timeline

No digger pictures at the moment - but we have a site meeting on Monday, so I'll post a picture of how it looks stripped of the garages, the piggery, the mound etc. and all ready for our house!

During May the foundations will be dug, drainage laid and service connections put in - everyone has been very helpful; special thanks to John at Anglian Water & Jaz from BT Openreach so far.

Scaffolding goes up at the beginning of June and the provisional date for our timber frame delivery is the 13th. It takes 2-3 weeks to put the frame up and then services get connected, the roof goes on and brickwork goes on the outside.

We can start work inside, laying the underfloor heating and putting up plasterboard (actually Fermacell), but a lot will have to wait until after the floors are screeded in August.

We have an end date of October, but a lot of internal work won't be finished by then. We do hope to spend Xmas there, and we haven't forgotten the house-warming parties everyone asks us about!

I have posted previously about our journey of finding out how to have a house as environmentally friendly as we could and how difficult some choices can be (try reading the technical appendix of the Green Building Bible!).
We have made the best decisions that we can, and for those who are interested, here is what we have arrived at:

Materials:
Timber frame houses are better for insulating than conventionally built houses (given that we weren't going to build a house from tyres or straw!)
Insulation:
We are having solid insulation panels, these are less "green" in manufacture but more efficient. We shall use recycled insulating materials in any spaces left.
We have lovely windows from Andersen (thanks to our neighbour Leslie for her help with this) that are double-glazed & argon-filled.
Heating:
We have opted for a wood-burning stove with built in thermostat (the Hwam Vivaldi from Fotheringhay Forge) which will provide warmth & interest.
We are using a mechanical heat recovery pump from Villavent to extract warmth & circulate it. And we are getting a central vacuuming system from them as well (one of the joys of the building shows is watching the vacuum pipes at work, really!)
Back-up will be under-floor central heating from Nu-heat.
Fuel will be gas.
We decided that ground-source & air-source pumps were not yet efficient enough to justify the amount of electricity they use. That will probably change in the next few years.
Micro-generation:
We have a south-west & a south-east roof. One will have solar thermal panels, also supplied by Nu-heat to generate hot water.
The other will have photo-voltaic cells from Solar Partner. This is quite a big investment, with what looked like a long pay-back until feed-in tariffs became available. We wait to see how well it works!
Water:
We are not going to re-use grey water. Storage & the need for extra pipes & pumps means it isn't an obvious decision. We shall have rain-water harvesting. Originally we were going to use it only outside, but because of the new water-use regulations will install the pumps & pipes to use it inside the house.
We are having showers that limit water flow, but we hope that they will prove efficient & pleasant, thanks to David & Roxanna at the Bathroom Studio for their help with this.

That's all for now! If you have been, thanks for reading this.