So, will it have been worth it?

So you're sitting there, in your old house, knowing the paint is going to be dry in the new one pretty soon, so it doesn't matter that it's getting colder and that the guy who filled up the kerosene cans didn't put the lid on properly, and it spilt on the floor of the car, because soon you're never going to need any more kerosene.

You've already let the kids switch on the electric toilet seat warmer, and if it gets much colder you may actually plug it in. It's not going to be on for long though.

Then you read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/pooran-desai-interview-green-buildings

And you start to wonder, again, whether the extra mile was worth the few inches more of energy efficiency. The point of the article is that the difference between a high energy performance and very high energy performance building is not so great, but lifestyles will make a huge difference. So if you're eating strawberries flown in from India, your eco house isn't really going to be so eco. Riding a bicycle to work may not help your carbon credentials if your burning fat from an avocado from Mexico.

So what does the design of buildings actually do to change the way people live?  

Or maybe this is just the nature of the media to find different opinions, and highly energy efficient buildings really are worth it; there are just other things to worry about too.

I still wonder how much the new house is just going to be a very stable environment, immune to the massive temperature swings outside, and what we're getting is comfort, rather than ecology. I worry that the lifetime carbon costs have been spent and then some in the construction.

There certainly are several fronts to fight on when we're trying to come to terms with a population doubling in a couple of decades.

So, going to back to the idea of a house that doesn't consume energy, at least symbolically this is a challenge to the consumerist aesthetic.

You can't make an omelette without using a few hundred kilojoules of thermal energy.  

19th December

We have a completion date, and the good news is that it's before Christmas. Also, looking on the bright side, as it's a few pay days later than expected, and all being well I'll be getting a bonus this year, I can reduce the amount I need to borrow from the bank. I won't dwell on the fact that we were expecting to be in the new house last Christmas, and I'll try not to worry too much if this date slips a bit. 

I got a copy of the building schedule, and it's very exciting. As of 23rd November, the tiler has started tiling away, planned to finish at the end of the month. The kitchen is going in on the last two days of November. The wallpapering is finished, and the door frames all have at least undercoats on, but the wall painting will start from 1st December, until 8th. Not every room has tiles, so I'm sure the painters and tilers would have been able to work simultaneously. Perhaps they don't get on with each other.

Also, it seems the building trade in Matsumoto is incredibly busy at the moment and it's been difficult to get all the subcontractors lined up. This is probably a combination of projects delayed when the earthquake hit up north back in March, that are now all going ahead, and rebuilding work from the earthquake that hit Matsumoto in June and dislodged a lot of tiles. This is what it did to a wall in our house, although I don't think the landlord has added it to anybody's list of things to do.

When the paint is up on 8th December, the electricians and plumbers come in. Actually, the schedule says it's possible for the electricians and plumbers to work any time from 24th November, but they better be careful not to upset the tiler as he doesn't seem to like people walking around on his tiles.

They take down the inside scaffolding on 10th December. They put it up a couple of weeks ago for no obvious reason, then took it down a couple of days ago so the tilers can tile the ground floor. The heating engineers are coming to fix up the heat pump and the underfloor heating.

The bannister rail is going on the stairs on 15th December, then they can start cleaning inside the house. The tatami mats are going down in our Japanese room on 19th December.

This is the plan inside the house. 

Simultaneously to the tiles going down and the paint going up inside, the external wall is being clad. When we were planning the house, the options for the external finish were ready-made sidings, or a constructed and mortared wall. Apparently sidings can be much cheaper, however quality and durability are issues. I'm amused every time I see a house with red-brick imitation sidings, coming as I do from an area where brick houses are liable to be stone clad. I was assured that by the time you find sidings that look nice, the cost is about the same as building the wall, although it seems to be a very involved process. First there are gara ita, strips of wood on top of the ventilation gap. Then goes a waterproof sheet of asphalt, on top of this goes chicken mesh, then the wall finish is pasted onto that, undercoat, middle coat and then overcoat. The gara ita have been up for a month or two in most places, although the problem areas have just been fixed and fitted. The rest of it has been given until 10th December.  They could have it all finished in a couple of days, or they could be working right up to the end. If it were ready-made sidings, I imagine the whole process could have have taken a couple of days. There may also be advantages with ready-made sidings, for example in insulation performance. I imagine if they are weathered and worn, it's easy to replace them.

When I talk about the choice having been between sidings or a constructed wall, the choice wasn't really ours. As usual, the architect told us what he thought we should do, which was what he wanted to do, and he poured disdain and mistrust upon the sidings.

Next on the schedule, on 12th, the ventilation and insulation engineers come back to fix the vents on the outside. They may fix the inside vents too, which are currently holes in the wall, and there are a couple of places where the ducts run through a painted room, so they need fixing in place. Hopefully they'll be insulated the exhaust duct inside the house too.

Not sure when the final airtightness test is going to be, but that's the same people.

The shutters are to be fitted on 12th December, which should be interesting. These are for the upstairs south facing windows, to keep some of that summer sun out. They're electric. The shutters have a wire coming out of the back, which should go through the wall into the house, where the switches are. The walls need to be airtight, and the wires need to be sealed from the outside, which of course will be covered by the shutters when they are installed. This is another one of those riddles that builders must answer.

They're going to rearrange the outside scaffolding on 14th December, as most of the external work will have finished. The balcony will start going up on 15th, at least if we have decided how it is going to be made. It'll be painted and railing added to it on 17th, then the scaffolding for that will come down 19th. The screen doors will also be fitted on that last day, although to be honest I don't think we're going to be needing them until next summer. They're doing the drainpipes then, too.

The prospect of moving, a spectre that has haunted us for a while, is rapidly moving in. We have over a decade of crap in the house to sort through, and conflicting interests of not buying anything new that we don't need, and getting rid of what we can rather than bringing it into the new house. 

Things I may always look at and just shake my head. Part one.

Doctors bury their mistakes, gardeners dig them up, and architects plasterers wait for the painters to come and paint them over. But if you're building a house, then you're going to live in your mistakes, or with them, or looking at them every day.

I have often regretted my words, and in fact I've also regretted my silence a few times. The upstairs ceiling is a case of both. Part of the plan for being able to breathe in the house while maintaining high thermal efficiency is the ventilation system. Air comes in at the top of the middle of the East wall, goes through the heat exchanger and is sent through ducts around the house. It returns through another set of ducts, goes back through the heat exchanger to ensure that the we're not losing too much heat in the winter, or gaining too much in the summer, then air leaves the house on the high north wall. It took a lot of time and mental gymnastics to work out where these ducts should all go, to ensure all parts of the house would have suitable amounts of air flowing through, and we wouldn't have ducts in the way to trip over or bang our heads on. The final plan had two ducts running across the upstairs south ceiling, from the machine room at the east to the west wall in the master bedroom. The south ceiling has two beams running east-west, one a third of the way up, above the edge of the corridor and the south edge of the master bedroom, another two thirds of the way up, in the middle of the master bedroom and above the stairs. The ducts were to go above the higher beam, covered by a bit of ceiling coming horizontally away from the sloping ceiling, then heading up vertically to meet it again. 

Two ducts were necessary along this bit of ceiling, one delivering fresh air to the master bedroom and to the downstairs room, and the other extracting old air from the kids' room, the loft in the back of the master bedroom and the geta bako (shoe cupboard) in the genkan. So, this bit of ceiling seemed like it would be rather large.

I had the idea of leaving one of the ducts along the higher beam, but sending the other duct along the lower beam. This would have had a more balanced effect on the ceiling, so that rather than one boxy protrusion around half a metre wide, and another beam-sized protrusion a quarter of that, there would be two protrusions, both around 30 cm wide, rather like wide beams. I discussed this a little with the site foreman and architect, and then made the mistake of suggesting it directly to the man in charge of the ducting. The result was that, rather than one of the ducts ending up along the lower beam, it moved to the other side of the higher beam. 

"You don't want it to go along that beam. It'll look strange." They said. 

And I believed them.

They probably just thought that it was too much trouble changing it, or perhaps wondered what on earth was I doing putting these stupid ducts in the house anyway, rather than allowing in real fresh air, bracing or stifling depending on the season. And if I did want these ducts, then surely I'd be happy for them to create a massive ripple on the ceiling. Or perhaps they were more concerned about the other hundred items on the list of things to do.

So now we have something that is likely to make people think, "What the f..." And I'll have to explain that the ventilation ducts are behind there, or tell them the tale I have just told, or pretend the reason is to accommodate the down-light, because we can't put anything through the vapour barrier just under the plaster board on the ceiling, or I'll have to make up a more elaborate story.

Or perhaps they won't notice. I mean, nobody looks at ceilings, do they?

Or perhaps they will just politely say nothing, and I will have no opportunity for elaborate story making.

But I will notice. And I may always wonder why I didn't dig my feet in and tell them what I wanted. 

Of course it may look better when the paint is on. 

Or it may look worse. 

Spot the deliberate mistake.

Here is our heat exchange ventilation system. Can you spot the deliberate mistake? Just to help you work out what's going on, the four ducts coming out of the top are, from the right, clean air supply from outside, return air from the house, clean air supply to the house, exhaust air going outside. Can you see what's strange?

The supply air splits straight after leaving the heat exchanger, then goes through two soundproofers. This should make the house a bit quieter. The clean air supply duct is insulated. That's why it's thicker.

The exhaust air duct is not insulated. That is the problem.

I know it makes some kind of sense to insulate the pipe coming in, because that's bringing in cold air from outside, but as it's a heat exchanger, the heat from the return air is largely transferred to the supply air, so by the time it goes out through the exhaust air duct, it's going to be close to the temperature of clean air supply from outside, and close to the actual outside temperature. So it needs insulation every bit as much as the insulated duct does. Perhaps there is some rational reason why there is no insulation there.

Not too late for the punctual thermal bridge - The North side revisited

One good thing about having a 12 month delay in a building project is that it gives you plenty of opportunities to reconsider previous decisions. You spend hours, days and weeks thinking about things, then come back to them months later with a fresh opinion. Then you try to remember why and how you came to the decision in the first place. 

There are always many ways of doing things, and often there is something radical that you've never seen in a house before. There is usually a good reason why it has never been seen, either that there is a flaw in the idea, or the conservative nature of builders and architects. Materials and science have moved a great deal in the past few decades, but building sensibility still goes back hundreds of years. A lot of dimensions can be calculated, rather than guessed by eye or by rules of thumb, and this could reveal extra possibilities, or if the architect doing the calculations is semi-numerate, it could further restrict the possibilities.

Let me digress into a couple of examples from aeronautics. In the 1940s when Howard Hughes made his eight-engined Spruce Goose, the largest flying boat ever, about the same length as a 747, but with twice the wing area, the science of aerodynamics was young and aircraft design was more of a craft. The wings, scaled up from smaller working designs, were so big you could walk down the inside. A little bit earlier, in the 1920s when airships seemed the only logical alternative to crossing the atlantic by sea, and R100 airship was being designed, they needed to calculate the stresses on each beam and wire of the massive frame that kept the balloon full of hydrogen. They used a computer for this, which at the time was a person with a slide rule and a pad of paper. If they found that any of the wires had negative tension, they would send it all back the designer. 

Back to our little world, at the end of the day, you just have to make a decision, and then stick with that decision, and convince yourself it is the correct one. Then move on, as there are plenty more decisions to make. 

Of course, when the house is built and you start living in it, and those decisions become solid objects, you find out whether you did the right thing or not, and if you want to find out whether it was the right decision, then keep reading. When we do move in, though, after the investment of time and money, there's a high chance that I'm going to consider the house to be close to perfect, and I'll look around, through or away from any problems that there are, and do my best to enjoy the good bits. Human beings are, after all, very flexible animals when it comes to living environments.

It has been very tempting, whenever part of the building comes up that we have not been entirely sure about, to take the full opportunity offered by the questions "are you sure?" or "do you really want to do this?" or "what, exactly, are we supposed to do here?" that the builder asks the architect, luckily in our presence.

I suspect that, had we not started to get heavily involved with the builder, insisting that we are involved in any meetings with architect, and if I hadn't been visiting the building site, with a camera, pretty much every day, things would have been very different. For a start, we probably would have moved in a few months ago. All the questions that we see being asked, as the builders scratch their heads over the architect's drawings, would have been worked out in some haphazard fashion, filled with builders guessing what the architect meant and hoping for the best, and the architect demanding constructions based on his own prejudices, either forbidding materials that he doesn't like, or using them indiscriminately because we had the nerve to ask him to use them. A lot of the time, I suspect the architect would have just presented it as a concept in pencil on paper, and left it to them to work out how to make it. Almost none of the time would he have been thinking about what we really want.

So, anyway, when it came to the roof over the front door, we were able to change the plan. 

The plan had been to have a sloping, transparent roof over the two doors on the north side of the house. The front door is to the west of the north wall, then there are seven steps up to the entrance to the este room. With the doors being at different heights and there being windows and glass doors, it seemed like a good idea to have a transparent roof, at an angle.

It seemed to me a very bad idea to puncture the thermal envelope, but according to the architect, this was just too difficult to do without puncturing the wall with beams, although in a couple of days the carpenter seems to have managed to remove the protruding beams, and construct a new roof. Evidently moving hammers, saws and three-metre lengths of wood is more difficult than moving pencils, erasers and the computer mouse.

It had always seemed to me a good idea to have a transparent roof, as this will let in more light, but when it came to it, the architect had no idea how this was going to be done, and the ideas he had all sounded like they would look terrible. One big issue with the roof is that it is likely, at some point, to be subjected to falling bits of ice from the roof above. These could actually be quite large and serious as the roof is highly insulated, so the heat escaping from the house is not going to have a very good melting effect. Also there is a bit of wall sticking up from the north roof to the higher south roof, so the top part of the roof will be in permanent shade for half the year. And the north roof has quite a shallow slope, so snow is likely to stay there for a while, going through a melting-freezing cycle and getting harder and harder. Anything transparent is not going to be as strong as a solid roof, and liable to be damaged by such falling ice. Then there are fire regulations, which need a whole new post to cover both their simplicity and the extent to which they are interpreted and ignored.