Eco build on a budget

Donald returns to uni full-time tomorrow so our deadline is officially up. If you have been following our progress you’ll know that we’re not quite done yet, so we’re going to be weekend builders for the foreseeable future. And our budget is pretty much spent. What’s left in the kitty is allocated for the heating, plumber and electrician.

But we have pretty much accomplished our aim. We have a habitable extension built with sustainable materials in a low impact way. We have a super-insulated building that will be energy efficient and cheap to heat. We have achieved this on a tight budget while maintaining high standards and it looks pretty good. Though we’re behind schedule we are still way ahead of the extensions on the road which predated our build.

We may not have a kitchen installed yet but we’re close. The plumber is coming tomorrow, the electrician next week and Donald’s Dad will lay the flooring the following weekend. Then we can retrieve our appliances and flatpacks from our friends’ garage and, finally, put our kitchen together. Minus the counter top, but that’s another story.

Regrets, we’ve had a few…

Obviously, we’re not happy about the zero decorating budget. Having put so much effort into constructing an eco home it would have been nice to reflect this ethos on the interior. The recycled glass counter top will remain the stuff of dreams for now. And the kids’ rooms are a delightful shade of grey (plasterboard).

We’ve written about some of the compromises we’ve had to make, such as the floor, but we can live with those. We’ve had to forego the downstairs toilet / utility room but we’ve never had either of these before so we won’t know what we’re missing. The big regret is that we have no budget to work on the old part of the house. So we’ll be spending another winter with draughty aluminium windows, a white PVC front door and our old radiators. I anticipate we’ll be spending most of our time in the cosy new bit.

And what of the blog? Well, we’ll keep posting until the building is well and truly finished. And then we’ll morph into an eco-decorating blog. On a budget. On a very tight budget. On a down-to-one-income budget. Expect creativity, imagination, auctions and freecycling. Lots of freecycling.