himself, he is full of praise for the local Building Control surveyors (Scott Adams and Chris Maslen at Devon Building Control Partnership). “They have been so helpful, I could send them an email and they'd get back to me with great advice. Very positive, and happy to do site visits.”


A point of view


The four-bed (converted from three-bed) bunga- low sits on a spectacular plot at the top of the village of Bishopsteignton overlooking the Teign estuary. It needed a lot of work to turn it into their dream home, but was close to what they were looking for as a renovation project, says Paul. “Funnily enough our brief to ourselves was prob- ably a 1950s bungalow, hopefully with a view.” And the view south over the estuary and


fields thanks to the bi-fold doors is enviable – with continually changing colours and tides and a big sky, it is truly captivating. The renovation has been designed to allow the family to take full advantage, opening the side of the house up with generous windows and bi-fold doors leading onto a full-length paved terrace. The purchase was via sealed bid, made some-


what more nervy by the fact that Sam spotted the bungalow on a Friday and bids were due in the following Monday! She travelled down from where they lived in Nottingham over the week- end and assured Paul it was ‘the one,’ and they went for it. They rented it out for around 18 months while they sorted out their affairs and sold up, and began designing their dream home.


Design & dismantling


Paul and Sam made a scale model of their bungalow (as they had done on a previous


renovation project) using paper-backed poly- styrene. “It included tiny sofas and squares rep- resenting things like washing machines and work surfaces,” says Paul. He says that with the family’s needs changing significantly due to becoming parents during the process, “It was useful to be able to run through several scenarios beforehand,” and adds, “I’m a bit of a geek like that anyway.” The major building works – designed by Paul


and Sam but undertaken by contractors – were adding an extension to the east end of the house to make a new master bedroom, small double and shower/WC room, plus an apex window to open up the kitchen to the north that would allow a view straight through the house to the estuary. They removed and/or replaced several windows and walls, in what was a total rearrangement of the room layout, including cre- ating a corridor connecting the bedrooms. In addition, a new Spanish slate roof was added to provide a better structure for solar PVs, with Velux rooflights to the loft studio. Work began in earnest three years ago, and


the house was pretty much gutted. This was a mammoth task however because it was a very substantially built double-skin concrete block con- struction. “The guy who built it owned it all his life,” says Paul, “the graft that went into it was incredible, it was obviously a labour of love.” The site is a steep slope and around a quarter of an acre, originally enclosed by a shuttered concrete wall. The slope meant that deliveries had to be ferried up the drive from the road, and Paul found that a hired track barrow was a major ally. Paul adds, “Huge pieces of steel had to be


lugged by hand up the driveway,” as well as a cast iron bath. All the blocks, plus all concrete


for the footings, came up in a track barrow, and at one point two barrows were running in relay. Then of course was the even bigger task of get- ting rid of all the waste. “It’s only a bungalow, but two chimneys have been taken out and there are a shedload of bricks in two chimney stacks.” Paul used what he could on site such as in rais- ing the garden in certain areas, but there were still around nine grab truck loads of hardcore to be taken off site. He jokes: “It’s kind of the final indignity, there’s


all the graft involved in smashing it down, then the graft involved in getting it to the end of the driveway, then you’ve got to pay somebody to take it away and they sell it anyway!” Paul says that given all the challenges of the


existing house, “I had a lot of comments from people saying I should knock it down and start again, and with hindsight that may have been quite an easy thing to do! But at the end of the day, we chose this path, and it’s brilliant.” Part of what he describes as the “interesting”


journey of investigating someone else’s construc- tion was discovering that the house had a com- bined range cooker and woodburner heating system. However, although Paul was potentially looking to achieve something similar (with added solar thermal in his case) the venting solution his predecessor had devised – routing into an old cistern through a U-bend – was idiosyncratic to say the least. Paul says he could not get anyone to replicate it, but it was always the plan to rip the whole system out anyway as it was defunct. Paul decided against filling the wall cavities – “because they are not very big and I believe the cavity itself provides a fundamental role. I have heard so many horror stories, and witnessed bad results, from filling cavities.” He adds: “I know a lot of people that have filled their cavities then


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