Blog Rebooted

After a long period of inactivity this blog will be starting up again in earnest next month. Building work is set to start in the middle of May and I'm hoping to keep up with the work on site and show lots of pics as we go.

The Garden

Since I was watching the history of British gardening on TV last night, I thought it might be time to talk a little about the space outside the house. When we moved in, there was a patio, large bay tree, one ornamental shrub and a small shed all in the back garden. Previous to that we had been in a one-bedroom flat so this was our first garden.

The first task was to find out what was there, then to tool up for planting, pruning and mowing. Within a few weeks of moving in the shrub fell over and killed off half the lawn (which was patchy anyway - this was the middle of winter). The rear fence was also covered in ivy which ran all the way along the boundary to the house. Having had the previous episode with root growth through the house walls, I decided to embark on some radical pruning. This took about 3 days and filled around 6 bags with Ivy! At this point I found that the ivy was largely responsible for holding up the garden fence.

Once spring arrived it was time to get the lawn sorted. I decided that this would be done with seed and proceeded to double dig the existing lawn area (2 days). This exposed all sorts of roots and builder's rubble just below the surface. We removed the worst of this and added topsoil to the thinnest areas then prepared a compost and sand mix about 2 inches thick over the whole lawn. After seeding and tamping the area down it had to be watered every day for around 3 weeks, at which point grass shoots started to appear. It also became apparent that the local pigeons had had at least a 3rd of the seed, so I did all this twice and remembered to net the lawn the 2nd time!

The bay tree was about 6m tall when we moved in and then proceeded to add about another 4m over the next 4 years. In the end I resorted to getting a tree surgeon out to give it a thorough pruning. There is a reason that most people grow these in pots or planters and that is that these things are like triffids bent on world domination! Every year it sprouts shoots and saplings all over the garden, however it does provide evergreen shade and lots of bayleaves (although I think the amount of stews and soups needed to use these up could feed half of London). It also stops rain getting at the plants and lawn below it so there is a need to actively water that part of the garden regularly.

Once this was sorted out it was time to consider the planting beds. I had actually done quite a bit of landscape work as an architect, so I had a much better idea of what I wanted to add and where. The main thing is to try and picture what the plants will look like in 2 or 3 years time, and also allow for how they change seasonally. So the main structure was done with evergeen shrubs (preferably flowering) and in between this I went for maples and birch which don't completely block out the sun in summer (allowing bedding plants to grow underneath) and provide good colour all year (see picture above). More recently I've added some fruit trees and shifted some of the original planting around (the maples didn't like direct sun - leafburn).

So what's left to do? Well, the existing garden is actually on a hill and the patio is more or less at finished internal floor level with the inevitable pea-gravel to ensure that the damp drains away from the house walls. The native base soil is clay and over time the slurry fills up the gravel giving it the drainage properties of concrete. So the main thing is to fix the levels so that the gravel isn't necessary. This means a level change of around 225mm somewhere mid-slope, and some channel drainage to deal with the patio run-off. At the same time the planting beds near the house could do with being bigger, and there is a definite need for more storage (new sheds and outdoor cupboards for pots, BBQs etc).

Oh, and did I mention herbs? Lots of these all over the place (mostly in pots but some in the beds). So far the collection includes marjoram, origano, tarragon, mint, sage, thyme, rosemary, lovage, garlic and chives with a seasonal planting of basil, parsley and coriander. I'll talk more about sheds later on when I've figured out what they'll be!

Section and Elevations

Here is a long section through the proposals with the front and rear elevations added. You can see how the existing ridgeline is preserved and the extension forms a flat roof behind this. The second floor is timber frame with structural steel beams providing the main support back to the party walls. The exact form of the windows has changed since these drawings were done for planning. Incidentally, I'm not sure that you could do this now under permitted development-the new rules insist (since last October) on setting back any dormers from the boundary and eaves. The Planning Portal has some useful guides and tools for assessing terraced houses and what needs permission when you are considering extending. These would have been handy when the regulations were changed!

The Plans

I had a few requests from (mainly) architect friends to put the plans up so here they are. These are the ones that went in for planning.

Starting on the ground floor, the mess that is the bathroom and store disappear, and allow the living room to expand and provide a utility and cloakroom space. On the first floor the box room becomes the main bathroom, and on the 2nd floor there are 2 new bedrooms, some storage and an en-suite appears.

It all sounds quite simple when put this way, but I've managed to spend about 3 years getting to this stage. Some of this was just spending time on other options that since fell by the wayside, and of course getting the finance together took a while. The drawings reflect this, and have a lot more detail than a normal set of planning drawings, simply because I've had time to think through the construction and refine the details.

In future posts I'll walk through each of the spaces and provide some rationale for why things are the way that they are. Some of the spaces have changed internally since then, and I also had a rethink on the garden. Currently I'm waiting on the structural engineer to finish work and then no doubt some other things will change as well.

Quieter in the 19th Century?

Having been woken up really early all week by the children (roll on BST), I thought it might be a good time to talk about sound-proofing. First the science bit!

Sound is a series of vibrations that pass through everything around us which we hear by our ears picking up these vibrations and resonating. It obeys the inverse square law, so if someone is making a sound, its energy (not its loudness) reduces by the distance squared. Sound is generally measured in Decibels (dB) which reflect perceived loudness (I don't have the textbook around right now so the maths will have to wait - but from memory this is an average logarithmic scale for a certain sound frequency- which in real terms just means a figure which can be added easily so that if a sound is say 50dB and a wall has a sound insulation of 40dB then there will be 10dB getting through it).

When sound hits a material surface it can do three things: reflect, absorb and transmit. The reflection bit is what makes spaces echo and reverberate. The absorption is essentially the amount that a material deadens the sound (resulting in a very small amount of heat), and the transmission is the amount of sound that gets through. The energy of all three adds up to the original sound energy at the point it hits the surface.

In a house we are usually concerned with one or two sound problems. Internally there is the noise (unwanted sound) from adjacent rooms (talking, music and impact noise) and externally in an urban area there are things like traffic, aircraft and parties across the road. Generally most domestic buildings deal with these in two ways: adding mass and sealing openings.

Adding mass or weight to a wall or floor tends to absorb more mid and high frequency sounds like speech. Impact noise has to be handled by separation, so a wooden floor surface, for instance, will be isolated from the structure below it by rubber pads and fixings that stop the sound of kids throwing heavy objects around coming through to the rooms below. With a young family you usually need to hear things going on like this so most people in a single house would not bother with impact noise except in local areas like around the washing machine (also this is expensive to retro-fit). Brick walls are already pretty massive, but timber frame walls usually need beefing up. Conveniently the insulation for this also acts as a good thermal break as well. Incidentally the best sound insulation for this tends to be different from the best thermal insulation which is normally foam based (lots of air not much mass).

Openings such as windows and doors are the main weak point in the strategy of adding mass to an enclosure. There's not much point in heavy walls if the door is open and lets all the sound through. Internally this isn't usually an issue as long as the door is not too light-weight. Where there are particular problems (washing machines come to mind again), a heavier door with neoprene seals around the frame should suffice. The seals stop the sound travelling through the air gap.

Externally, brick walls are pretty good at reducing sound, and the main problems occur around windows. Some of this can be dealt with by draught-proofing them which again seals the air path, but in extreme cases it is necessary to use double, triple or even secondary glazing to reduce the noise from outside. Again there is some overlap here with thermal performance, but the properties of sound mean that the spacing of glass separation becomes more important. The ideal separation (again from memory- the idea here is that the sound bounces around in the gaps between the glass and loses energy before getting out into the space beyond) is around 200mm so this usually means secondary glazing to shield against loud noises like aircraft and traffic.

So in the case of our house the internal strategy will be to beef up any internal timber walls with sound insulation, use heavier doors in circulation areas (onto the stairs) and do our best to isolate the permanently-on washing machine (separate room, heavy door with seals and closer to keep it shut). Externally we will use high spec double-glazed windows with good seals (the aircraft noise is intermittent and the seals will take care of most of this). The external walls will also be thermally dry-lined which should improve their sound performance as well. Timber floors will be taken up and relaid to remove creaks, and central heating pipes re-fixed where loose (the kids love jumping up and down on loose floorboards near these as they make a huge clanging sound which reverberates in the floor voids).

The Design Brief

Having talked about the structure of the existing house at length, I suppose I ought to talk a little bit about what I would like to do with it during the renovation. My intention is to retain the period features where possible and to repair the existing structure as needed. As you might have guessed from the previous posts I will be replacing the UPVC windows, and possibly the front door (single glazed and badly fitted). Most of the existing roof will be getting replaced as well - although the front elevation will be similar to how it is now with the addition of some rooflights.


The layout on the ground floor (existing plans are shown above) is a result of the house being used for bedsits in the past and the old kitchen is currently the bathroom with a store/ WC sat in the middle. So the main aim here is to get the bathroom back upstairs where it belongs - giving more space to the living area. Of course this then means losing a bedroom on the 1st Floor. In order to keep the number of bedrooms and generally create more space we will be extending up into the roofspace (from the existing ridge backwards). The kitchen is also past its sell-by date so this will be replaced.


The result of the extension into the loft is that the hall stair will need to be enclosed and all the doors from habitable rooms (bedrooms and living room) onto the stair and landings will need to be of fire rated construction (FR30). This accounts for pretty much all the existing doors being replaced (none of them are original anyway). Another implication of this is that the plumbing will now have to extend up another 2 floors, so some duct space will be necessary and possibly a new boiler will be needed.


In the course of doing all this, most of the electrics will need upgrading/ replacing, and we will be taking the opportunity to add things like internet access and TV aerial points where needed. One bathroom will be stretched as the kids get older so an ensuite is planned for the new 2nd floor, and a cloakroom will be added on the ground floor. We will also try to add some sound insulation between the floors as we go.

What the Victorians Didn't Do for Us - Part 5

Windows.

Originally, the windows would have been timber sash windows with the frames rebated into the brickwork. Like most Victorian joinery these would have been painted with a lead-based gloss paint - most likely white. The rebates (the inner opening is stepped back half a brick and the frame partly concealed by half a brick on the outside) help to protect the timber from weather exposure, and also hide the bulk of the boxed frame containing the pulleys and weights for the sashes. The openings have a stone sub-cill which casts water away from the window and the brickwork immediately around it - in this case these have been painted white. At the back of the house the openings are capped by brick arches in red brick. To the front there are stone arches above the windows treated similarly to the cills.

Sometime in the mid-80s the timber windows on our house were replaced by the previous owner with UPVC windows like the one in the picture above. Typically these have a maximum design life of around 20 years, and after that they begin to fail. In our case the ironmongery has started to fall off (handles are rivetted through the plastic and when these fail they can't be replaced), the glazing panel seals are deteriorating and some of the opening mechanisms have buckled (not particularly strong in high winds!). So one of the major tasks and expenses of doing the house up will be replacing all of these.

Interestingly these windows have much smaller frame sections than the originals would have had. So the original internal openings must have been boxed out for the new windows to sit properly in the external openings. Having tried fixing curtain rails etc internally I think that this has probably been done with plasterboard and newspaper! So another task once work begins is to determine exactly what has been done around the openings internally.

Of course replacement timber sash windows are expensive and are prone to the same problems that the original windows would have had leading to their replacement. In terms of the current regulations, the main issues are insulation, solar gain, ventilation and maintenance. The UPVC windows are awning casements (which tend to catch the wind!) and double-glazed. These days even this would not pass muster for Building Control, and better glazing, possibly with better frames would be necessary.

My own preference is to return to sash windows. Party this is on aesthetic grounds, but also because I think that ventilation is much better controlled with them than using trickle vents.
Getting a timber frame that will take double glazing means beefing up the frames for the extra depth, so these will always appear slightly bulkier than the Victorian originals which were single glazed with putty. The other alternative is to resort to UPVC or metal sashes or composite timber windows.

UPVC is still the cheapest option, but the sections are bulkier and it always looks like, well, plastic. Metal is problematic because it is a poor insulator. Composite timber windows are a good compromise, being virtually maintenance free, but more expensive than UPVC. These are timber windows with seals and thermal breaks which are clad in coated aluminium externally. If installed properly they have a long design life, and still give the feel of a timber window without the expense of repainting/ restaining every 2-3 years which a normal timber window would need. In my experience almost no-one bothers repainting until it is necessary (paint is falling off or the timber is rotting), by which stage the timber needs repairing as well.

While looking around at windows I did a quick count on our street. Out of roughly 100 houses nearby, about 90% had gone for the cheap UPVC option - in most cases doing away with sashes altogether. Within this there were virually no repeats, which reflects the number of manufacturers out there, I guess. They were also all uniformly plastic white. A couple had timber framed windows that were not sashes - these were probably installed in the 1950s, and about 2 had original sashes or very close reproductions of these. Strangely enough, when we moved here we looked at another property on the same street which had remained untouched since the 1930s. This one had the origial sashes, which were painted a dirty yellow/cream colour. These have now gone and the house has been renovated.

Anyway, getting back to our windows, my current thinking is to go with timber composite frames. These have a good thermal performance, negligable maintenance, can be made as sashes with glazing bars and house the latest thinking in double-glazing (special glasses with inert gas filling the cavity between panes). The other advantage that these have is that they are dimensionally stable - timber windows can warp and stick when their moisture content varies. This also helps with draft-proofing. The Scandinavians and Americans seem to have cornered the market in these, and 2 of the more well known companies are Marvin and Velfac. Of these Velfac doesn't do sashes, so if anyone knows of other manufacturers who do composite sashes drop me a line here.