House crushed down, country locked down

[H] Today is Monday and today the crusher arrived. The whole house, or rather the pile of rubble that was the house, was crushed down to small pieces so that we can use it as hardcore around the site. It means that none of it needs to be transported off site or put in to landfill. In fact, from the entire house and garage, including all the fixtures and fittings, we have only filled two builders’ skips (8 cubic yards each) with rubbish. Everything else has been recycled or will be re-used.

By the end of the day the big digger had disappeared behind a very, very large pile of crushings.

The new coronavirus epidemic is making its presence felt in the UK with the government last week advising that we should now avoid non-essential contact with others and stop all unnecessary travel. Not everyone was listening though, with many tourist spots, our valley included, being inundated with visitors this weekend. This evening Boris Johnson has announced that, from tonight, we are officially ‘in lockdown’ – everyone must now stay at home, normal life is to cease. It was a sobering moment and I have to confess feeling a little anxious about what lies ahead. We have no idea how bad this will get or how long it will last. Obviously work can’t continue as we’d planned but hopefully we can start up again in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime stay safe everyone.

March 17th 2020

[H] Two Mondays have been and gone and no sign of a crusher yet. So we’ve been busying ourselves on our “other project”. We’re currently living about a mile away in a house built in 1895. It’s got 2-feet (60cm) thick stone walls, absolutely no insulation, lots of draughts and is heated with an old oil boiler, night storage heaters and a wood burning stove. It’s a great property with lots of potential, but in terms of thermal efficiency and thermal comfort it’s atrocious! So, at the same time as undertaking a self-build, we’re going to gut this other place and do what we can (with a limited budget!) to improve it, again doing as much of the work as we can ourselves. Yes, we are completely mad!!

In the same way that building a new house is a massive learning curve for us, so is renovating an old property. And it’s a completely different curve! The key principle for our new build is ‘airtightness’. The key principle for our renovation is ‘breathability’. The two buildings need to be treated in completely different ways, using completely different materials, and it’s taking us a while to get our heads around it.

If we can ever find the time, we hope to add a section to this website to cover our experiences of working on an old property. Most people don’t have the luxury of embarking on a self-build, but many want to improve and upgrade existing houses, so perhaps some of things we learn along the way might be interesting or useful to others.

March 6th 2020

[H] After the drama of bringing the house down we spent the whole of Tuesday and Wednesday working through the rubble to break it up and strip out all the steel reinforcing that was embedded in the lumps of concrete. With both Mike’s digger and a large pecker going and Malcolm assisting with a second, smaller pecker attached to Kubi, it was pretty noisy. Petr (a Czech who’s lived in the valley for 12 years and does gardening jobs in the summer and works for Mike in the winter) was darting in and out of the diggers pulling out long lengths of twisted rebar and strips of metal. He was also tasked with picking out the stone and I helped him retrieve the smaller bits and then chisel off the worst of the mortar before stacking them in piles in the garden. Some of the stones are ridiculously heavy and I had to leave all the larger ones to Petr because I just physically couldn’t move them! Goodness knows how he managed to shift what he did, and he was at it all day from early start to late finish with hardly a break. I was knackered after a couple of hours! Oh, and Malcolm got to have a go driving the BIG digger!

Now we’ve got a 'tidy' large pile of rubble where our house used to be and Mike’s next job is to bring in a crusher and crush it all down to hardcore for us. He’ll be back to do that “soon” - Monday perhaps?!