GBRC

Last July, we published Tina’s blog on her eco-refurb project and on some trouble she had with getting planning permission. Now that this is all over, she is back to tell us about her project’s progress.

After many months, we made it through all the necessary hoops (planning permission, building regs and so on) to start work extending and upgrading our chilly 1950’s solid wall house to create a cosy, ultra-low energy home. With the fabulously detailed plans and sections drawn up by our architect, Gil Schalom, and the passive house suitable windows on order, the old gas boiler finally broke down for the last time in mid-October. Happily, we moved into somewhere warmer a week later, and the builders started on site in November.

The weather was kind, and the extension floor is now complete with a course of highly insulating marmox thermoblocks just below floor level, and 300mm of silver EPS under the slab. While putting in the extension footing, we took the opportunity to beef up the foundations in places where it clearly needed attention already, or would soon do to support the changes to the roof.

Indoors, the suspended wooden floors for the whole ground floor have been taken away (to be reincarnated as the floor of the new loft conversion in a few months’ time). With the necessary beams in and some areas of wall out, 300mm of silver EPS insulation runs under the ground floor in every room, with a slab above. There is not much we can do about the existing walls – heat will be lost into the ground via those, but adjacent to every wall we have placed downstands of insulation below the main layer of EPS and upstands above it to minimise this heat loss.

With the floors insulated, the next step is to renew the roof and create an attic room, followed by replacing the single glazed windows and insulating the whole house externally.  I will keep you posted on what is happening and if you want to hear more about this project and others in the Nottingham area you can come to the Eco House under Construction exhibition on 21st January www.wbecohouses.co.uk