Construction begins!

Construction of the lodges began in June 2008, slowly at first as we were keen to treat the first two as prototypes, realising we may have to make small design changes to during the build process. Having laid concrete foundation pads and serviced the plots with necessary utilities; water, electric cables and sewerage, we were ready to start erecting the buildings.
This involved bringing in a huge crane to lift the glu-lam frames into place and then fit the timber frame panels and bolt everything together. Within two or three days we could have a basic building up with a waterproof membrane on the roof to keep out the weather. More about the fitting out later.

While the lodges were being built there were many other things to consider.
Two potentially very expensive issues were high on the agenda; water supplies and stone for roads and foundations. We had approached our local water utility company asking for a price to feed a water supply into the site but the quotation was of staggering proportions. We thought again and decided to take a chance on drilling a borehole as we had heard rumours of an underground lake in the area. We brought in a specialist drilling company and after a couple of days drilling...bingo! We had struck water, not only that but pure spring water under pressure!

We also suspected that there could be gravel under our field so we tasked Les our friendly ground works contractor to start digging and within a very short space of time he returned with a big grin on his face saying "I've hit
gravel, masses of it". Within a week we had a grader and crusher on site
and we were making our own stone and gravel on site. Sometimes you need a bit of good luck.

We had felled a number of trees around the site which were either surplus to requirements or rotten, so we brought in a log saw and splitter and set to work chopping up a huge mountain of wood which had been accumulating, the result was several years supply of logs all chopped to 330cm long so they would fit inside the hi tech log burning stoves soon to arrive from Switzerland.

It is difficult to calculate just how many lorry journeys in and out we have saved through our self sufficiency but it must be many hundreds.

Planning the lodges

During the summer of 2007 Simon and I took the time to do some market research into the holiday lodge market in the North of England and it quickly became apparent that most holiday lodges were essentially mobile homes with various degrees of cladding on the outside and maybe a bit of decking tagged on for good luck. The "posh" ones usually had a hot tub outside... yuk! Very little imagination seemed to be going into the design of either the lodges themselves or the settings. Whilst one or two lodge parks were better than most it seemed there was a bit of a gap for something more imaginative and elegant.

We decided early on that we would start with a blank sheet of paper and design every element from scratch. We wanted to build lodges which would be sensibly eco friendly, easy to build, practical to live in and look stunning. Simon came up with lots of ideas which we hashed around until eventually it just seemed right. Once were comfortable with the basic concept we got to work on the detailed specification and the plan slowly came together.

We then had to decide how to make the project come to life, we considered many options and concluded that we wanted to manufacture the buildings ourselves, no easy task but it would give us complete control over the quality and lots of flexibility to make changes as we went forward. We identified a manufacturer of glu-lam frames and then set up our own small manufacturing unit on a farm nearby to make the timber frame panels. Ben Bennett, a timber frame expert specialising in holiday lodges was drafted in to mastermind this process, he would take care of the erection of the lodges.

Once the shell of the building was up we could then bring in trades to fit them out, starting with insulation, dry lining, and plastering, then fitting windows, floors, doors kitchens and bathrooms. We had a plan and we were on our way...