Back storey

This is the beginning of a new series that is bound to be longer than I’d like it to be – both this text and the process of turning a damp collapsing house into a near-zero-carbon home. For my own record I will document the process from time to time over the next however-long-it-takes and I don’t expect anyone else to plough through it all. 

I was brought up in a house that my parents finished building when I was six months old. The light that streamed in through the big plate glass windows altered my personality. Or maybe I inherited their plate glass genes. Either way, I hate not having light.

Ever since I was 18, apart from two years in Cameroon where I had plate glass windows to watch the sun set sadly at 6pm every day, I have lived in Victorian or Edwardian houses whose windows are too small. Ever since I was 19 I have dreamt of building a house of my own where the light streams in. As the unbuilt years have gone by my dreams have become more and more environmentally friendly. 28 years ago I had the opportunity to improve an Edwardian house but I was way ahead of the builders who thought I was mad wanting solar panels and recycled grey water. The house became a bit lighter but that was about it.

In 2019 I started house-hunting and in December, before the estate agent’s board had even gone up, saw what looked like an ideal place to refurbish. I visited, I loved it. Problem was, so did someone else and my offer was rejected because they had a mortgage agreed and I didn’t. I grieved, pulled myself together, printed 429 flyers and put them through the doors of every house in Oxford I was interested in.

Six weeks later the estate agent called me. The other person’s mortgage had been withdrawn because the house was in such bad condition and if I wanted it, it was mine. I did. I commissioned a structural survey, I asked a builder friend to visit it with me and I set about finding an architect who knew about PassivHaus design.

The surveyor was clearly appalled by the state of the house and his report, which I got in early February, said it was unmortgageable (as I knew); the back needed demolishing (hurrah – opportunity!); the floors and almost certainly the joists too were riddled with woodworm and would all have to be removed (hurrah – opportunity!) and it was damp (well, obvs). The builder agreed it would need rebuilding. Good. All that came to be reflected in the price which left me a bit more than I’d expected for refurbishment.

An architect was more elusive. I was astonished at how few architects’ websites even mentioned the environment. By going through the PassivHaus Institut in Germany, I got a shortlist of two in Oxford who had PassivHaus certification, one of whom never replied to my email and the other of whom was Tom. I met him at the house in late February  and i instantly liked him: down-to-foundation, practical and fun. Best of all, when I told him I wanted my house built of brick and he told me sadly that bricks are environmentally unfriendly because of all the heat used in their manufacture, and I then told him I have over a thousand, unused, 100-year-old, wire-cut bricks, he got really excited and told me about Alvar Aalto. Yes, my retrofit will include the bricks.

I commissioned him, even though I hadn’t yet bought the house. He advised me to live in it for at least six months before deciding exactly what I wanted to do with it. He arranged for a detailed survey of the house and plot and, astonishingly, bumped into someone elsewhere in Oxford who enthused about PassivHaus and who turned out to be my new next-door-neighbour… We decided to do a joint project and Tom started sketching ideas.

Meanwhile, conveyancing. Nope, not going there. Too tedious and stressful for words. 

It ended with both exchange of contracts and completion happening on my birthday in May and me acquiring not only the house but also its original documentation going back to 1867.

I immediately began making the house temporarily habitable and the shed usable then five days later I moved in all my stuff that hadn’t previously gone to storage and did a backblip I hadn't dared to do at the time. 

Tom, my neighbours (I&M) and I whittled the sketches down to firmer ideas and in July Tom drew up some outline plans. We talked about them some more and commissioned a PassivHaus survey to see how close to zero carbon the design was, taking account of proposed materials, window sizes and potential energy sources. Only new-builds can meet the exacting demands of PassivHaus so we were pleased that the plans were very close to EnerPHit, the standard for retrofitting. We submitted the plans unchanged for planning permission in October, due for a decision in early December. 

The planning department missed their own deadline and asked us to withdraw the plans because they weren’t Victorian enough (and perhaps so they didn’t have to record a missed deadline in their own quality standard statistics). Instead, Tom arranged for the planning officer to visit my garden in mid-December to see how unVictorian the backs of the houses have become round here and therefore why the plans were OK. They conceded a lot, though for the sake of the Victorians I will have to sacrifice a bit of light and have a bit less wood and a bit more brick. Not a total disaster. We got the official planning report this Monday, and Tom, I&M and I had a Zoom meeting this morning to agree the required changes. Tom will do new plans early next week for us to agree and resubmit.

NB this isn't all mine. Mine is the house in the middle with the intact Victorian sloping roof and no loft conversion. I&M's is the one on the left.

Phew – that was a bit of a marathon. Future accounts should be shorter.