JOHN’S TOP TIP


something I was used to doing for clients when I worked for a law firm. “Every day there was something new to grapple with, but I never thought there was anything we couldn’t do – there was always a solution and that’s what I really enjoyed, working through challenges.


“All the subcontractors were fantastic – there


were so many issues we had to deal with but none of them said to me, you’ve never built a house, so just let us get on with it. We were able to work out how to do things day by day.” While every self-build project presents its own ‘bumps in the road’, the constantly reoccurring challenge at The Pump House was how to approach the curved elements of the building design. To create curved walls, insulated concrete


form (ICF) – blocks that are essentially a polystyrene sandwich’ with a concrete filling – was chosen as the building structure system best suited to the task. “It’s a great system and the ICF suppliers helped a lot,” says John, “but working with ICF was a completely new experience for many of the building team.” Curved walls (and sometimes ceilings too) posed a problem when it came to fiing plasterboard internally or rendering outside. John says: “If anything needed a bend, I got involved. I pretty much learned how to bend every type of material.” He continues: “The roof decking was just one example of the challenges I got involved with. The building is crescent-shaped, so the joists had to be all different lengths. We also had an


36 www.sbhonline.co.uk


essentially flat roof so we needed to work out how to get the rises and falls of that roof to take rainfall away. Our joists weren’t running in the same direction as the falls, so we constructed two layers of decking. e laid one layer completely flat fied to the joists, and then laid out battens at whatever angles we needed fied to the flat deck. ach piece of plywood had to be cut four times because of the curves and then they had to do it twice because we had two layers.” John and his team were faced with another pule when it came to fiing plasterboard to the two-storey-high curved ceiling above the lounge-dining area: “I worked out we had to put down strips fied to the oists and then a batten fied to all of those so there were essentially rails to follow when fiing the plaster board. We also used several layers of a slightly thinner plasterboard too so they would bend more easily.” John’s ingenuity was called upon once more when it was realised that aluminium strips on the roof edge would have to be bent in plan and elevation. John designed jigs for a chop saw to cut between 100 and 200 slots in each aluminium strip so that they could be fied to the roof in the shape needed.


Glazing was yet another aspect of construction that was impacted by curves – on the southern elevation of the house, a convex curve was needed for the windows at second-storey height and then a concave curve for the smaller doors onto the patio. On this occasion at least ohn didn’t have to figure out a solution and


Be onsite at the build as often as you can and get involved in the detail of everything you can – otherwise, you can’t guarantee what you’re going to end up with. This was absolutely vital in our case because the design was so unique and outside of what our builders, carpenters and electricians would normally do. We inherited detailed drawings and had even more drawn up and worked very closely with the architects. But even with that it was hard sometimes for the builders to visualise certain parts of the construction. The builders would say to me, what’s this supposed to be like? I’d phone the architect and they’d supply a freehand sketch, then we’d give that to the builders and the next day that’s what they would build. Something like that happened almost every day during the initial construction phase.


nov/dec 2024


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