End of week six

One week on and the external and internal walls have now reached the first floor so it's starting to really look like a house. It's possible to go inside and get a feel for the downstairs rooms and, with windows on all three outer walls, they seem incredibly bright. This will cut down on the amount of artificial light they need as well as maximising the warmth from any winter sun. Next week work starts on the first floor rooms so the scaffolding has been put up, which rather obscures the view of the house.

On Friday afternoon the JCB came back as one of the biggest jobs on the site is about to start. These pipes are the key part of the house's heating and will be buried under most of the garden that's visible in this picture. I'll tell you more about the heating when I've got my head round it as it makes no sense at all at the moment to me...

The JCB for the job is so large it made furniture in this house shake when it came on site so the next couple of weeks should be entertaining!

End of week five

I promised you walls and here they are:

The massive windows are because this is the south-facing wall and the sun will be one of the major sources of heating for the building. We will have electronic blinds on the outside of the windows on this wall for the summer time, to stop the rooms overheating. Presumably we will eventually tire of playing with the electronic blinds, but I expect it will take a while....

The walls are all made with blocks of recycled concrete. If you look at them close-up you can see they are flecked with black stuff that looks like charcoal, although it's not soft. 

They are made of about 90% recycled material and, according to the WRAP website (http://www.wrap.org.uk/), they are "sourced from a variety of material: arising from construction and demolition (concrete, bricks, tiles), highway maintenance (asphalt planings), excavation and utility operations".

Apparently the bricks have got an A+ environmental rating (similar to the energy ratings of white goods) and I think they're produced in this country so that helps their carbon footprint.Sadly, like energy efficient white goods, they are also more expensive than their non-eco counterparts... sigh.

I know it's obvious when you think about it, but bricks in a wall have to be strong enough to support the bricks above them without crumbling so here's a bit of physics for you. The pressure that something can withstand is calculated by the force of the weight from above divided by the object's area and is measured in Pascals or N/m². These bricks have a strength of about 9 N/mm² (or 9 megapascals). Whenever I've had to read about pressure in physics I'm always reminded of the time the lady from Weightwatchers left tiny pits all over the newly-restored parquet school hall floor with her stilettos.

End of week four

Here's the site at the end of week four - one month into the build. The leyland cypress has gone, as has the compost heap and the bricks have come. This time next week I should have some walls to show you. Apparently the site is about to get busy; not that I'd noticed it being particularly placid so far....

The (putative) wildlife area

So here, bathed in the setting sun (sorry about that!) is the site of the wildlife area. To give you an idea of scale, the tallest part of the wall is about 12 feet high.

It obviously looks a wreck at the moment but you have to see through the mess to the Eden it will become - imagine wild flowers and a pond and some sort of tree where the fence and the wall meet...

... and note the logs in the foreground, they're going to be part of the oasis too, forming a home for all those things that crawl over your feet if you're not careful.

Timber!

This was the south-west corner of the site before the build began, with the most enormous compost heap and a leyland cypress tree. Goodness knows how long the heap had been here but you can see how high it was and it was way too big for me to move on my own, so it's been bugging me ever since we moved in. This week the eyesore has gone and the final part of the clearance was the removal of the cypress.

It wasn't the most beautiful of trees and because it's an evergreen it was going to be a problem  in the winter as it would block the sun so it had to go. It took the tree surgeons just over 15 minutes to take the tree from this:

to this.

The orange machine to the left of the JCB is the shredder and all the tree was fed into it and turned into chippings apart from a series of logs that I'll keep on site. The removal of the tree and the compost heap has cleared a massive new area and this is where the pond and wildlife area are going to go in the new garden - plus a much smaller, deciduous native tree that supports more species than the cypress, maybe a crab apple.

Advert break

I thought it would be good to see if I could find some recycled notebooks or something to keep my notes in for when I go into schools and, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to find this very funky stationery:

I was really pleased to see that it is made just down the road in Worcester so not only is it green by virtue of its manufacture, but it's only travelled a few miles to get here. Apparently when the stationery eventually falls apart you can send it back to them for recycling if you don't have the facilities in your area - how cool is that?!

What's nice is that their range isn't all biscuit-coloured and worthy so you don't feel a drudge for doing something eco. You didn't have to buy green-coloured products but I'm a visual learner so I thought it would emphasise the eco message. I particularly like the pen which is made of cornstarch (and writes as nicely as my normal favourite from the Tate Modern). Anyway, here's a quick plug for them:

Remarkable (Pencils) Ltd, The Remarkable Factory, Midland Road, Worcester, WR5 1DS  http://www.remarkable.co.uk/

Advert over!

End of week three

So here we are at the end of the third week and, so far, everything is going to plan. This morning's machine was the concrete mixer:

and by the end of the morning the hollow was filled. The hardcore, plastic, insulation, steel and concrete make a substantial base for the rest of the house.

The concrete should be set by the end of the weekend but it will be interesting to see if anyone/anything visits the site and makes their mark for posterity like this little dog 2,000 years ago (I bet the tile maker was delighted).