Home Sweet Home

Well?  To Buy or to Build???

The moment will come in your life when you are thinking of setting up home, settling down, having a family etc.   Trust me, thoughts like these will cross your mind and the results of your decisions will show in your bank account or pocket:

• ‘How much is this going to cost every month on top of the mortgage?’
• ‘What is the difference between a house of ‘A’ grade energy efficiency and C, D, E …?’
•  ‘ I wonder whether it might not be better, cheaper and future-proof if we built our own house?’
• ‘What is a Passiv-Haus…and what is an Active house… and a CO2 neutral home?’   

So, shall we have a look at some of these from an English TV programme called Grand Designs (fronted by a good presenter called Kevin McLoud who speaks very clear English).  It has its own You Tube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/GrandDesignsShows

My environmentally-sensitive favourites are the following:

• Sliding Roof House (the house that Monty built) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GSteaEvRGo.  Yes ordinary people CAN literally build their own house…. although Monty is a self-taught, self-build genius…. wait until you see the washbasin and bath that simply disappear and the sliding roof and winched-opening windows.
• Finnish Log Cabin.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHMraJYKE8Y  .   Designed by the site owner, made in pieces from sustainable forests in Finland, shipped over to England then assembled by the owner with the help of two finns.  All wood.  All heated by one wood-burning stove.
• Cruck-Frame House.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rc-SvcDy4k  (The house that Ben built).   A guy living under a tent in the forest for 10 years decides to design his own house and build it himself from 100% local materials: wood from the forest for the frame, the walls and the roof; straw bales for insulation. Generates and stores his own eolian energy, cleans his own water by natural means and re-uses it, plants all his veg and fruit needs and farms a few sheep and chickens for meat.  Lives effectively ‘off the grid’ with no energy needs or outgoings….
• Brittany Ground House.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSIba-eKAbE A somewhat’ hippie’ English/Aussie couple move to Brittany and build a home from thousands of rubber tyres (free from a local ‘dump’).  They build it into the ground using only natural, local materials, make the walls of straw, mud and wattle (like old Alsatian columbages), free volunteer labour and local craftsmen.  Barring major investments in solar energy and a massive storage tank for the hot water they make everything themselves for nothing: just wait until you see the bottle walls!

Other favourites(but not for totally environmental reasons) include:

• Huf Haus.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opc-zprxGnU  .  So… you want a bespoke design, German, prefabricated house and you want it up and finished from concrete plinth to watertight in 7 days for a fixed price.  No chance!  Of course not: they did it in 5 DAYS!!!  Well there was a German international football match to get home to!  Both the people commissioning this amazing house are self-builders – they watch people destroy the home they built with their own hands before the new one arrives.  They are well into their 70s – how’s that for courage.
• Huddersfield Woollen Mill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETnJbyc-LM4  A pair who run a business furnishing bars decide to restore an old industrial building as it was externally but to make a revolutionary, ultra modern, computer-controlled home inside.  Just watch the meticulous way in which they plan down to the last socket and switch.  Wait for two immortal phrases:
  • ‘To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail’   and
  • ‘Just look at this – it’s as rough as a Badger’s backside!‘
• Stealth House.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTY_F_aC-xc  The UK’s first Passive House… breaks all records for not having draughts and for making energy really work.  First, prop up a complete ruin, then dig a gigantic hole with diggers … then when it is all finished get your mates to cover it all up with thousands of barrow loads of earth.  You would think it is going to be a dark disaster, but it is anything but……  Be prepared to be surprised.
• Check Mate?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbzHvaqcQis A 14th century RUINED castle…. made into a home by a little local guy with a dream and not much money…..
• Bath BauFritz Kit Haus.   (AKA the sea of mud)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-7Q2J3IZoI  Given the amount of rain and pouring water you will see in this episode (most of it under or inside the house!) it is pretty obvious it had to be in ‘Bath’!  Before your perfectly-created home arrives on a truck from Germany, first dig a hole….. then watch it collapse……the reinforce it and open it up again……. then watch as the hillside collapses with half the neighbour’s property and fills the hole (again)…. then calculate – the hole has cost 400,000 Euros (without the house!).   But the finished product is something else.
• Isle of Skye.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRg6ilsmAGA  Two lady artists set about challenging the prevailing look and feel of every house on the island: traditional, brick and white with a house and a studio which are anything but traditional….  They plant and grow their own roof too…yes, grow!
• La Creuse…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEQdGZx8xE4  .  OK…. I have to admit being a bit biased here as one of the couple featured here is Deni (Denise) one of my ex-students from Bournemouth University.   Impressive to watch her husband (an ex-merchant banker with apparently not much DIY experience) learn from a book how to make stairs and then construct his own to go up FIVE floors!!!
• The Tree House on the Isle of Wight.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPXETDts-Cs     An architect with vision plus his artist / sculptress wife create a vision at tree-top level….. using ‘moo poo’ (cow dung) and yoghurt and wood that has been burned with a flame-thrower!   Sounds crazy…… but then they said that about flying and going to the moon………