29 MAY 2008

We have walls!

Travelled down by train the other day to check on progress and was delighted to find the new kitchen surrounded by rough plywood walls on three sides, with gaps where the windows and doors are to go and a rafter or two overhead to give an idea of the roof height. It looked amazing. I’d been pleased with the dimensions of the new space when the slab had been poured, but John the builder had told me it would look even bigger once the walls were up, and he was right. The ceiling seemed positively cavernous – a dramatic contrast in height when you walk from the railway carriage rooms out into this 10ft high central space. A row of small square windows runs the length of the carriage on the seaward side, to let in morning light, while a large roof lantern will light the rest. The guys seemed in good humour, and were off for lunch and a swim in the sea before Andy Baxter of Sussex Solar arrived.

I’d earmarked Andy for the job a couple of years back and was delighted to find him still enthusiastic about our project. A relative local, he spends as much time repairing systems that other people have put in as he does installing new ones, so I figured he would be a good person to devise a system that works for us. After much talk of watts and killowatts, and sketches showing coils and unvented cylinders and so on, we seemed to get there.

First the good news: in summer, a single solar panel will be able to supply practically all our hot water, for baths, showers and (thanks to a pair of “mixer valves” you can buy and have fitted on the backs) our washing machine and dishwasher. In winter, even on dull days, it will be able to take the edge off the cold water so that a back boiler on the wood-burner will be able to top it up. Nor is the initial outlay too alarming. In the present climate, anything that can lessen our dependence on oil can only be a good thing.

Now for the bad news: it looks as if the underfloor heating we’d had our hearts on is out of the window. It turns out that having underfloor heating running off a wood-burner is over-egging the pudding. A good wood burner is efficient enough to heat a space such as ours without additional heating; so if we were lighting the wood-burner to fuel the underfloor heating we’d soon be sweltering. Running underfloor heating on oil would be prohibitively expensive, as the pipes take a long time to warm up and are best left running (albeit on low temperatures) for long periods. We’re not on mains gas. So it looks like we’re back to the radiators – salvaged ones if possible. Luckily, there are silver linings in the form of a) less work, which means b) less to spend and c) we can now return to the original idea of a reclaimed timber floor. I love wood – its natural warmth and organic texture and the way it reflects light. Try as I might, I could not really get excited about the idea of tiles – which work better with underfloor heating – in the central floor area. But as for visiting salvage yards and hunting down old school and hospital floors and radiators – I’m on!

The only problem I had to sort out was that the guys had made the gap for the kitchen windows too high: my sketch had featured low conservatory-style windows on two sides, going low enough to have a window seat or shelf for plants beneath, and they’d made them start at waist height. Luckily this wasn’t too much of a problem, John said – much easier to make a hole larger rather than smaller! There was also the issue of how to fit everything in to the new utility room. With the walls up, it became even more clear what a jigsaw puzzle this is going to be, even without incorporating stairs to the projected upper storey. After pacing it out and trying out a few possibilities we all decided to take a rain check on this one and re-convene next time with any thoughts we’d had in the interim.

Back to London on the train, my brain buzzing with ideas. Going down just for the day was discombobulating – my body was returning to London but my mind was still there. We still have a great deal to do, but at this rate we just might – fingers crossed – be installed by the time Mary starts school in early September.