An Eco House Built for £60,000

Tommy didn't even own the plot before August 2006. "I live in London and the film crew are in Birmingham, so we had to find somewhere in between," he tells me. Together with business partner Steve Willis, Tommy scoured a vast area looking for suitable sites and eventually came across a side street in the Fenland town of March, where plots are still relatively cheap and easy to obtain. He had already agreed with the film production company that the house should be contemporary and should include a number of sustainable features, and a preliminary discussion with the planners indicated that they would have no objection to such a project on this site and so, on that basis, Tommy pressed ahead and completed the purchase.

Not that the planning process was without its quirks. The planning officer Tommy originally contacted went off on maternity leave and had been replaced by a locum from out of the area who took a very different view on what sustainable development might mean in practice. "This bloke wanted us to build a house using clay lump and thatch, because he said it would be more in keeping with the neighbourhood," says Tommy. "But the neighbourhood is full of Victorian brick cottages with slate roofs." The promise of some positive publicity for the town was enough for Tommy's wish to prevail, bar a dubious requirement not to build any living space in the loft, despite there being ample headroom.

The house sets out to prove a point or two. It was anticipated that it would be built for £60,000 in just 60 days, and yet it was to be far better designed and better finished than the typical developer box of similar size. Tommy also wanted to make it as eco friendly as possible within this tight budget and to make use of recycled materials wherever possible.

The recycling aspect came into play right at the outset when a lot of bricks and rubble were uncovered on site. Previously there had been a pair of cottages on the plot and they appear to have been bulldozed and buried some time ago. Bricks from these old cottages were reused in the patio and the front yard, and the good rubble was used as hardcore.

The house is arranged on two floors, each of around 40m² internal area. This comfortably accommodates two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, and an open plan kitchen and living area on the ground floor. The ground floor itself is masonry construction whilst the upstairs is timber frame. The masonry is unusual in that the team have eschewed the traditional cavity wall and gone with solid 215mm aircrete blockwork, laid using the thin-joint method, and wrapped this in 100mm of Kingspan insulation, which was then rendered. Externally insulated masonry like this holds the heat very well and the team have used this feature to build an interesting heating system. The ground floor has underfloor heating, the upstairs has no heating at all. Steve Willis explains: "It is designed to be so well insulated that the heat downstairs will gently drift upstairs so that it simply won't need a heating system. But just in case it doesn't work, weve run a flow and return in the floor so that radiators could be added very simply and easily."

The heat is produced by an air-source heat pump, a 6kW Unichiller, which is mounted at the back of the garden. "It's basically a fridge in reverse," says Tommy. It fires up at 6kW but it then ticks over at just 1kW, and for every 1kW input it produces 4kW of hot water which is enough for the space heating and the hot water.

Other features include a 3,700-litre tank, buried under the garden, that collects rainwater, which is then distributed to the toilets, the washing machine and the dishwasher, and photovoltaic solar panels on the front roof which are integrated into the Nu-lok slate roof. The roof at the rear and the rainwater goods are made from zinc.

Tommy wanted to build the upstairs timber frame on site, but the warranty providers and the building inspectors wouldnt allow this and insisted that the walls and the roof section were fabricated in a factory where quality control was assured. In fact, this work was carried out by Potton, a company based only 30 miles away from March, who proved to be a very helpful supplier.

Another innovative aspect of this house is the roof section. The original plan had been to build a three storey house, but the planners deemed otherwise. However, the ridge is high enough to take a third storey and the team have designed the space so that it could be easily converted at a later date. "I am a big believer in future proofing," says Tommy. "We have grown used to moving house every time we need more space. How much better to build houses which enable you to grow into them, so that if you have a second or third child, you can simply and easily just move into space that's there without the hassle of major building works. I think in future, we will see three big killer costs - energy, water and transport. We need to build houses which use as little energy and water as possible and we also need to live somewhere close to our work."

So did they stick to their original objectives? Did the house really cost just 60k and was it ready in 60 days? The answer to both would seem to be very nearly. The build began on 1st April and the house was largely complete in 61 days, with another week taken on the landscaping and garden. The costs, which have all been borne by Tommy, and don't include any sponsorship deals with suppliers, came in at around £60,000; but to get to this figure there was a little juggling with labour rates. It's certainly an amount that a self-builder could easily achieve. "I spent a little more, using guys I already work with who came along to help out at short notice, and I had to put a lot of people up and feed them. But then we also had the disruption of a film crew being on site most days, which slowed things up a huge amount. Without a film crew, I reckon I could have done it much quicker. But though they got in the way and occasionally made us do things out of sequence, they've also managed to show every aspect of the job as it progressed, including things that went wrong and how we managed to sort everything out. All in all, I am really pleased with how the house has turned out and I think the programmes will be really interesting. There is no glossing over the difficulties its pretty much as it happened."

For more information on Tommy's eco house visit tommyshouse.co.uk

Further reading:

• A Low-impact Eco House
• An Eco Home Built on a Budget
• How to Achieve Level 3 of the Code for Sustainable Homes