HIGH POINT
“Moving in, even though it wasn’t finished. And when we got the flooring down upstairs, that certainly made it look no longer like a building site, that made it start looking like a home.”
not originally appearing in the designs. “You see this lovely bathroom and then they say ‘you’re going to lose a bit of that so we can put a soil pipe in’,” he says. “We went through about three or four meetings and redesigns, but they were toying with a basic plan rather than changing anything dramatically.”
PROGRESS
Once the design and planning were taken care of, Ian and his wife waited for the sale of their existing house to go through in order to have the money to fund the build. Work finally began on site in June 2019, with substantial site clearing work. “The scrub just blossomed in the interim period,” Ian says. They also had to bring utilities to the site which presented a few problems. “The project manager had to help me fill in all the forms, like choosing ducting size,” explains Ian. Their initial groundworker also didn’t correctly join the ducting for the telephone wires so another trench had to be dug last minute. He pays tribute to the work of UK Power Networks, saying that with their help, “we finally got it all sorted!” Due to the nature of the site only the upper floor was constructed using timber supplied by Scandia – the lower floor is built in concrete as it’s dug into the hill. The lower floor slab was laid by September 2019 and the concrete walls poured in October 2019. In December 2019 the block and beam for the first floor was laid, and the timber frame for the upper floor was erected by February 2020.
Not long after this of course, Covid hit, which 46
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took their builders off site for a few weeks. The couple also had some issues with some ‘temporary’ fixes during Covid becoming permanent fixtures, such as in glue-laminated timber beams. “Bolts that were meant to be temporary stayed there – by the time they needed to come out it was too late, it would collapse,” explains Ian. Unfortunately, he says, the “glulams were covered in MDF to hide the holes.” They were nice and slim and they’re now a bit more chunky.” They also suffered from materials shortages. “The project manager got hold of some Portuguese plaster, which you have to treat in a different way,” says Ian, and managed to exchange. “People were driving up to Oxford from down here just to get plaster.” The couple were renting a property nearby so they could be onsite as much as possible to track progress and make decisions. They moved into the house in September 2020, despite it not being quite finished, but they needed to, to ensure things got finished. “The longer we stayed in rental accommodation the longer it was going to drag on,” Ian says. The main contractor for the project was
recommended to them by Scandia, though it was the project manager who took care of subcontractors. Being based in Somerset, a lot of her contacts were there, however the cheaper labour rates proved beneficial. “We paid for Airbnbs, and they would come up for a week or two,” Ian says.
Sustainability was really important for the pair, and they installed an air source heat pump which
nov/dec 2021
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