Personal story:

We are Liz and Catherine and we own this lovely 1940s end of terrace property in Surbiton.  Liz is a civil engineer and sustainability professional, Catherine is a drama teacher.

Motivations:

There were lots of motivations, principally our aim was to improve the value of the house by extending and modernising, whilst at the same time creating a home that fits with our environmental principles in construction and use.

Having worked within the construction industry on designing and specifying sustainable materials I wanted to take the opportunity of this house renovation to put my years of consultancy experience into practice.  One of our principal aims was to ‘use our wallet as our weapon’ so we have tried as much as possible to use low impact materials to achieve our aim of a warm comfortable home.

As well as the energy performance of the house, we also wanted to use the house renovations to incorporate as many reclaimed and re-used materials as possible (firstly items coming out of the house itself, such as loft beams made into our dining room table and then local waste products – such as pallets to make in built wardrobes.)

Property background:

The house was built in 1948, it is solid brick construction with concrete floor joists.  When we bought it in 2011 it had had one previous owner and contained all the original 1940s wiring!  The previous occupant had done very little to the house in the 60 years he had owned it other than install a new condensing gas boiler in 2010.   It’s the end of a terrace with 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, living room, dining room and small kitchen.

Key changes made:

Overall the house was in need of modernisation so we decided to knock down some walls and extend out to create a single kitchen/dining area as well as do a loft conversion to add an extra bedroom.  As there was a whole lot of work going on already we decided to upgrade the energy performance of the house at the same time.

Measures installed in detail:

Insulation:

Pitched Roof and dormer – Actis Tri-iso super 10+ with 50mm wood fibre insulation from Pavatex

Flat roof to new build extension

• Living roof
• 175mm NBT pavatex woodfibre insulation

Under floor existing building – 140mm sheeps wool insulation laid between concrete joists, existing floorboards

Underfloor new build extension –

• 210mm NBT pavatex woodfibre insulation

External wall new build extension

• 2 coats lime render
• 120mm NBT Diffutherm woodfibre external wall insulation
• 150mm NBT pavatex wood fibre insulation between studs

Double glazed windows

• Bereco u-value 1.37W/m2K throughout

Solar PV system – 1.7kWp

• Sharp 190W solar modules
• Sunny Boy 1700W inverter

Wood burning stove – Morso 04

Twin coil cylinder for future solar thermal install – Joule Cyclone CY200l Twin

Draught stripping throughout

Low energy lighting – 90% LED

Low energy and low water appliances

Low flow taps, toilets and shower heads throughout

TRV radiator valves throughout + digital heating controls

Benefits of work carried out:

Our new extension is really toasty, there are plenty of evenings when cooking dinner heats up the space and we don’t need any additional heating, also the heat is retained in the space and it stays warm for a long time.  I also love the daylight from our roof lights.

A personal benefit has been learning lots of new skills as we did a lot of work ourselves!

Favourite feature:

The wood burning stove is really lovely and snug plus we get all our wood from local tree surgeons for free!

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