Improving our building fabric, one step at a time, firstly understanding our external cavity walls construction

If you’ve ever lived in an old, draughty home, you’ll understand the struggle of cold rooms with high heating bills. No matter how high the thermostat is, You know that the warmth will disappear when you turn down the system. This was exactly the challenge of our 1930s home. Continuing to add more heating was no longer a viable long term solution. We agreed to take a different approach… one that focuses on making the building fabric itself perform better at keeping the heat in.

 

Welcome to our whole house retrofit journey! These images, will take you through the first steps we took to transform our home, starting with our external walls. Following a ‘Fabric First’ approach, we focused on improving airtightness through our cavity walls before adding the external wall insulation and render system. The goal? A more comfortable, energy-efficient home that costs less to run and is better for the planet.

 

We’ll show you how we stripped back the external cavity walls, repaired essential elements and got everything ready to install the insulation system. You’ll see the challenges we faced, the decisions we made and the changes we didn’t expect!

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Our process was to first:

• Remove the existing pebbledash render

• Assess the existing construction makeup

• Clarify the junction between each fabric element

• Make alterations, replacements and essential repairs

 

To improve the airtightness of the wall fabric and so reduce heat loss thought our walls we first added a

• Skim coat layer of sand & cement render.

• This created a flat & even surface for the final External Wall Insulation and Light-weight Render systems.

 

Stick with us as we take you through our step-by-step process. Whether you’re planning a retrofit yourself or just curious about how our old homes can be made warmer and more efficient, we hope these images give you plenty of insight and inspiration!