Plot 6 - Carrie and John

Carrie writes:

Building our own house has been exciting, scary, all-consuming and inexorable - in fact, a bit like bringing a child into the world. John and I, and our two children, have been involved in the project since June 2000 when the opportunity of buying a self-build plot in the yard first came up. We started to put down the foundations in May 2002, and now have nearly finished the outside of our house and are working on the 'second fix' and plastering inside. We have had our success and failures, our bad decisions and our fortunate flukes.

We needed the design to be as simple as possible to keep costs down. Using roof trusses instead of a big beam helped to keep costs down as well as allowing a room in the roof. We put all the windows on the south side and none on the north side to maximise solar gain and minimise heat loss.

The frame was built by a timber frame company, which was a mistake. I believe in retrospect that the people who built their own frames have done a much better job. We have lots of concerns about the low-spec nature of the company's work.

The walls are 140mm thick studs filled with rockwool. We used a thin layer of multi-reflective roof insulation which is equivalent to 200mm of rockwool and works both to keep the house warm in winter and cool in summer. Whether this works or not remains to be seen, but initial signs are good. I'm a sucker for new tech products with environmental claims.

We clad the timber frame with Heraklith board, a product with the appearance and texture of high tensile weetabix. Again it has good green credentials as well as being fire resistant and sound and heat insulating. It is also designed to work with render to 'breathe'; i.e., the finish is not waterproof, but both absorbs and evaporates moisture. On to this we rendered with a lime render and finished with limewash, so the finish is rougher than a cement render and the colour is not uniform, but we quite like it like that.

I'm looking forward to moving in and starting the landscaping and garden. Its been a really full-on nine months, but very rewarding.

(Click on pictures for larger version.)

Plot 1, Plot 2, Plot 3, Plot 4, Plot 5, Plot 6, Plot 7, Plots 8 and 9, Plot 10, Plot 11, Plot 12, Plot 13, Plot 14, Plot 15, Plot 16, Plots 17 to 20, Plots 21 to 26.