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.