Empty Nester Dilemmas

We’d got planning permission ages before to build a small cottage on part of the garden of our village home but had hung on to both until the demands of school fees required some decisive action. So sell the original house and build the new one was the call. Beverley at Design & Materials (www.designandmaterials.uk.com) skilfully re-worked our existing design adding the extra story and a rear extension and changing the floor plan. The wish-list for the project included certain non negotiables that Judith had extracted as promises if we were to do the project, most notable being the oil-fired Aga cooker (www.aga-web.co.uk) which she still loves and which I’ve come to be quite fond of despite the fact that it never quite copes with the demands of cooking Christmas lunch without an alarming dip in heat output always at the critical moment. Would I now choose an Aga for its warmth and cosiness with no underfloor heating (since the additional heat requirement is tiny) against underfloor heating (http://www.homebuilding.co.uk/directory/215) and a good range cooker? You bet I would! Would Judith? Still to be tested but it would be quite a struggle of logic, rhetoric and sheer underhand cunning to persuade her. One potentially successful line of attack would be to suggest underfloor heating warmed by a ground source heat pump with a wind turbine powered pump http://www.kensaengineering.com/self-build/index.htm. That would probably do the trick and be an excellent solution given an appropriate site. Kensa Engineering, incidentally, is a company we came across a number of times during the autumn’s Awards judging trip and a number of self builders spoke very well about them both in price and service. A farmhouse style kitchen, walk-in larder, inglenook fireplace and walk-in wardrobes were amongst the other specific requirements that I can remember. But the general desire was to create the look and feel of an old, traditional village house and to imbue it with a sense of charm and timelessness. Then add all the modern features that make a place easy and inexpensive to live in - excellent insulation, plastic plumbing, mains pressure hot water, built in hi-fi speakers and so on. The best of both worlds. If we were building today we would add more convenience features like computer network cabling throughout the house. The external look was achieved using small cottage windows and a traditional angle of pitch on the roof as well as Judith’s cottage garden. Internally we left ceiling joists exposed on the ground floor, used some tongue and groove panelling in some areas for variation, some nice thick oak window boards and some good quality flooring materials, terracotta tiles in the kitchen and utility (we used rejects as we liked the unevenness of colour as well as the cheaper price- http://www.yorkhandmade.co.uk/ - and oak in the sitting room as well as some rounded edges in the style of plastering. The external walls are rendered blockwork with interlocking reconstituted slates from Sandtoft (www.sandtoft.co.uk) more to come