Practise what you preach. Being thirty-plus years in the reclamation business, I have spent many a day advising and persuading clients to embrace the use of all things reclaimed. I have myself used a vast selection of beams, bricks, tiles, and all things reclaimed in our restoration projects over the years, but, when presented with the opportunity to build a new house from scratch I found myself with a real challenge. How do you build a modern house that conforms to the highest spec for efficiency and meets all current building regulations out of reclaimed materials? Well obviously you can’t; but you can get close!
 
So the conversation started a while back, when I said to an architect and an engineer that I wanted to build a house from 80% reclaimed materials and no concrete, believing that this would be the only truly green method of construction for a new building. Eighty percent seemed a reasonable, if arbitrary, proportion because there are areas which require the inclusion of newly manufactured products to achieve the specifications required. The windows, insulation, drainage etc were all planned as being constructed from newly manufactured materials.
 
Our salvage yard and home for the last 26 years has been located on a charming green in the market town of Hingham, Norfolk, the Market Place is described by Pevsner as ‘stylish’. Louise and I have now embarked on converting our steel framed showroom into a dwelling that will sit happily in this environment. We wanted a building that not only paid homage to the Georgian buildings surrounding it but also showed the industrial heritage of the existing structure. We, above all, wanted to use traditional and reclaimed building materials in an architecturally modern building.
 
After a few years in the planning stage, we started the building a few months ago. The existing building, which we are converting, has a beautiful polished concrete floor, some of which we will maintain, but, in order to create a first floor, we are lowering the level at one end of the house.
 
It had been suggested to me that it would be possible to cut the slab and lower it whole. The architect and engineer looked very sceptical at this point, but the engineer came up with an ingenious idea of cutting the slab into blocks and using these as underpinning for the steel frame.
 
We have been thwarted however. Unfortunately, the slab proved to be reinforced and much thicker than expected. We have nothing available that will cut it. The site has many restrictions, one of which is limited access, being surrounded by existing housing, and everyone involved agreed that, without some heavy plant, this part of the reclaimed building was just too difficult.
 
We have also failed in using the foundations from our old workshop. This was to be crushed for the base to the new limecrete slab on the extension, but we could not get it crushed in time without holding up proceedings. The next best thing, we bought in hardcore from the recent resurfacing of the A11 about 6 miles away. Our crushed concrete will get used elsewhere in the project.
 
I’m sorry to say that we have used new blocks in the new foundations under the ground, this was a pragmatic decision, primarily to enable us to get these built quickly as they form the party walls and we want to keep our very tolerant neighbours happy.
 
On the other side of the building, we have removed carefully the concrete blocks and these have been used for our internal retaining walls, which is very fortuitous as they need move only four feet.
 
To be continued...