Why I have done this project                                                                    

I am concerned about climate change and that the way we live at present is destroying our natural environment.  We are also far too dependent on dwindling supplies of oil: we need to make a major shift away from oil dependency now, not in 20 or 30 years time.  A motivating factor for me has been the Transition Town movement which is trying to find positive solutions to these problems on a local level. Awareness is growing and the authorities talk about what they are going to do but there is remarkably little meaningful action. In any event, the solution cannot come from one source: it needs to be from top down, and from bottom up. And so making people aware of what they can do at a local level and in practical terms seems to me a useful contribution.  Of course, it was an interesting personal challenge as well.

There are many ways of tackling the improvement of a house's energy efficiency and its overall impact on the environment and there is no one solution. Much depends on the owner's finances, their motivation and how far they want to get involved in the process themselves. What I ended up doing on this house will not be an answer for everyone.  There is plenty of advice out there from many bodies about the actions we can take but often it is confusing.  You will see how confused I was a lot of the time about the best way forward but I hope I have given some pointers as to the most effective ways of making changes within a reasonable budget.

The 'typical' house

I bought the house partly as an investment and partly because I wanted to try out my eco house project.  I was looking for something that needed work doing to it.  The average property in this country is a three bed semi so as the ‘typical’ house, that was what I was aiming to get.  The house I found had been repossessed by a finance company and had been empty for some months.  I am hoping to let it for a while and possibly sell it when the time is right and, if I have the energy, do another eco refurbishment.

Making the project public

Originally I thought about presenting it as a show house but the difficulties of opening it to people to see and yet having it occupied seemed insurmountable.  Hence the idea to set up a website.

Budget

My budget was probably higher than if I were an owner occupier and able to do a lot of the work myself over a period of time.  I have had to employ people to do most of it.  As a landlord, there is also the difficulty that I am not eligible for grants that would be available to owner occupiers, although there are some tax allowances available to landlords (see HMRC).

I hoped not to run much over £15,000 and finally managed to do it all for about £16,000. 

I am what you might call an informed enthusiast.  My background gives me some knowledge of buildings and I find construction details fascinating.  The passion I have for environmental issues combined with this has meant I have spent a lot of time in researching "eco" building and living.  Our own house has been extensively "eco-tuned" and we try to live in a reasonably low impact way. Click on the picture for more on what we have done.