Older Articles
The following are articles written for various publications pre-SelfBuild & Design Magazine.
The House That Bob Built (from Practical Householder Magazine, volume 5 number 413, August 1990)
My story starts in March 1986 when I began looking for a building plot near Nottingham. I was going to build a house; I was going to subcontract it; and it was going to take a total of only six months.
The market was stagnant, so there were plenty of plots to choose from. Many could be dismissed immediately. (One turned out to be next to a power station, a detail that the estate agent, not surprisingly, omitted to mention.)
The most promising were a pair of adjacent plots in the middle of a small Wimpey estate that had been built some five years previously. They had been sold to another builder, who was now, in turn, selling them off.
My Straw Bale Cabin (unpublished, 1996)
I conceived of building walls of straw bales in 1994. As an idea, it seemed to show a lot of advantages. Straw is a very natural product so it ought to be ecologically friendly; it is essentially a waste by-product so it is cheap; it has good thermal insulation; and stacking up straw bales ought to be a quick and easy method of making a wall. It would be interesting, I thought, to build a straw bale cabin as an experiment - would it be such a good idea in practice? Where to build it? I knew of a place in East Anglia where it might be possible, and after some negotiations, permission was granted. But I'm talking of the landowners' permission, not Planning permission. If I'd have applied to the planners for their permission, it almost certainly would have been refused. However, it is not illegal to build without planning permission. Normally people obtain permission before building so that the planners can't tell them afterwards to change or demolish their building. (Planners have a period of four years after the building has been finished in which to do this.)
Home Making (from Resurgence Magazine issue 140, May/June 1990)
For the last four years of the Seventies I lived at Old Hall Community in Suffolk. Ever since my boyhood I'd fancied the idea of building my own home, and I left the community to do just that. Though I'd never done any building before, I built a bungalow, using one of the package-build kits. It was my personal challenge to see if I could do it single-handed and I did.
Three years later, I sold the bungalow and built a house, this time using a good deal of subcontract labour. Though it is conventionally constructed, it is probably the best insulated house in Nottinghamshire.
Having learnt about selfbuild the hard way, I thought it would be a good thing to write a technical book to pass on my hard won knowledge to others. At the back of this book, "Practical House Building", I was going to have an appendix relating the experiences of a few selfbuilders. But when I went to interview them, their stories were so interesting that they became a book in themselves, "Talking About Self-build", which has just been published.
