Nuts!

How on earth do people who are not technical manage to build houses? Does the actual design come as a surprise when built? Alan and I can read drawings, understand specs, envisage things in 3D - and even so we're finding that we need to build little bits of the proposed design in our house to see how the drawings work... or not, in some instances... Central to the new house was the idea of one big light living space which is kitchen/dining/living. But now we've laid out all the proposed rooms over the weekend, we've concluded that you need a really really big space if you're going to have them all together - otherwise your chips will fall down the back of the sofa. So - do we go back to a separate living room or can Peter-the-architect come up with a large enough single room? Panic-ometer reading was full scale for a bit over the weekend once we established this, but a bit of rational thought has calmed us down somewhat - there WILL be a workable solution, it's just not the one we have on paper in front of us at present... By the way, our working title for the new house was originally Walnut Tree House, imaginatively named for the huge walnut tree on the front boundary. However just about every other house in Tytherley has bagged the walnut - Walnut House, Walnut Lodge, Walnut Tree Cottage etc etc so we had to abandon that. There are also many hazels on the plot so provisionally and appropriately at present the working title has become 'The Nut House'...

Archaeology suddenly becomes more important

Today the continuing excavations finally unearthed the patio. It's all become rather more relevant since the day before yesterday when we accepted an offer on our [other!] house from a lovely couple who are currently living in their summer-holiday caravan and would like to move in two months from now. So, fingers crossed that it all works out, but meanwhile we need to work out what we can actually fit into the bungalow and what will need to go into storage. In the next thrilling instalment we find out whether our bed will actually fit into the bedroom.

And here may be the perfect storage opportunity as all the horses appear to have bolted... We will also be reporting soon on the progress of the new house design - we spent some time this week with our architect visiting houses he's built and considering design features and options. They look splendid but {{adopts Kevin McCloud voice}} is what we'd like even remotely achievable within our budget? And if not, what will have to give? Life's too short to... spend two years creating an ordinary house... go bankrupt creating a spectacular house. Desperately hoping for the middle ground and trying not to panic. Of course, we don't have a concept design yet, just a set of somewhat conflicting ideas. We're expecting the first sketches for discussion early next week.

Lesson: new houses are not like old houses

One thing that becomes clear from any research at all is that houses being built now don't work like any house that we've lived in before. Just to meet basic building regs these days requires really high levels of insulation, and if you exceed those and head towards the so-called Passivhaus standard then you don't really need to heat the house much at all. In fact you have to limit the amount of south-facing window, or at least have overhanging eaves to shade the glass, otherwise the place will fry in sunny weather - technically known as limiting solar gain. New houses also need to be very much more airtight than they used to be, which further limits heat loss - but also means that you need to think about ventilation. The obvious answer is to have managed ventilation where you deliberately trickle fresh air around the house, and these systems have a heat exchanger on them so that the warm outgoing air preheats the cold incoming air. Simple, eh? Initially we thought we'd go for a ground-source heat pump and underfloor heating, as that seems to be the greenest way to heat a house, but Alan's been doing the sums and reckons that we will need around 3kw to heat the whole house - one plug-in electric fire would provide that. So there doesn't seem to be any reason to do something as complicated as a heat pump and a heating system. There are various options instead - you can do it with electric heaters, a small boiler, a log-burner, or a top-up heater on the ventilation system which will add a bit more heat to the incoming air when needed. All have different capital and running costs so there's a cost analysis to be done there... I bet you can't wait to see the results published!?!

Project timeline slippage already...

So our surveyor has gone off sick and the house we're going to look at for design ideas can't host us tomorrow after all - one week into the project and one week delay already... But are we going to get stressed about it? Nope, we're saving that for when it really matters...