Last week saw the really exciting part of the build begin: time for the timber frame kit! As with the foundations, we’ve been looking at the various PH15 frame drawings for months, without really comprehending exactly how it all worked and everything slotted together. I don’t understand it all yet, but base plates, i-joists and…

We now have beautifully smooth house and garage slabs. Big congratulations to the whole groundworks team – and relief! Steve and I had hoped to see the concrete pour while we were up in Ardnamurchan last week, and whilst we were ready for it to be poured, unfortunately there was a big hydro project on…

Thermal bridges are another of those things that can’t say I’d ever heard of or thought about before recently. One of the key principles of building a Passivhaus – or indeed any air tight house – is that you eliminate all thermal bridges. In this latest stage of the build Steve and I are beginning…

We’ve received quite a lot of “you should have done Grand Designs” type of comment over the past year or so. Aside from having absolutely no desire to ever be on television, or have film crews around our house build, in every Channel 4 reality programme there is a requirement for that moment of jeopardy….

I appreciate that the vast majority of people won’t be that interested in this post. But if you don’t read any further, please just absorb this next fact, which explains the reason why concrete is so important and builders in particular need to pay attention: Cement – the key ingredient in concrete – is the…

It’s taken a while but finally – three weeks into the build – those foundation drawings are beginning to make sense to my uneducated eye! Fortunately we have some very experienced people around who understood them all along and have been getting our site prepared in line with the drawings. And also fortunately they have…

And so it began… after a slight hiccup, the extra big digger arrived on site on Monday 10th May, and the serious work began. Aside from genuine excitement that the house build had started, the first week was all about keeping our fingers crossed that not too much rock would be found close to the…

Monday 19th April – and the digging on site began. Not for the house itself, but to do the first part of the electricity connection work. We were lucky to have been introduced to Eenie MacGillvray a few months ago, who agreed to help us dig the trenches for the electricity cables. But this –…

When we decided that we would try to go the Passivhaus route, the next thing to think about was how we were actually going to build our house. The obvious route – especially given our location – seemed initially to be using panels pre-fabricated off-site. But it became clear that this wasn’t going to be…

From the moment we started looking for a plot, we were always keen to build some sort of ‘eco’ house, but I’m not sure we’d thought – or knew – very much more than that at the start. As we started discussing the house build with our architect, Peter Smith, someone mentioned the Passivhaus concept…

In Scots Gaelic, SAORSA means freedom or liberty. AITE SAORSA is ‘place of freedom’ And that’s what Ardnamurchan, and particularly our piece of land (soon to be house), means to us: a place of freedom, somewhere that we escape the stress and constraints of the way too busy lives we lead and feel completely relaxed….

Originally we’d thought that our house build would start in Summer 2020. It would always have been challenging, but once all building work was stopped in Scotland during the first lockdown, the timetable relaxed and we planned for 2021. In the meantime, I discovered some old foam board in the shed and set about making…

Steve and I had some pretty clear ideas about what we wanted from our house when we first met our architect, Peter Smith, in May 2019. And whilst all Roderick James’ designed houses appealed to us in one way or another (you can see a range of them on their website here), for our own…

In 2018, Steve and I spent a week in Ardarroch, close to the southern end of the spectacular mountain pass that is Bealach na Ba. Infamous in cycling circles for being the longest ascent in Scotland, cycling up this long hill was how I chose to celebrate my 50th birthday. During our week we spent…