One of the fabulous things about Kits and Mortar has been how fast the idea has chimed with so many people. I’ve never started a blog which has prompted so many messages by email and Twitter from people interested in the same subject who wanted to suggest ideas. It has amazed me - after all, [...]
8 Comments » If you’ve ever wanted to live in the Shire, then maybe this imaginative house in Wales might be for you?
This low-impact woodland house was built by Simon Dale and his family. The build cost only £3000 and took about four months. They wanted to be as green as it’s possible to be, so the building [...]
The back of my childhood home, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
Suw and I know the vague outlines of the kind of house we want. That’s the relative known in this equation, but at the moment, one of the biggest unknowns is where we want to live, where we want to call home.
This is the [...]
I’ve been telling a lot of people about this blog lately, and explaining the two main threads - green development and cat-friendly design. The concept of an ecohouse is very well understood, but I’ve been seeing a lot of blank faces when I talk about designing for cats.
We don’t generally think about the environment that [...]
I just discovered that Grand Designs Live is on at ExCeL in London’s Docklands, from 3rd until 11th May. I remember going to the Ideal Home Exhibition once, years and years ago, but as at that point I had no real interest in houses, I didn’t really pay much attention to anything other than the [...]
Kevin and I signed a one year extension on the lease to this flat today. The contract is onerous, the rent has gone up by 10.6% and there’s stuff that’s been wrong with the flat since we moved in that’s never been fixed.
I looked at Kevin as we left the estate agents and we [...]
January 26th’s New Scientist ran an article on E-Crete (p 28 - 29), which is sadly behind a paywall but which I shall do my best to summarise here.
Concrete is a very versatile building material, but it’s not very green. The production process for Portland cement, a key ingredient of concrete, involves heating limestone up [...]
Now that our wedding is over, Kevin and I need to figure out a few things about our future together. One of those things is to decide where, and how, we live. Right now, ‘home’ is a small one-bedroom flat in north London, a flat so small that even the gas boiler repair man felt [...]
