Under Construction

In which self-building Ben Tuxworth gets insulated with old news, drylines his walls with wood waste in the mix, and sees his old oak trees take on a new identity. Daily newspaper deliveries are difficult in Daisybank Road. We’re up a hill that puts it off the radar for the average paper round. But I’ve just had a huge lorryload arrive, and, best of all, I’m spared the trouble of reading them. They’ve all been minced up – to make my insulation. Warmcell is made of old news. It’s an odd thought that I’ll be encased in thrice-pulped journalism. That’s counting the efforts of the original hack, the probability that it was printed on recycled paper – perhaps from UPM’s Shotton Mill, which is currently switching to 100% recycled production – and Warmcell’s final mincer. It’s comforting to know that those millions of unread supplements about South American countries and off-road vehicles can come to a purposeful end. At last, a use for Jeremy Clarkson. But I am slightly worried about Daily Mail editorials that may have crept into the mix. Could their presence still affect my mind, like Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining? When the Warmcell is pumped in through holes in the walls, it fills the voids and turns the shell we’ve built into a super-insulated house. Once that’s done we can get on with the bulk of our ‘first fix’ – all that piping and wiring that disappears from view, though sadly not from your bank statement. And when that’s out of the way the walls can be lined. We won’t be using the familiar plasterboard, but another product with more sustainability appeal. Though still based on gypsum, there is a new generation of drylining boards that perform better for sound and heat insulation, and strength, largely because they include a proportion of recycled paper, or in our case, timber thinnings and sawmill waste. In Sasmox boards the gypsum itself has already been used in an industrial filtering process, and since the only other ingredient is water, we’re feeling fairly chipper about them. They even save us the bother of plastering. I hope I’ll still be feeling as positive 250 boards and 11 tonnes later. Then it’s the home straight – floors, kitchens, bathrooms, decoration, and, one day, demolition of the bungalow we’re in, to make way for the decks (and the pipes that will fire our ground source heat pump). We’re using lots of timber in the internal finishes; oak for the floors and staircase, ash for doors, tongue and groove softwood boards for ceilings and birch plywood for some of the walls, shelving and worktops. It’s been easier than I expected to find certified timber products; in fact most timber from Europe now seems to sport one badge or another. But arguments rage as to the credibility of some of these – and with Greenpeace on the rampage about some of the Finnish sawmills, it’s easy to lose confidence. A heated debate on the subject at the Association for Environment-Conscious Building conference has left Charles, my architect, similarly nonplussed. Without the time to get to the bottom of the issues, specifying is still a challenge. Interior design is equally fraught. It’s horribly easy to get sucked into frantic bourgeois anxiety about the aesthetics of a mixer tap, when really we should just be grateful water comes out of it. With all this timber on display, we’re also a bit concerned that it’ll end up looking like a sauna. All the same, the prospect of living in a structure that is about 90% wood I still find really uplifting. Already it looks, feels and smells fantastic. At one end of the wooden spectrum, recycled newspaper insulation is functional and efficient – good enough. At the other… well, in a clearing in the woods last night, surrounded by huge baulks of timber, we watched the oak trees we cleared from the plot being sawn into the boards which will protect our walls from the elements, and it was really magical. Self build may stretch us to the limits, but it’s given us experiences we’ll never forget. Ben Tuxworth is director of strategy at Forum for the Future.

14 July 2004

Ben Tuxworth