A Few Pictures.From Summer's End

 

The house with first floor walls in place, ready for the beams to go in.

 

It's almost sculptural.

 

Not bad weather for building either..

SIPS are quick

Here's the video of the ground floor being constructed in double quick time.



Ian from Sips @ Clays came down on Friday with a trailer load of timber that the crew could use to set out the soleplate. At the same time Les and Phyllis (my in-laws) arrived in their VW campervan with a plan to stay the weekend and to see the site before the build started. On their journey down though, the gearbox gave up (something about thirty years on one oil fill!). Repairs would take a week, so our busy little site had to find room for a couple of extra guests. The more the merrier!

On Tuesday, the construction crew of Duane, Chris and Phil arrived to beautiful blazing hot sunshine. They cheerfully worked throughout the day, with Les lending a hand. In twelve hours they measured, marked, packed and placed beams around the blockwork that would give an accurate and level base for the sips panels. Happily, the slab and blockwork had given them a good start - less than 10mm difference in 17 metres.

As they were working, we had a call from the lorry driver who we expected to turn up the next morning with the panels to start construction. Rather than drive over night, he had already set out. Could we find somewhere for him to park? Did I say the more the merrier? Of course! So, the campervan was joined overnight by a forty foot artic. We should open a lorry park - we certainly feel popular enough.

The next three days saw Duane, Chris and Phill working fantastically hard in a wonderful late summer as the harvest ran around us. Back wall, sides, interior and front all went up exactly as planned to the thud-thud-thud of nail guns and some enthusiastic singing along with their radio. Each day would end with the compressor being turned off from it's asthmatic bursts of activity, air being let out of the hoses and quiet descending. We'd take it in turns to wander around the house, looking out of windows that hadn't been there hours earlier and pacing out the position of cupboards, stairs and furniture.

The short working week ended with plates built around the top of the ground floor walls ready for joists and first floor deck. Les and Phyllis drove home and we set about tidying the site for the next big push - first floor walls and then the roof. Our feet hadn't touched the ground. At last our house had truly started.

Piles!

We've been busy the last couple of months, but not blogging. Sorry. We had a great holiday in July - a last little breather before the chaos hits. And boy has it hit.

The house should start to go up next week.

Right now that means we have to co-ordinate all of the bits and pieces needed on site to help the build run smoothly. We also have to pre-order many of the follow on materials and supplies for the house to be made water tight and first fit to begin. Some of these have two month lead times so we're having to anticipate where we're going to be sometime in October. Being new to the game, this is all quite daunting and I'm sure Barry (our builder, who will oversee the rest of the construction) dispairs of us at times. But it's coming together slowly.

In the mean time, I've sorted out a computer with enough space to cope with the four thousand photos we're taking a day (one every ten seconds or so) to give us timelapse video of the build.

Here's the first film, of the site being scraped down to level and the piles going in. Abbey Pynford did a great job and their teams were efficient and friendly - we'd highly recommend them.

It Never Rains But It Pours (or not...)

We started our building the actual house - or at least broke ground - in the brief spell of glorious weather and this sleepy little site has transformed into a hotbed of activity. Not only are we drowning in lists of people to contact, decisions to be taken and jobs to do (when we've not even started the foundations yet!), but our social calendar has chosen this moment to explode.

We're having a great time. Sleep, after all, is for the weak and foolish.

Friday saw a trip into Cambridge for a night of beer and curry with friends. It reminded me how well situated we are. The train station is ten minutes' on foot through beautiful fields along side the river. What better way to forget work at the end of the week than walking through blissful countryside as the day's heat gives way to fresh evening breezes? Then it's barely more than five minutes into town and a short stagger to the civilised comfort of the Salisbury Arms (many other pubs are available, please see Mill Road for details).

Back in the village (with a hangover.. ouch) the barracks had it's annual open day this weekend. The kids were entertained with a chance to sit in a helicopter and turn knobs and dials until it might never be able to fly again. Dad was entertained by a long display by the Lancaster bomber, Spitfire and Hurricane which took turns to do runs over the old airfield, dive and spin off into the sky. Mum took the opportunity to go riding.

Sunday saw the village beer festival's family day - Pimms for Mum, beer for Dad and more ice-cream for William and Becky. When so many of the local villages have lost their identity to nearby Cambridge and the march of supermarkets and shopping centres, it's great that ours is big enough to have a real sense of community and successful events without quite loosing that close knit feel.

In between these trips we've managed to fit in a visit by Ness' Aunt, cousin Ben and his family, a visit from my Mum & Dad, my birthday and a lot of site preparation. When not socialising, we've been checking plans, marking out locations with upside down paint(*) and hammering in bargeboards to show just where everything should go. The day starts at seven and ends with me watering the plants in the dark as the sun has set. Last minute clearing, chopping, digging and marking seems to be paying off though - I'll post up the video of the site being dug very soon.

* - For painting upside down. Very useful stuff.

Starting the build

This must mark the beginning of our build - we're knocking down the shed.



It'll be a couple of months before anything shows above ground as we're still completing a few remaining details for the construction. However, by the end of this month we should have a foundation slab to show just how big (or small) the house feels. Very early days, but it's still quite exciting.

SIPs - Genius Idea

Once we got planning permission, one of the first decisions we had to make was - how are we going to build our house? Only a few years ago the choice was simple, wood or brick. Now there is the option of straw bales, durisol bricks, thin joint blocks, ICF blocks, SIPs and many other even more obscure building materials. For our needs, SIPs (structural insulated panels) seemed to be ideal. They are a sandwich of wood chip board and insulation, a little less than six inches thick and produced in enormous sheets. At the factory, they are cut into sections for your house walls and roof, holes are made for windows and doors and the whole lot are wrapped up and sent on the back of a lorry to the site.

here's an offcut 

Once they arrive on site, they're glued and screwed together to make up the entire shell of your new home. From bare slab to complete shell can take as little as a couple of weeks. Whilst the speed is impressive, the most significant feature of SIPs are that you end up with a shell that is consistently and robustly insulated. The few joints that are needed to connect panels are glued and airtight. The result is a home that is easy to heat and easy to keep warm.

in a few years time, SIPs will become a significant force in UK construction

SIPs have been used for decades in Canada and some parts of Europe. Whilst they are relatively new in the UK, the market has been maturing. Early experimental homes have given way to a well established stream of new buildings. The benefit to self-builders is obvious - you can build a top spec, energy efficient house for a sensible cost and at low risk. Developers are beginning to catch on and I'm sure that in a few years time, SIPs will become a significant force in UK construction.

After talking to a number of suppliers, we chose SIPS @ Clays, who have proven to be enthusiastic and experienced. They deliver something like a house a week from their base in Skipton and take pride in the results they achieve. The houses are first drawn up in CAD, then cut and delivered for their construction team to erect. At the moment we're making the final small revisions to the CAD model and in a few weeks they'll begin to cut them up for construction this summer. Between now and then though, we need to prepare the site and lay some foundations.

Pollarding at speed

Getting things ready for a summer of building - the old willow needed to be trimmed back. It was also an excuse to try out the camera which should help us video the house being built.



For anyone who actually cares - the house will be in place of the derelict sheds you can see to the left of the picture. But bigger.

Homebuilding and Renovating Show

This weekend saw the Homebuilding and Renovating Show at the NEC. It was far from our first, and seemed much quieter than it has been before and somewhat smaller. It's hard to tell though as we've been through four distinct phases when it comes to house building shows. This time round we knew who we wanted to see, what we wanted to talk about and what was irrelevant to our build which shrank the whole event down to a manageable size. The first time we ever went to the show, we were still just thinking "Wouldn't it be nice to build our own house", and the array of stands offering different ways to make a home seemed to go on forever.

Between then and now, we also went through the vital phase where we actually decided that we would build our own home and had to begin to research our options properly. Somewhere in a filing cabinet is a heavy stack of brochures from those research missions. Then there was the phase where we had made our basic choices and needed to find the people who could make it all happen.

 

That said, the credit crisis seemed to have had an impact. There were fewer gizmos and 'bling' house features on display. Only a handful of stands were giving away freebies - and jute bags with your company logo are apparently so last year. Some well known faces from the self build scene were absent. If not subdued, the whole event seemed to be a very calm affair.

More depressingly, the Eco-village showed that you can make anything environmentally friendly (apparently) by adding 'Eco' to the name and painting your stand a nice shade of green. The show itself led the way in that respect, but it's hard to view (amongst other things) a swimming pool as a means to make your house kinder to the planet. At least some of the stalwarts who used to sell slightly suspect whole house vacuum systems have moved on to selling heat recovery ventilation kit instead which has a more convincing benefit to the self builder.

Retrospective Blog 3/3 - Planning Permission

We got planning permission. We got planning permission. We got planning permission.

It doesn't get old.

I have to apologise for not posting up perhaps our most significant news of 2008 until a few weeks into 2009. The reason for the delay is that I've not been able to put down in words the combination of delight, relief, vindication, exhaustion, frustration, trepidation and a few other emotions that the news has brought.

The overwhelming feeling is delight. We've been waiting to build our house for quite a few years now and at last it's happening. The process had gone on so long that we'd stopped buying self build magazines and making mental notes about kitchen designs we liked. Now, suddenly, it's time to put the theory into practise and make it all happen.

There seem to be two schools of thought as to how we should describe the last few years. The soap opera view suggests that we have been stressed and dismal, forced into terrible living conditions and dragged ourselves listlessly from day to day, hopeing for salvation. The Grand Designs view is that planning permission happened just like that in the five minutes before the interesting part of the programme gets going.

The reality is that we've had a fine old time living in our caravan, bringing up two small children and getting on with our lives. A few things have been put on hold (such as big holidays), and there has been a slight sense of limbo, but really the move to Lock Farm has coincided with quite a few other changes that have kept us busy and entertained in equal measure. We have learned the valuable lesson of what exactly we need to be comfortable and happy (it turns out, remarkably little). There have been occasional bad moments usually centred around heating or storage space (the former being slightly unpredictable and the latter highlighting how disorganised we can be). On the whole though, living in a muddy field is good fun.

The planning battle has very much been a learning experience. Most of it has been boring and bureaucratic, with short sharp shocks of disappointment. However we didn't go into this expecting instant gratification, or with a picture in our heads of the exact house we wanted to build without compromise. The result is that though we feel we could have done it better - or at least faster, we're very happy with the final decision. There's a lot to be said about our planning system in this country, a good deal of it being deeply critical. However none of that actually matters when there are tenders to be requested, suppliers to choose and the detailed design to complete.

Did I mention we got planning permission?

Retrospective Blog 2/3 - Bonfires' Night

When I was young, bonfires' night was always a favourite. We'd have a big old blaze of deadwood and odd remnants of furniture. My Dad would carefully work his way through a box of fireworks which childhood memories recall as a long and spectacular display. We'd frantically wave sparklers around until the sparkle burnt out and the glowing metal bent in our flailing hands. At the time our cooker was a coal fired Aga which spread heat through the kitchen floor and into the room. It was pretty much inevitable that we'd have jacket potatoes that had been slow cooked to perfection. The following day would see me raking through the bonfire ashes, trying to coax it back into life and hunting down the spent rocket shells as trophies of the night's fun.

As I grew up, bonfires' night took a bit of a back seat. We moved house, away from the convenient back garden and the Aga which so suited traditional celebrations. Later I went to college and made do with watching Battersea fireworks display from the roofs of our student digs. It wasn't quite the same.

Then, moving up to Liverpool for my first job, bonfires' night got so much better. The evening would start at Keith's Bar before swaying gently with the crowd to Sefton Park for the big display, making slightly inebriated oohs and aahhs. Then on to one of the old park mansions, run as a commune and putting on it's own display - an enormous bonfire of planks and furniture and a comically small fizzle of fireworks that could barely compete with the heat and light of the blaze behind it. As an adult the occasion had suddenly become less about the explosions and more about gathering together with friends to drink, sing and enjoy the company.

Cambridge only reinforced that. When we bought our first house just in time for November's celebrations, eighty friends packed our garden, trying to strike a balance between singeing themselves by the bonfire and freezing up by the house. Almost without exception every one of them had come with packs of fireworks - it took three of us over two hours to work through the rockets and roman candles. At one in the morning a frantic search was carried out for the last remaining sober driver who could help collect a large unwanted cupboard which was just right for keeping the fire burning bright that little bit longer.

Now we're out on the edge of the fens, with young children of our own and bonfires' night has changed again.

Last year we bought a very small pack of fireworks to see how William and Becky would respond to them. Not too surprisingly William very quickly decided he didn't like the unexpected noises and we called a halt before he could get that idea lodged in his head. This year we thought we'd try again - I'm looking forward to them both being old enough to come along to the fantastically well organised Cambridge City display. After a couple of fireworks, William started to ask what kind was going to come next, and by the end he was asking for 'the sparkly one' or 'the green one'. Even Becky joined in, standing on the window ledge inside the caravan and watching me setting off rockets. We used up a pack and a half of fireworks (this year's and the remnants of the previous year which had been languishing on top of a cupboard) and every one was happy. Especially William's proud/pyromaniac dad.