Monthly Archive for February, 2007

The Brief

Published
by
Paul
on February 25, 2007
in Inspirations and Design
. 0 Comments

Very early on, when this whole scheme was but a little twinkle in our eyes, we decided to write up a brief for ourselves, and our future architect of choice, to work from.

According to the advice we had from the Grand Designs Handbook the brief shouldn’t be a list of instructions, more that it should form part of a portfolio, and help to create an understanding between ourselves and the architect. Rather than a lot of instructions and “we want this, we want that”, it should start to offer an understanding of the sort of people we are, and how we want to use the building.

I’ve pasted a copy of the brief as it now stands below. We’ve added and removed a few things since our first draft, and it will probably change even more before solid designs are being drawn up (assuming we get to that stage). It seems to me however, the more we talk with Nicolas Tye, the less important an A4 page of desires appears to be. It feels much more about the relationship with your architect, and them “getting inside your head”. But it still helps to have things written down somewhere in a more formal manner, I’m sure!

So, here’s our brief:

Abi, Paul & Alfie’s House

Brief – Or things we would like from our home…

We would like a home that;

  • Has a contemporary look and feel
  • Is a long term home to two adults and one little boy, who will grow to become another adult, no doubt in the blink of an eye!
  • Maximises natural light through the year (front of plot faces south and the land slopes away to the back)
  • Is energy efficient in it’s use of natural sources of light, heat and ventilation, and environmentally responsible in it’s use of materials during construction
  • Allows us to experience “inside out” living, we enjoy seeing the garden, the fields and an “open” feeling
  • Is open plan and has a feeling of open space and flowing rooms
  • Uses light and lighting to change the atmosphere of rooms, and the exterior of the house
  • Has a feeling of cool in the summer, warm in the winter
  • Has “something” extra special, unique, quirky about it

Some more specific things we’d like from, in, or about our home;

  • We like wood panelling on many of the houses we have seen while looking for inspiration.
  • To incorporate solar, wind, recycling/harvesting of water and any other environmentally friendly, as well as money saving, technology as is feasible
  • Low energy fluorescent and/or LED lights instead of traditional filament and spot lights
  • We would like the entrance to be private, we don’t want cold callers to be able to see our entire (open plan) living space from the front door!
  • We like the idea of using “levels” to break up various living spaces/zones
  • Three bedrooms, and a clearly defined office or office space for home working
  • We enjoy entertaining, especially cooking friends a meal while chatting together, in the evening in winter or in the summer afternoons with the garden open, so a social kitchen and dining area is important
  • We often have friends around for weekend football or late night movies on TV, so the option to close off a TV/Cinema area for this use is appealing, but not drastically so, a flowing and open living space is more important
  • The idea of a modern looking, maybe “floating” log burner at the heart of the living area is very appealing
  • We love balconies and being able to walk out from the upper level(s), as well as decking and patio areas at lower levels
  • We like wooden floors and lots of windows for light and to feel open.
  • We like the idea of external blinds, both in terms of design and function for insulation
  • We like the idea of flat a roof(s) or roof(s) or with interesting angles
  • We have seen sliding doors which open into the wall cavities, we liked them a lot!
  • We use Sky TV, so any clever way to have an unsightly south east facing dish disguised or integrated/hidden is good!
  • We like to be able to hide away “the workings” of things such as TV and computers and to be able to open up and use them when we want to, to reduce clutter
  • Integrated storage space is important to help us hide away the clutter, but keep it all at hand!
  • We would like the house to be networked (CAT5 etc)

Please be sure this isn’t a list of must haves, it’s more of a way of us trying to help you to understand us and what we like or want from our home.

We’ve included a range of images of houses we like elements of, we have no idea what our home should look like, but we have a good idea how it should feel. We hope that you will see that while the homes shown share some common themes, we like angles, boxes, curves, glass, wood….. We’re looking for a home that inspires us and those who see it, and will continue to do so for a long time, but feels very much like home to our family.

We hope this list helps you get inside our minds a little bit!

 

A visit from our architect

Published
by
Paul
on February 24, 2007
in Pre-Planning
. 0 Comments

Nicolas Tye called around on Thursday 22nd to let us know he’d spoken with the planning department, and much as we expected they said they had too little time and too much work for a visit to the site to trash out ideas at this stage.

So, digital camera in hand, Nic took a load of photos of the property and the land and went off to work on The Pack we’re going to present to the planners in order to bowl them over with a) How rubbish things are now and b) How fantastic we intend to make them with our new project!

We should, if I got this right, receive a copy of the pack late next week to go over and see what we think, then on approval that will be sent to the planners, and we’ll again be crossing fingers and hoping for the best while they mull over a brief outline of our master plan.

We may, after they’ve reviewed this outline document, be more open to coming to our place for a meeting to discuss what they like and (heaven forbid) don’t like, and issues, ideas.  Just bounce things off each other.  I hope we do get a meeting, or at least lots of encouraging words.  We’ve been primed to expect a response in what at first glance will appear extremely negative in tone.  But generally, once some form of conversation has taken place, either in person, on the phone, or via a series of letters (or a combination of all of these), things may well not be so bad as they at first appear.

Here’s hoping Nic’s photos were really, really bad.  The only annoying thing is the office car park was three cars down on it’s regular quota of traffic.  So that doesn’t help our sell on improving access and parking and such.  But that’s a minor detail in the grand scheme of things.

Our Plot on the Landscape

Published
by
Paul
on February 22, 2007
in Pre-Planning
. 0 Comments

Waterhall

This is where we are, to the left of this rather poor capture from the Mid-Beds GIS Local Plan website. Probably one of the worst interfaces and most unreliable Internet resources I have ever encountered. Anyway, you can see our current home/office set up to the left of this image. We actually enter the driveway from the small lane on the far left of the picture. A (rather out of date) photo can be seen on Google Maps which gives a better idea of the lay of the land.

This really shows how the flood plain cuts through what is presently our garden area. I have to say I was a little shocked by this, not least because the garden very rarely floods. I think twice in eight years we’ve seen it get wet, and nowhere near to that line. We’re not overly concerned by this (maybe we should be), because we don’t intend to build that low on the plot anyway. But it still another potential banana skin.

Settlement Envelope

This second image shows just where we are in relation to the Settlement Envelope of the village, represented by the dark green area. You can see we’re some way outside, but the Google Maps image earlier hopefully shows that we’re not really as remote as the map may appear. We’ve one neighbour, a pub, and a number of commercial and industrial buildings scattered nearby.

On the idea of “betterment”, which seems key to any chance of success, I’m increasingly confident we can offer a good sell on our ideas. Our part of the village really has very little offer, and people speed past and into the village, probably because they barely realise there’s any homes here, yet along one with a young child. We’d really like to be a “gateway” to the village, a warm, interesting, and welcoming site. We’d like people to recognise they’re entering a residential area, not just a place with a pub and some ugly industrial units.

Yesterday I took a walk with Alfie around the local footpath and across the fields. It’s amazing how well hidden our place is compared to the house on one side and the industrial plot on the other. We could build an egg shaped glass house on this plot and nobody but the postman would probably notice for months! On the other hand, a new house that has recently gone up on the other side of the village, replacing a derelict cottage, stands out like a sore thumb from the country footpaths. It’s not an ugly house, it’s a perfectly nice average looking self build, but it’s very exposed from the rear. That’s also outside the settlement envelope by some degree, so that’s positive for us too. I think.

When we say “Self Build”…

Published
by
Paul
on February 20, 2007
in General Musing
. 0 Comments

OK, while I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs and getting ever more anxious about the conversation Nicolas Tye may or may not have had with the Mid Beds planning department I thought it would be wise to explain exactly what is meant, in our case, by “Self Build”.

I’m not a builder, plumber, plasterer, fitter, carpenter or an architect. I have experience of project management, but not that I feel applies to a project we hope to make our home for some considerable time. So, we’re not really self building.

At this stage we have every intention to employ the right people for the right jobs, and hold the intention to pay a professional to tell us how much it should cost at each save, and give us tips on how to reduce that cost. I may possess some skills that help me in day to day life. But none of our household have ever built anything much more than a Lego car, and my DIY skills are on a par with those of Frank Spencer, and I’m equally as accident prone. So I really think it’s not wise to tackle too much of this project ourselves!

Sure there will be certain tasks we can take on, and it will certainly be interesting to see how much extra we decide we can have a go at as costs start to spiral. At this stage, I don’t expect to be doing much more than laying some floors, doing some basic DIY and painting, and the general finishing touches.

As for the landscaping, we all agree we’ll probably leave that for later. I can see a long ‘to-do’ list still waiting when the project is over and we’re all moved into our new homes. But I can live with that.

I’m a firm believer that if you want something doing properly, give it to the best person for the job!

Looking for Inspiration…

Published
by
Paul
on February 19, 2007
in Inspirations and Design
. 0 Comments

Since the idea of being able to build our own home came to light, we’ve been seeking inspiration from all sorts of places. Books (as mentioned here) have been a major source of guidance and ideas, but seeing as I spend far too much time in front of the computer anyway it wasn’t a great leap for me to while away the hours seeking inspiration from the web.

The other, obvious source of ideas is to travel around nearby Milton Keynes to see how others have done it before. Milton Keynes, for those who don’t know, is a relatively new town, and has many areas with plenty of self build housing, sections of estates have been reserved for self-builders during it’s development, and there is a decent array of houses from the 1970’s right up to date to look at.

But, after hours driving around town, our main inspiration was not to do it how almost everyone else was. It became depressing driving around the self build areas to be greeted mostly by larger versions of houses that, outwardly at least, appear as though they could have been made by Barrett Homes, or any other developer for that matter. Obviously people have their reasons for taking this route, but to us it seems like a chance wasted.

There are a few places of note in Milton Keynes, sadly they’re not from recent times, but rather from the 1980’s. From1986 we have Energy World and from 1981 Home World (can’t Google any links for that one!) at least offer something different, and for their time very forward thinking.

I think we have a good idea in our minds what we’d like our house to do, how we’d like to live in it, but in all truth very little idea on how we’d like it to look. Which I hope in many ways is a good thing as that’s the job of the architect. We have seen plenty of houses we like aspects of, and one I’d move in to Tomorrow, but we’re hoping that when we throw all these things at the architect, they’ll be able to find the common themes and produce something a little bit special that we both find appealing.

We’ve also been looking at objects we like, I’ve been crawling over the Internet. I’ve added a load of links headed “inspirations” to the blog. Looking back, some of the stuff I’ve book-marked even I’m wondering why, but there must be something I liked somewhere.

One slightly depressing aspect of our inspiration hunting missions has been the houses that appeal to us are generally way beyond our reach. But we’re hopeful, and quite probably blissfully over optimistic that we’ll be able to get some kind of scaled-down version of the homes we’re lusting after in books.