A Traditional Oak Frame Self Build

Brian Houston is the living proof that self-build can be a hazardous business, physically as well as financially. He still walks with sticks and is awaiting further surgery after falling 20ft off a ladder while decorating the ceiling of the stairwell of the new oak-framed house owned by himself and his partner, Carol Hosgood.

By good fortune, when the accident happened Carol, a retired hospital theatre sister, was at hand. When she realised the severity of Brians injuries she summoned help. He was taken by helicopter to Poole General Hospital 10 miles away. He underwent two seven hour operations and was in hospital for a total of 10 weeks.

"If I had not done a parachute roll on landing my injuries would have been even more serious, according to my doctors," says Brian, a former naval communications specialist, who undertook a number of parachute jumps during his 25 years in the Royal Navy.

The accident has kept Brian away from the IT training business he runs and because of the large amount of travel involved and the time he has to spend standing up he is likely to have to give this work up. Even more galling was the fact that when Brian and Carol got round to looking at their self-build insurance policy for which they had paid £820, they were amazed to find there was no permanent accident cover. "If ever there was a case of not reading the small print this must have been it," says Brian.

Before the accident Brian had done a great deal of work on the house, although Welsh Oak Frame of Powys were responsible for the roof and the walls (and also the staircase and flooring). Brian and Carol acted as main contractors and Brian had designed all the electrics and installed much of the plumbing. Further work was not possible after his accident.

Since then he has been able to do very little building work. Outside, however, he has managed to build raised beds and produce excellent crops of potatoes and carrots in the vegetable garden at the south facing front, which competes with Carols efforts with the large flower garden at the rear.

The two had been living in Botley, Southampton, when they saw the plot in an estate agents office on an afternoon out in Wimborne Minster, which is two-and-a-half miles away. They were so taken with the one-and-a-half acre plot in a clearing near to the New Forest that they decided to make a formal tender through an estate agent.

They bid £210,000 and secured it. The plot was occupied by a roofless brick and cob cottage dating from about 1850 that had not been lived in for 35 years. "We had every intention of saving and extending it. There was planning consent to add a wing, but in the end it made more sense to build a new house," Brian says.

They had seen oak frame buildings and immediately contacted Welsh Oak Frame because they had been impressed by the company's designs. "They seemed to me to be slightly more modern in feel than those of other companies, and there also appeared to be more oak used in the structure," says Carol.

Welsh Oak Frame invited them to look inside some completed houses and they were very taken with the adzed finish of the beams and also their light colour. "The company also proved very adaptable," says Carol. "For example, they were quite happy to adapt the design we chose, to incorporate some jettied beams over the front entrance and to separate the garage from the building because this was a demand of the planners. We also have three bedrooms rather than the standard four because we wanted more light in the hallway and a rather more luxurious staircase than the norm." Brian and Carol were also offered a choice of different chamfers on their main beams. They opted for a lambs tongue stop chamfer.

Carol says: "Nothing seemed too much trouble for designer John Edmunds, who worked hard to get us the maximum space permitted 50% more than the 139m² cottage previously on the plot. Unfortunately we were obliged to include the conservatory in this space, which means that for the meantime we have had to omit the en suite bathroom planned for our bedroom in the roof space above the utility room.

"The team that came from Powys spent two weeks erecting the house. We got on equally well with the roofing and oak flooring team, which was a good job because by that time we had sold our house in Southampton and were living in a caravan on site, so we saw a great deal of them.

"The large hall and stair layout has given us more light than we would otherwise have had. We were also keen to make sure the glass roofed conservatory at the rear did not take too much light away from the house and we achieved this by leaving a space where there would normally be glass doors, once we had checked that this would not adversely affect the SAP rating."

The timber framed double garage is in fact a cartshed they were allowed no doors by the planners - and is a separate building, with a one metre gap separating it from the house, another stipulation of the planners. The utility room at the east end is a weatherboarded timber framed structure with a ridge a metre lower than the rest of the building in order to provide interest and variety in the front elevation.

Inside the house is a wealth of oak. All the floors upstairs and down are of oak, except for the Chinese slate floors in the kitchen, utility room and conservatory, which Brian was originally going to lay. All the oak posts and beams were cleaned using oxalic acid by Welsh Oak Frame before the floors went down. "This will help to keep the beams light, which we are very keen to do because we think it will contribute to the atmosphere of the house," Carol says. "Oak changes colour very subtly in different lights. My favourite time is evening when it is very peaceful, but for Brian it is late afternoon, when the light coming in at the front plays pretty patterns on the stairs through the stained glass window I designed in the window above the jetty."

Outside there is no mains drainage so they have a Bio Bubble sewage disposal system at the front which discharges into two large garden ponds. Their heating and cooking is powered by liquid petroleum gas.

"The only major technical hitch came when the underfloor heating was about to be fitted upstairs. Because the 28mm thick oak floorboards were already laid on battens, the company fitting the heating - Kee - would have had to drill 150 holes through the oak joists in order to take the pipes and we realised that this was just not practicable, says Brian. The result is that they have radiators in the three bedrooms and bathroom upstairs.

The roofspace is an uninterrupted room, with a full ceiling, insulated and 12.5 metres long. "It is accessible by a loft ladder. If we should chose to sell there are potentially six bedrooms in the house and a good sized room above the garage that we intend to insulate and line so that if I have to work from home in future it can be my office," says Brian.

"We are so delighted with it that it would take an offer of well over £1m to make us move again. However, now it is finished we are full of advice for other self-builders. The first piece is not to have timesheets. Stick to fixed prices as far as possible. All the extra jobs we asked to have done cost us more than we expected because of this. Another, specifically for people contemplating an oak frame, is that there is a lot of decorating needed. Apart from all the walls which we painted, all the oak needs three coats of Danish oil on every post and beam. But this is nothing compared to our advice on choosing a self-build policy that has personal accident cover - and always securing ladders correctly before going up them."

Further reading:

• An Oak Framed Home on a Replacement Dwelling
• A Timber Frame Self-build
• The Evolution of Timber Frame