When Reuben and April came across a ruined 19th-century house amid the tower blocks of Leith, Edinburgh, they saw it as their future home. They had no clear idea of how to restore it, and precious little building experience. Still, they were young and fit (they had met on Reuben's climbing wall) and they liked a challenge. So they bought the crumbling shell and set about transforming it with their own hands.
Budget And Build
Cost of building and land £23,000
Budget for build £100,000
Final cost of build TBC
The first step was to demolish internal walls and the remains of the roof. Reuben and April did it themselves, swinging sledgehammers and kicking down bricks with a daredevilry that Kevin McCloud dubbed 'extreme building'.
Their initial idea had been to rebuild an open-plan ground floor, with two bedrooms, an office and bathroom on the first floor, but once the internal walls were down, they fell in love with the height and the light. They now opted for a very open design, with a curved gallery-style first floor overlooking a double-height light well in the living area.
The open-plan first floor would be shared by a bedroom space and office area, and the only walls would be around the bathroom.
They were still a long way off any such reconstruction. Working to an eight-month schedule, Reuben took a sabbatical from running his climbing centre and worked six days a week on site. April spent every spare minute working with him.
To strengthen the external walls, built of local sandstone, they had to replace all the rotting timber lintels and, using concrete, fill in gaps between the sandstone blocks. The stone had been eroded by pollution and the Scottish weather, so they hired a specialist stonemason to replace the weakest blocks.
It was no small job: he ended up adding 140 hand-cut blocks to the building.
Meanwhile, April power-washed the original stone of soot and mortar, and learned to apply traditional lime pointing. Reuben's brother Ben built a new garden wall out of rubble, lovingly cut and laid.
The upper parts of the house required complex engineering, so they commissioned architect Greg Holstead to design a new roof, with a pitched ceiling. To avoid cross-beams breaking up the internal space, the roof would have an unusual steel frame, which was made in a factory.
After in-filling the walls with concrete to strengthen them, Reuben and April built padstones for the steel frame to sit on. The roof was installed with an ingenious combination of heavy-duty manufacturing and DIY. The steel frame was craned into place and bolted on to the padstones. Reuben and April then measured and cut all the wood rafters themselves (with quite a few mistakes) and fixed them to the wooden roof plate and the steel frame using a powerful nail gun.
They spent the summer hand-crafting the roof. They used reclaimed Scottish slate, which was beautiful and environmentally sustainable, but came in all shapes and sizes. Trimming the 4,000-plus slates took two weeks, and April spent another eight up on the roof fitting them. Luckily, she discovered that she had a passion for the job. Reuben turned out to be equally devoted to lead work.
Professionals were commissioned to manufacture and fit the steel beams that would support the upper floor. The main feature of that was its curved shape, provided by one curved I-beam braced by two straight ones. The beams had been precisely measured, but the house, being old, did not offer straight lines, and some anxious cutting took place before the structure was secured.
In November, April and Reuben joisted the upper floor and installed a maze of pipes to provide under-floor heating. This was followed by the installation of all the windows. The two self-builders had long since abandoned their hopes of being in by Christmas, but as Grand Designs 4 went on the air, their restored house was sound and watertight, and looked beautiful from the outside.
By restoring an old building, using predominantly local labour and materials, Reuben and April have made this a sustainable build.
The steel I-beams and the steel frame for the roof were polluting to manufacture, but the quantity used is quite small. And it is offset by the use of reclaimed sandstone, slate and even rubble.
Crucially, Reuben and April have regenerated a disused patch of land in a built-up area, improving it for their neighbours as well as themselves.
The open-plan design of the house may be wasteful of heat, though, despite the double layer of insulation and under-floor heating.
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Want to be a self-build guru? Then read on....
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