuff

• New material is generally more expensive to buy
• Takes less time to build the house using it
• Potential to have a really well build house in terms of thermal insulation and air tightness is easier to achieve

• Tradition stuff can be bought down the road at a local builders merchants
• It's possible to achieve a very high standard of build but more difficult
• Most builders know how to use the materials but it will take them considerably more time
• Therefore more venerable to bad weather patches 

Planning in the post

Harry has sent the plans to the planning department in Yeovil so hopefully 8 weeks later from now we may hear something positive ... then again!

Ropewalk House from the south west

I've got to ring up Keith the QS to find out if he has done the provisional working.  It may mean we have to revise our plan and not have the void which would be a shame but there you go.  We're going to the Homes and Renovating show on Sunday for some inspiration which will be even better as the girls are going to be looked after by Uncle Hamish, Gran and Stella.  The only other major consideration is that to me it's not looking like we're going to have much of the south facing roof (which was the point!) to have solar PV however it might be possible to either put them on the flat roof wood shed and or another shed could be positioned near by with a perfect sloped roof.  I'm confident that we don't need planning permission even in a conservation area but knowing this general mood we're have to fight to have them!

Monk's stair is a space saving way of climbing height than traditional stairs

Three bathrooms in one way sound great but lots of cleaning and not a mass of storage (the attic isn't going to be big which is a real shame)

Quality surveyor and materials

What to do?  I've taken so long researching loads of different ways in which to build our house and it transpires that Harry isn't happy with anything apart from the traditional block and brick  Something that I thought I would never have to go down as surely there are easier, more cost efficient ways?  Does it matter? Well the trouble is I've got one chance of making this house really the way I want it and I'm dangerously close to having a house that goes beyond housing regs but doesn't reach it's true potential.  I just want someone to suggest ideas of what we could do rather than well this is how we've done it and it works so that ok.  Ahhhhh I want to get better and it's more interesting that all of that!  Maybe I should just capitulate but I want this to be all together working and making something interesting.  I set up this blog for me to express my concerns about this huge project and I hope it's going to work!

I woke up at 4:00 am last night just trying to get my head around the discussion Harry, Keith (QS) and I had had in the afternoon.  I hope that the three of plus Phil Neave will be able to sort out the best solution. Having a QS will help and keep us ultimately in our budget.

On a plus note we spent a pleasant Tuesday afternoon cutting the hedge, clearing the wall and pegging out the rough floor plan which was really interesting.  It looked pretty small which is scary as we may need to reduce the design as it's currently 240 sq m and we were always looking to have a 200 sq m house at £1,400 per sq m.  So we either reduce the price or reduce the floor plan.

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