Back to the barns!

Or would not tents be
the cheaper alternative?

Daily Mail: The Grand Designs house for first time buyers:
How you can get on the property ladder with a £41,000
three bedroom home

 Daily Mail

I know, Mr Neo and Mrs Lib are governing us. Clever is he who rips off his counterpart the best while best is calculated in buckets of Sterling, bags of Euro or piles of Greenbacks in our days and counterparts are regularly called customers, clients, often idiots and stupid.

I respect Kevin McCloud; he, his Grand Design programme has become a brand name, is the one who is trying to demonstrate that there are many different ways to build your home and dwell in a spectacular one-off or an ambitious dream home.

It is he who shows the nation that there is this opportunity of a self-build market against all the construction industry’s hard trial to channel the majority of all house buyers towards its shelves; readily available new builds, built while cutting all possible corners to reinforce margins, often part of soon-to-look-like-slums sleeping estates, where estate is too grand a word; one or two metre distance between the houses, bedroom three, four and possibly five being wardrobe-sized, the two designs, three colours, four shapes and five layouts so similar that I would need to raise a bespoke flag to find the one my family lived in cooped up in between cheapest wooden fences.

The industry claims UK house buyers would not want anything else but what it makes available; I doubt that.

But I also doubt that Kevin McCloud should use his name and brand for the described farmyard type barns; those poor and pity constructions are definitely not what we should aim for:

'We set ourselves the challenge of getting under the magic £50,000 and making sure that what came out the other side would be something we'd really want to live in, be really beautiful and not just more shoe boxes.'

The Barnhaus steel frame is lined internally with lots of insulation - straw bales being most cost effective - and doors and windows are added at either end.

Beautiful? ... not a shoebox? Give me a break!

 Daily Mail

Straw bales being most cost effective ... compared to what? To avoiding any need for any insulation or to living in a cave? Of all materials straw is probably one of the most complicated to deal with in reference to λ- and U-values, durability, fire resistance, etc. pp. Cost effective bales?! Another break, please.

I would have thought we finally have arrived at a point where designing, constructing and delivering any home would at least touch the subject of energy efficiency, durability, comfort and health? The article takes long and rather funny detours to avoid such basics:

Architect Ed Green came up with the award-winning design which gives buyers the 'skeleton' of a house, and allows them to adapt the original framework to their taste
....
The home, which is bigger than many modern new-build houses, will give first-time buyers the chance to build their own 'Grand Designs' home at a fraction of the cost.

Typically first homes under £90,000 will get a much smaller space to a 'substandard design', the winning architect claimed.

Is this some kind of April fools' joke? A substandard design replaced with a farmyard barn box? But it gets even better:

Pretty much the whole house could be built by a relatively unskilled person - except for the electrics.

Well, there is the real difference to the normal construction industry's approach; while it also uses relatively unskilled persons but charges an arm and a leg the self-barn-builder can build and finish his barn without going into any great detail, not to mention know-how, as to plumbing, heating, ventilation, tiling, windows, roof and foundation, thermal bridging, U-values, air changes and what not! Progress! Superb? The remains of British construction industry should turn pale.

Would climbing the property ladder starting from a substandard designed and built farmyard barn really work?

'And you can go on eBay and buy a steel barn frame the size of a family home for around £2,500.

Good luck, this is the next best solution to living in a tent; but then may be living in a cave would make more sense! It would definitely be more cost effective.

Carpe diem!

CCS: ...and now, the end is near...!

BBC: Longannet carbon capture scheme scrapped

Again, there is this totally inappropriate idea of picking an industry, e.g. CCS or Electric Automobiles and then declaring the obscuring aim to become a so-called world market leader instead of doing ones homework, first and foremost; the end result reads as follows:

"If there was a completely unlimited resource then we may have been able to surmount the technical problems at Longannet," Mr Huhne said.

Scottish Power's coal-fired plant at Longannet had been the only remaining site in the UK government competition for the funding.

"However, almost four years after launching its funding competition, plans for CCS in the UK have descended into farce."

"It is vital that this money is not recycled into the Treasury but used for carbon capture and storage projects. 

£1,000million pumped carefully into the up-dating and up-grading of the British construction industry, its training and teaching facilities would do more; much more; without inventing the wheel again and without an unlimited resource, Mr Huhne.

Carpe diem!

shareholders' values shoeboxes

BBC: Architects say new houses
are 'shameful shoebox homes'

This is a bit like asking for the number of wheels when shopping for a car:

"In the UK people buy homes based on the number of rooms. In the whole of the rest of Europe pretty much, and certainly North America, you know how many square metres you are buying when you buy it - and that's not available to UK consumers."

 

The article matches my experience; a good example was the Highland Housing Expo where 3/4 beds were put into so-called bedrooms that one could hardly enter into through doors stopped by those huge beds from opening. No room for any furniture unless from a doll house, en-suite bathrooms smaller than in any prison with sinks too small to wash one hand in.

Excellent for profit and the shareholders' values but not build for people to live in named customers.

Here is a comment on the above BBC article: no need to hide, Snowknight, you are hitting some of the nails on their heads:

Compared to housing in Switzerland and Germany British housing is sub standard. The insulation is a joke, damp cold rooms which cost a fortune. Good quality low energy homes can be built for £100,000, but banks and building companies are not interested at all. Shabby houses mean more money need as after 10years renovations are required! Good houses 75 years nothing!

Carpe diem!

Expo's Funky Town

... one year later... things are really happening here.

It's sheer pandemonium!

August 26th, 2010: highland housing expo!

August 27th, 2010: eco, friendly, green and credentials...

January 19th, 2011: new year: old news


Carpe diem!

learn from automobile industry?!

why not, construction industry!?!

While we are working on our "more than a nursery" project we would like to share some thoughts with you on MMC, Modern Methods of Construction. Sometimes it helps to look beyond one's plate, so we like to compare the construction industry with the automobile industry which in this case takes your feet back onto the ground of what is so "modern" about something that is just new to a specific industry.

In 1908 Henry Ford installed the first assembly line...

Since then, 100 years later, the automobiles come in all colours, not just black, and any shape but the basic advantages of a factory installed assembly line still make good sense: it considerably cuts assembly time while material and quality control dictate the building progress from start to finish. The result are products built to the required standards and highest quality requirements.

So the time of horse and buggy levels of technology are long gone; however, there is (at least) one more important parallel: Henry Ford started those assembly lines in 1908 and 19 years later had built 15,5 million Model Ts during what we know were very tough times of economic difficulty and transition - not unlike the times we are just entering into.

So.., why wait?

Carpe diem!

more than a nursery...

rockenergy's project in Glasgow

We will detail the nursery's key components and technology details in the coming weeks and explain why the construction is "A" rated (EPC)*; here is what our client Milnbank Housing Association and the Energy Saving Trust have to say:

Carpe diem


* EPC (Energy performance Certificate) rated; not rated by any of the rating agencies dominating financial headlines, the rats.

Fuel or rather construction poverty?

telegraph article on fuel poverty

With energy prices going up more and more people/households will be pushed into fuel poverty.

...the targets of ending fuel poverty in vulnerable households by 2010 and all households by 2016 were now "embarrassingly unattainable.

High energy bills are a serious problem for millions struggling with the consequences of Gordon Brown's recession.

I wonder how that ominous target was and is dealt with? Throwing money at it might help - short term.

A more lateral approach will be to clean up poor building regulations and poor construction standards. All instruments are readiliy available; it is for a future-oriented governement to set the targets and a customer-oriented industry to offer the appropriate products. The technology is long known, it needs training and education of both, the customer and the supplier.

more

The benefits will be multifaceted from reduced CO2 emissions to lower energy bills, from creating valuable jobs to creating future-proof, comfortable and healthy living space.

What is the hold up?

Carpe diem!

Construction Industry: New Challenges - No!

The challenges have long been addressed; we just need to take action.
It was meant to happen before the credit crunch hit the construction industry so hard; with energy prices going through the roof and the awareness of the vast majority of people(s) that the globe will see severe climate alterations the way we design and build our homes and buildings must change dramatically.

In fact the dominating headline to reduce each individual’s footprint in order to make a real difference emphasises the need to re-think construction, a major player when it comes to CO2 emissions:





It might come as a surprise to some but all the instruments and means to reduce emissions from any building be it residential, commercial, or public by 85% and more are readily available, proven and affordable!

Even a 100% reduction, i.e. no emissions, are possible even though there is a global understanding to talk about “no net emissions” instead; the difference often is described as the transfer from a “Passive House” to an “Active House”.

Those terms and many more like insulation, ventilation, air tightness levels, dew points, condensation and more, but also different heating systems we will blog on in the coming weeks.

All the issues will help to get away from climbing that blue hill in the graph below…







Carpe diem!