April 2008

I don’t think that anyone here is going to be the least bit surprised to discover that I’m really quite looking forward to nine days of Grand Designs Live next month. Indeed, it should be blindingly obvious after even the most cursory inspection of Kits and Mortar that I am, well, a bit of a Grand Designs addict. I’ve started buying the magazine now, too, so there’s no denying it.

I’m delighted to say, though, that I will be going to Grand Designs Live not just as a fan, but with a press pass. The lovely people from Midnight Communications, who are doing the PR for GDL, got in touch this morning and asked if I’d like to cover the show. I jumped at the chance. I do a lot of ‘live blogging’ at tech conferences, and it’s going to be oodles of fun to live blog GDL, and maybe even do some video blogging too.

It also means that I’m going to be able to spend a lot more time at the exhibition, so I can cover much more of the various goings on than I had expected. Looking at the event guide in this months Grand Designs Magazine, that’s a good thing, because there’s going to be a huge amount to keep me occupied.

I’m very keen to catch some of the free seminars that are running. There are 30 seminars in four different subject areas: Building, Technology & Interiors, Eco, and Garden. The ones that have particularly caught my eye are:

• Reclamation: Finding Beauty in the Past: Dispelling the myth that new is always better, our reclamation experts extol the virtues of re-using materials and objects from the past.
• Jason Bradbury’s Hot New Gadgets: The Gadget Show present keeps us up-to-date with the hottest new home technology and must-have accessories. [I'll be interested to see if he's as up-to-date as I am, given my geek background!]
• Best Eco Foot Forward: Our experts debate the methods by which you can reduce your self-build’s negative impact on the environment.
• Developing Sustainable Energy: Renewable energy can reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels - our panel examines the different sources on offer.

Then there’s the traditional building techniques exhibit, where we get to play with building out of straw bales and cob, and learn about thatching and lime or clay plastering. I don’t think I’ll be able to restrain myself if there’s an opportunity to get my hands dirty! I have already learnt that I love the warmth of traditional building materials, so I’m going to make a beeline for this stand.

And at last we get to watch Kevin McCloud himself do what he has spent nine years watching others to, in The House That Kevin Built. Yup, the Grand (Designs) Master himself gets his build on and, in just six days, throws up a house outside the exhibition centre. The question has to be: Will he come in on time and under budget?

So, am I excited by all this? Oh yes, I think it’s safe to say that I’m very excited.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter. For those of you who think ‘twitter’ and imagine small birds making cheep-cheep noises, Twitter is a site that allows you to leave public or private messages of 140 characters or less.

Entirely pointless, you might think, but actually a lot of fun and a good way to maintain friendships (and make new ones!) without having to think too hard about it. Twitter is more public than instant messaging, less intrusive than chat, and gives those of us that work at home the sort of lightweight social contact that we need to keep sane.

Anyway, I’ve created a Twitter account just for Kits and Mortar! Please do feel free to follow us, and do send me @kitsandmortar messages if you have ideas for URLs I should visit or things I should know about.

A message from me, via Seesmic. If you want to respond on Seesmic, but don’t have an invitation code, please let me know and I’ll send you one.

I’ll update the post with any answers that come in!

There have been a few stories on the BBC this week about eco-villages and green housing that I’ve been meaning to post about, but a nasty cold and jetlag got the better of me til now.

In the first story, a report from a group of MPs says that the government is focusing too much on making new builds environmentally friendly, and in doing so is neglecting existing houses, about 25 million homes. The government, of course, has suggested that bureaucracy will do the job: “The committee also proposes that energy performance certificates, contained in Home Information Packs (HIPs), be required for homeowners seeking planning permission.” Yeah, right.

In the second story, a shortlist of 15 locations for potential eco-towns was revealed by the Government. Over the next six months, the shortlist will be whittled down to ten sites, with half of the proposed towns to be built by 2016, the rest by 2020. The idea is to tackle the national housing shortage in a sustainable manner, with houses being “low-energy, carbon-neutral developments built from recycled materials”.

Forty sites were rejected, because they were mainly “on greenbelt land, threatened wildlife or were similar to projects previously denied planning permission”, and there’s been a fair bit of opposition to submissions from local people. Precise details of the design aren’t mentioned in the BBC articles, so it’s hard to know just how green these houses are going to be, or how well planned the towns. My natural scepticism leads me to believe we’ll end up with something mediocre that could be been done so much better, but I’m hoping to be proven wrong.

And, finally, a report from the The National House-Building Council (NHBC) Foundation says that most home-owners aren’t willing to take the steps necessary to turn their houses into ‘zero-carbon’ homes. It found that:

[E]nergy efficiency was not a major factor when it came to choosing a new home. Instead [...] most respondents would prefer a better kitchen or bathroom.

Quelle surprise. Whilst cutting carbon emissions and building environmentally friendly houses is seen as being too expensive and involving too much sacrifice, of course people won’t want to do it. Few people do stuff because they ‘ought to’, but prefer to do things because they want to or because they benefit from them. The stick is not as effective as a carrot.

With a big credit crunch happening, though, perhaps now is a good time to look at how making houses environmentally friendly could add value to them. If we had a little more focus on that, and a bit less on paperwork and soundbite-laden schemes perhaps we could make some headway.

One of the most wonderful things about our honeymoon apartment, apart from the fact that it was in Barbados, was its bathroom. Or rather, its master bathroom, it having two.

I may have mentioned before that our flat in London is small. Just how small was emphasised by this bathroom, which was bigger than our bedroom. It had a built-in wardrobe thrice the size of our tiny little thing, a walk-in shower, hot tub, separate toilet, and two sinks in a huge vanity unit with more storage than I would know what to do with. With stone coloured tiles, and dark wood doors and woodwork, it was a lovely bathroom.

But whilst the hot tub was nice, the bit that blew me away was the shower. It was a generous size - easily big enough for two (I hope that’s not TMI!). But it had something I’ve never seen before, but which I now know I want in my future bathroom: five shower heads. Yup, that’s right. Five.

The first was a normal shower head, positioned exactly where you would expect it, raining water down upon your head. Then there were a pair of smaller heads at about chest height, and another pair at about hip height. All five were controlled by a rather mysterious rotating handle which change the flow of water from a traditional shower to a full-on drench-o-rama. It really was truly a magnificent shower.

I hate to think how much water it would take, but as I’m intending to both gather rainwater and recycle water in our future house, I’m not too fussed about it. Most of the water that we use is only slightly dirty when we throw it away, so there’s no good reason why it can’t be cleaned up and reused. Whilst “reduce” may be the first of the three Rs, water is not something worth skimping on when a bit of ingenuity can make it potable again. (I’ll cover all that in future posts as I do my water research.)

Another item of bathroom furniture that has become a lot more important to me is my bath. I didn’t used to care much for baths, prefering a quick shower to a long soak. As a child we had weekly baths, every Sunday night whilst The Money Programme was on. I had a tendency to be less dirty than my brother, so I generally got to go in the bath first and then my brother got my water, topped up with some hot.

Our bathroom then was tiny, and the bath was an enamel thing that took up most of the available space. The water was heated by our Parkray coal fire, until dad installed an immersion heater, but even then sometimes the hot water would run out.The fire didn’t have enough oomph to heat the water and the radiators, so the bathroom was a bit nippy in the winter and I would dry off as fast as I could, get into my nightdress and go and huddle with the cats by the fire to get warm again.

As soon as we got a shower fitted, I used that instead, and have quite happily stuck to showers ever since, with only the occasional bath to relax.

Things change, though, and now I yearn for a decent bath. It was a year before we used the bath - as a bath instead of a shower - in our current flat, thus discovering that the overflow wasn’t plumbed in at all. That wasn’t because I didn’t want to take a bath, but because it is so tiny that you just can’t relax in it. I can’t straighten my legs out, so rather than relaxing in a nice, calming bath, you end up dipping in and out so quickly that it seems pointless spending all that time actually drawing the water in the first place.

Now, though, I want a bath that I can fill full of Radox and take a good soak in whilst Kevin reads to me. I love being read to, and I love reading to others, so one of the little rituals we’ve settled upon is that we read to each other before we go to bed. It’s a nice way to unwind and put ourselves in a nice, sleepy frame of mind. Indeed, the other night, Kevin nodded off mid-sentence in a shameful display of endearing cuteness.

What better way to extend that ritual than to sit in the bath whilst Kevin reads? Currently, that means he has to sit on the loo lid whilst I scrunch myself up and try not to dislocate anything doing so. No, I’d much rather have a nice big bath with a comfy chair next to it.

Indeed, I’m even thinking of having a bath in the bedroom. The first time I saw that on TV I couldn’t believe that someone would do that - it seemed completely stupid and irrational. But I’m coming round to the idea of having a bath in the corner of the bedroom with a nice comfy chair next to it.

The two drawbacks I see are that it’s easier to keep the air temperature high in a bathroom, so that you don’t have the problem of your submerged half being warm whilst the rest of you gets goosebumps. The other issue is ensuring that the floor doesn’t get wet. Whilst you don’t want a bathroom-like floor in your bedroom, you also don’t want soggy carpets either.

Another pet peeve with baths, though, is the thermal properties of the bath itself. Our old enamel thing used to suck the heat out of the water with fearsome speed. I’d get it to just the right temperature that it would be comfortable to get into, and just as I started to settle down, the water would go cold. Indeed, I complained about this so much that when dad had to re-plumb the bathroom he wound a few coils of hot water pipe around the underside of the bath to try and warm it up a bit.

Freestanding baths are gorgeous, but if they are made of metal they’re going to be colder than a witch’s icecubes. I suspect I’d be willing to forgo the sleek aesthetic of the freestanding tub so that I could have something to hide the lagging.

But whatever we decide on, I’m going to enjoy thinking about and designing our future bathroom, in anticipation of all that luxuriating.

I’m currently flying at 35,000 feet on my way to a conference in Washington DC. I’ve just read, cover to cover, this month’s copy of Grand Designs Magazine, and I’m struck by just how far I have to go. True, it’s still another five hours until I land at Dulles, my back is aching, my sinuses are threatening to give me hell later and I’m so squashed in my seat that I barely have room to fidget. But that’s not what I mean.

Reading this magazine makes me realise how little I know, and how much I have to learn about this whole self-build malarkey. Yet some things are becoming very clear, very quickly. Kevin and I are not eco-martyrs, and we are not looking at this project as a way to salve our consciences. There are no hairshirts here, no Luddite rejections of technology or modernity.

Re-watching old episodes of Grand Designs, especially the eco-builds, and reading websites about green houses has quickly illustrated that some of these projects are predicated on the rejection of almost everything about modern society. They are run by people who have fallen for the Victorian myth of Arcadia, the concept of the rural idyll in which we all hoe the land and live happily ever after. It’s an idyll that never existed, and never will.

Now, I’m a rural lass who grew up in a tiny Dorset hamlet where the amenities were, in order of importance, a post box and a phone box. There was a bus once a week to the market and if you missed the bus home, it was a long, long walk. Kevin is from rural Illinois, which is just like a stretched out version of Dorset but with maize instead of wheat. Both of us love the countryside, but both of us love our technology too, and believe that technology can help us live a more environmentally responsible life.

We also like our luxury. Well, ok, maybe this is more me than Kev, who does like his camping trips, but even so, I think he enjoys a bit of luxury once in a while too. I’m not giving up my future hot tub just because some eco-purist somewhere might think it’s too indulgent. Instead, I’m going to find the most responsible way to run a hot tub - recycling and conserving water and energy, and powering from renewable sources. Equally, I want my big American fridge (the Americans do such amazing fridges which make standard British ones look like small chiller boxes), my server rack, and my pervasive wifi. I see no reason why I can’t have all that without either succumbing to rampant consumerism or killing the planet.

Before someone suggests it, I don’t believe in offsetting, which to me seems to be an easy way for the guilty to feel better about themselves without actually ever having to do anything about reducing their environmental footprint. There’s not enough room on this planet for us to all plant trees, and if I want to invest in new green technologies, then I’ll actually invest as a shareholder and commit to the long term, rather than hope that money I’ve spent on carbon credits actually goes somewhere useful.

Nor does the irony of writing these words whilst on a flight to DC in order to speak at a two-day conference escape me. But we don’t own a car. We go everywhere on public transport, which is easily enough done in London where a car would be more of a liability than a use. Even with these flights as a blot in my copybook, I bet my carbon debt is lower than most car owners.

See, for me it’s all about balance between living a modern life as a technologist and behaving responsibly towards my environment. This is why I feel quite suspicious of some projects that claim to be green, when really all they are doing is making a weak political statement about the state of the world as they see it. I don’t care about politics, I care about building a future and a home with the man I love, and doing my best to ensure that my niece inherits a world that’s not totally ballsed up.

The only way we’re going to do that is en masse, by adopting more environmentally friendly building materials, by insulating our homes to the highest possible standard, by using renewable energy…

Those things have to become not just mainstream, but so embedded in our society that to skimp would be unthinkable. And the only way to achieve that is to make the end result desirable, aspirational. Few people aspire to be martyrs or to show off their lovely new hairshirt, and those that do rarely make a good job of it because they’re focused too much on the appearance and not enough on the substance. If green became synonymous with luxury, we’d see the adoption of green all over the place, but by associating it with privation, sacrifice, and soapdodging, activists have effectively shot the the environmental movement in the foot.

Luckily I think that it’s recovering. We are seeing increasing examples of green being just another form of normality. And with the price of energy and fuel skyrocketing, even just being energy efficient is moving from the “Oh, I suppose we ought to” category to the “We can’t afford not to” category.

We still have a long way to go as a couple, as a nation, and as a world. And I still have another 1858 miles before touchdown.