Late last year, Emma won a £1000 worth of Eco- retrofitting of her home. It was part of the 10:10 campaign and Great British Refurb campaign competition. In this blog, Emma tells of her refurbishment experience.

Having a gaping 5 feet wide hole in the front of your house on one of the coldest days of the winter may not sound much fun but when it means a lovely, new, insulated front door then it doesn’t seem so bad. Over three days all the glass in the windows and the back door were also replaced and the team of guys that did the work managed to stay cheerful despite the freezing weather. Ironically though, I am not sure that making hundreds of cups of tea a day did much for our electricity consumption!  Over the next three weeks we had many other changes including having the loft insulated, having the whole bathroom replaced, party wall cavity insulation put in and a new cooker. The loft had some insulation in but nowhere near the recommended amount. As we use our loft for storage we opted to have some compact insulation which was then boarded over to make sure we could still get access to the space. The loft door was insulated as well and draught excluding brushes added to make it even more draught proof – needless to say we have not had any recurrence of our previous problem of the loft hatch being sucked into the roof space when it is windy! As we had a very old fashioned bath suite complete with corner bath – not good for water consumption – and a (broken) shower from the dark ages the whole room was ripped out and replaced. This included an electric shower, not the original idea but it was discovered that the water pressure in the house was not high enough for the mixer tap that was originally installed. This did highlight for us that when choosing eco-friendly measures for your house you need to think carefully about what will fit in with your existing appliances and weigh up the advantages of one improvement against another. Our new bathroom is fantastic and now that we have a shower we rarely have baths and only heat up the water tank half as often as we did before. This tank is now double insulated as well – so saving even more energy. We were cooking on an electric cooker before the makeover but now have been converted to gas and have a great new gas cooker, a much more efficient way of cooking, quicker and more controllable. As well as this we also had our bedroom ceiling re-plastered to stop draughts from the loft, new energy saving bulbs in the lights that didn’t already have them and cavity wall insulation put in the party wall between us and next door. We were also sent a new wireless energy meter so we can keep an eye on our electricity consumption – we have been using the tumble dryer much less as a result! Before having the makeover we knew that we wanted to make our house more energy efficient but really didn’t know where to start. Without the advice that we have had during this experience we would probably have ended up wasting money on doing completely the wrong things. We learned so much even from the initial survey and had already started to make simple changes before the work started. It was pretty crazy having so many different things done all at the same time – especially having no running water in the bathroom for several days and having to ask to use your own toilet at times. That said, it meant that all the work was done in a fairly short space of time and after it was all cleared up and repainted life got back to normal very quickly. We were aware straight away that the house was warmer after all the insulation was put in, no more icy chill in the air! As the work was completed just as the weather was getting warmer we will have to wait until next year to see the real difference it will make over the winter – we don’t expect to see curtains moving when the Autumn gales hit the back of the house any more for instance. All in all the work on our house has made a great difference to us and we would have taken many years to be able to afford to have it done ourselves so a great big thanks to the Great British Refurb Campaign!