Let’s build again…

A quick update from us (after a 2 year break from blogging!) We are on the road travelling from Glasgow to Portugal in search of our next building plot. We’re going to keep you informed of our movements here so check back in soon. Big love, from Joanna, Ben and Frank xx

Who By Fire

It’s been a good few months since my last blog post. There’s been a lot happening! I’m not one to dwell on the bad things, but boy oh boy, we’ve had a few big hits in our personal life these last 12 months, which in turn has affected our progress on the build. It’s been one thing after the next and I haven’t felt much like writing about it, naturally.

Craig measuring up some of the purlins (Pu) for our house! Delivered to site by Somerscales Sawmill

In great news though, our foundations are down, the drainage is complete and we have an onsite warehouse in our marquee. We are over budget by around 10k. I think we can survive that, but it was a bit of a surprise, really down to bad communication and being provided with incorrect drawings of our services. Maybe we’ve lost the hot tub… or the underfloor heating… who knows at this stage. I’m learning that managing a house build doesn’t work quite like managing a film or animation project. Having no knowledge or experience of most of what we’re doing, I’m finding myself head-scratching after meetings and conversations. I’m learning a lot. And there is a lot of what I know that I can use; Negotiating, persuading and pushing. There’s been a lot of that so far.

Last week our beloved caravan, Crystal Tips, was burnt to the ground. One of our neighbours called me to break the news. We were and are just in shock. We are safe and living back at our place in the Southside, along with the cat. If you’ve been following our progress on Instagram or on here, you’ll know how much work we put in to that caravan. As there were no services supplied by GCC (services were part of our agreement when we bought the plot) we had to do a lot of work to ensure we could live onsite over the summer. The plan was to live in our 35” static caravan for site security, and to save us some money while we were building. We rented out our south side place which got us through the summer financially. We installed a solar power system with the kind contribution of a panel by Chris Card! Ben built us a water tower and we filled up our tank with my friend Leslie Craigie around the corner. We installed a brand new gas boiler and a roll top bath. We insulated the floors and laid pine boards on top. We built a hearth and installed a beautiful little log burner. We made it home! We had a plan to move the caravan to a site in the Highlands once we were finished building where our families could holiday.

Ben and Craig had been working onsite on the carpentry after the delivery of our beautiful giant hunks of Douglas fir arrived onsite around a month ago. The guys have 5 bents to build, and we were/are estimating that they’ll complete 1 every 7(ish) days. They completed one bent, then the fire happened, then the storm hit. And our marquee (our workshop!) blew away…! So we’ve been at a standstill for around a week working on insurance, budgeting, chatting to the police, local MPs and anyone who we think might be able to help.

So the caravan is gone now and it’s time for us to knuckle down and get this house finished.

The guys are back onsite tomorrow/Tuesday and we really, really can’t wait to get cracking again. Hopefully we’ll be able to update you some more from here on in. Cross your fingers for us! We need some good stuff to start happening again now thank you please.

Huge thank you to everyone who came to the rescue. Davy and Buster for being our full time site security, Mark for helping Ben with the marquee when it ripped and tried to fly away, Craig for being so patient and helpful with all things build and design, my maw for making us soup, The Fire Brigade for explaining things to me and being honest, our neighbours in Maryhill who have been passing and been so, so kind and supportive, whoever called to report the fire (!), Cet for heading out to site to help us figure out site security, and my pals Rona, Charli, Kate & Ivy for letting me implode a little bit in public yesterday.

xxx

We're still here...

Hey all! Almost 4 months in, and we’re still standing…JUST. We’ve come a long way, but boy oh boy are we exited to actually get started on the house building part of this now. I think we’ve been pretty patient and tolerant though it hasn’t been without some really trying times for us. We are still the only people onsite, there have been letters to the council asking why “travellers” have moved on to Bantaskin Street, we’ve had drunken loons calling us gypsies, we’ve been up in the middle of the night with all sorts of weird and freaky noises outside, from the dogs, the cats, the human traffic, we’ve been over to TC twice to stop the fire alarm deafening everyone, we’ve been rained on whilst in the loo and in the living room, we’ve used up all our data over and over again watching Nashville, we’ve both been sick, we’ve cried, we’ve tried to be normal, we’ve drunk probably a bit too much, we’ve cooked a few nice meals, we’ve had a tonne of take-aways, we’ve stayed in BnBs, we’ve let the bath leak on to the caravan chipboard floor, we’ve run out of sawdust, we’ve been given 2 generators, and our batteries have gone flat but as of this week - THE END IS ACTUALLY IN SIGHT!!!

We moved onsite in July, having purchased a “Serviced Plot” from Glasgow City Council. We got our mains water connection around a month ago now, and have yet to get electricity connected. The Scottish Power case for our street was closed and we weren’t able to action anything to get it opened up again…so as the nights have been drawing in, we’ve been getting colder and colder, and having to light candles earlier and earlier. A serious challenge when we are still trying to get the caravan finalised for winter. Luckily Ben’s impact driver has a little torch on it when you screw… The insulation is near completion, but a few weeks back we basically stopped doing anything as we were getting too exhausted, with no movement in any direction.

At the end of a long summer of waiting for emails and wondering why nothing was happening, we changed direction and hooked up with the excellent team at Design Engineering Workshop, based in South Block, who have been brilliant and helped us to get our Stage 1 warrant drawings finalised. These are with the Building Control Officer now… Fingers crossed there isn’t much longer to wait for the ok on this front!

Last week we got our loan offer from The Ecology Building Society which was another HUGE day - not without emotional turmoil! We will be receiving the first chunk of money this week, they say! This means breaking ground really is going to happen. I mean ACTUALLY going to happen and we should have foundations in the ground before the year is out. Crazy excited about this. We’ve met a brilliant groundworks contractor who will be building the ring beam, the slab, drainage and driveway. A separate company will be doing the piles. The other 5 plot holders may also be keen to pile, so we’re crossing our fingers they will be ready to go around the same time as us…SOON PLEASE!!! But it’s looking like possibly only 1 or 2 will be….

We borrowed quite a bit more than we thought we would from Ecology, and so it may be that we can accelerate some of the build process and get done a bit quicker than we originally anticipated. It also means Ben and I being able to step back a little, which sounds really, really, really good right now.

Hoping and praying we’ll be posting some pictures of actual house building on here very soon y’all!

Joanna xx

Week 8...in to 9...

Evenin!

Writing this from the deck of the caravan onsite at Plot 4 on Bantaskin Street. Man are we lucky it’s been such a warm summer so far… we really have felt like we’re on holiday for a lot of this. We got a bit of the taste of winter last week, with a few cold nights. We still have holes in the floors of the caravan and it is by no means insulated, so we’re talking about plans for how to insulate. The log burner is here, but not yet installed. Our friend Paul will install it, but as yet, we’re all a bit worried about heat and flues and polystyrene/timber very close to where the flue will be. I think our plan is to bring the whole stove away from the caravan wall by a few feet and use some concrete board to replace the existing walls. We might need to go double skinned for safety too. Still deciding… But I think winter is going to roll in fast! We are considering cladding the whole thing in wood, and insulating at the same time. Just not sure about guttering/the roof/building a new roof? Anyone have experience of this? Equally we aren’t working right now, and our Airbnb is slowing right now so hmmmm perhaps we don’t have the funds to do this. But will we freeze?! Ben’s talked about insulating on the inside - maybe we’ll do that. I have some rolls of cork - maybe they’ll work?

We’ve situated our caravan at the back and to the side of the plot, so that once the house is built, we can (HOPEFULLY) roll it on out. We’re looking at buying a woodland or patch of land somewhere sunny on which we’ll plonk our static caravan and family and friends can head out to stay there. A holiday cabin! Some guy working on the street the other day did describe our humble, rusty, tin can of an abode, as a “cabin” and I was totally flattered. Cheers mate!

We’ve been waiting for around 8 weeks now to finalise our Building Control submission but we have some serious delays with our SER (Structural Engineering Report) and our foundations design. Really hoping that next week we will get this finalised and submitted (Stage 1 warrant) - which will mean we can go ahead and try to get foundations in soon, soon, soon. Before the frost Craig says!

Tom Grant Plant

This excellent little digger is onsite with us today digging trial pits for some more information about what kind of foundations we’re going to use. 

We have concluded missives and have an official entry date of July 1st - that’s next week! Our static caravan arrives on the 2nd. Unfortunately we might not have water until the end of the month though - URK! BYOWB at our place! (Bring your own water bottle).

J

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Straw bales for walls...?

We are planning to do as much of this build ourselves as possible. We’ve been working towards an ideal scenario in which we have enough passive income to get us by, whilst we work on the house for a minimum of 6 months, and up to about 12 months. We have a two year window to build in, once we start…or else the council will come get us, WAH!

Ben and I have designed the house ourselves based on work we’ve both done in the past. Ben has 2 years of traditional post and beam timber frame building - he’s also a SketchUp whizz. He can make just about anything and we’ve built up quite an impressive tool collection over the last year or so. I’m an ex Sims-addict (not really sure I need much more experience than this to be quite honest), I worked as a 3D modeller at GSA’s Digital Design Studio (now the School of Simulation and Visualisation) for 2 years modelling and texturing Stirling Castle, Rosslyn Chapel and New Lanark, to name a few. We have been playing around with drawings and 3D designs ever since we met. We travel quite a bit and try to stay in interesting and unusual places when we go.

We’ve obviously watched a tonne of Grand Designs, Stay Here, Homes for Under 100k, everything with Sarah Beeny and the rest… I had never considered straw bale as a building material for our house until one of the architects we have been consulting with mentioned it. Chris Morgan of John Gilbert Architects gave us some exciting ideas with regards to building materials and heating systems. He lectures at GSA on heating systems and we’re hoping we’ll get some more consultation with him before we start the build! It was really great to chat to someone who really got where we were coming from, and who seemed to have a lot of confidence in us, wahooop!

So I jumped online, and as luck would have it, there was a straw building course running that very week at the School of Simulation and Visualtion at the art school (!) Perfect timing! We contacted Allan from The School of Natural Building right away and asked if there was room for us. He said yes indeed, and that Barbara Jones would be leading the course. We had seen Barbara on YouTube and were reminded of a couple of brilliant Grand Design episodes where they used straw bales for the walls and insulation. We re-watched those, then nipped down to The Hub at Pacific Quay for the course last Friday.

So, so interesting and brilliant to meet 15-20 other builders, some of whom who have land already, others looking for land, others looking for advice on renovations, others just generally interested in natural building. We had a great day hosted by Eileen and Barbara who answered all our questions and made all of this feel really achievable and real!

Now for how to manage the weather if we choose this inexpensive, natural path. Barbara told us there is a Straw Bale Goddess looking out for her, and that they’ve never been rained off yet - I’m just not sure that Goddess would travel to Maryhill in Glasgow, hmmm…..!!!! The lime rendering can be entirely ruined by frost, so ideally rendering would be complete by September. Eek. Let’s see….

We are currently looking at running these courses on the site:

1. Straw Bale Building

2. Lime & Clay Rendering

3. Car Tyre or Plinth Wall Foundations

There has been a lot of interest already - we just need to do a bit more research with our lenders and the other peeps in charge… But we shall keep y’'all posted.

Please fill in the form on our contact page if you’re interested in coming to build as a volunteer or attending one of the courses this summer.

Joanna xx

Save Me, Millbrae Crescent!

I used to lie in bed scrolling through Right Move on Saturday mornings. I love looking at what’s out there. A few months after Ben had moved in to my place in Fergus Drive in Glasgow, I was doing just that and I scrolled upon a real mess of a property. I angled my phone at Ben and said something like, “Look at the state of this place…” He took a look and commented on how big the rooms were. A few weeks later Ben suggested we go check out the area that scabby old flat was on, just to see.

Driving down Millbrae Crescent feels like driving on to the set of a movie. We were gob-smacked - really! I couldn’t believe this beautiful street was hiding only a few minutes drive from a street I lived on as a kid, in Newlands, just down the road. I had driven past it a hundred times on my way to school… So we slowly rolled along the cobbles, peering in to the beautiful Greek Thomson town houses on the opposite side. Then we spotted a Clyde car, outside number 7. Yeah! I nipped inside and sure enough the agent was there showing a couple around. He invited us in to look around too, and told us there had been “a lot of interest.” We didn't say much inside, we just looked around, up and down, asked a couple of questions. And then we went outside, the car drove away and we just stared at each other.

What followed was a couple of months of madness - probably not worth regurgitating, but a series of EXTREMELY fortunate events led us to our dream renovation project, and Millbrae is now a place we call home!

Work Processes

We both took 3 months off work and did everything ourselves, bar the plumbing and electrics.

I would wake up at 6am most mornings and start work on filtering through my Gumtree alerts for “square tiles”, “vintage taps”, “4 poster beds”, “range-style cookers”… Then I would rake through the auction catalogues for anything that might work for us. We took trips to the incredible Steptoe’s Yard in Montrose a couple of times, filling up with odds and ends - old cistern brackets, hooks, pans, all sorts of things. I would find an image in Pinterest, show it to Ben, then we would visit these places and eventually something would emerge in the flat - totally unique and made for a no cash at all!

We designed our kitchen from scratch. The room that would become the kitchen had nothing in it except a stand alone sink, which we took away as quick as we could as it was in a really bad way - like everything else in the place! Ben created the kitchen layout and design in SketchUp then built the cupboards from scratch. I ordered the handles from Etsy. Ben’s friend Lewis came around to help us pour the concrete tops. We’re so very proud of it! We kept the original single pane wooden sash windows - too beautiful (and expensive) to get rid of, and I made some thick, blackout curtains - who needs double glazing! (Possibly us, now that we’ve learned so much about efficiency and how much energy we are wasting!!)

We’re still finalising and chipping away at the place, but it really is a crazy transformation… Hopefully these before and after pictures do our work justice!

J & B