Moving house: some notes for service managers

As he surveys his new property, Richard Horton reflects on certification, contract management, new technology and the need for a waterfall approach.

There was a crazy period in 2022 when we had 3 prime ministers, 4 treasurers, and 2 monarchs in the space of less than 63 days. I remember it well because in those 63 days  my wife and I went from offering on a house to completing the purchase. 

It was a 1930s house in need of significant work, epitomised by the gas check we had done on our first day which condemned the boiler. The EPC had declared it ‘Good’ but we weren’t surprised or bothered, as we were already planning to have a major eco-retrofit project done, and we wouldn’t be using gas in the future. It just meant we weren’t able to use the house at all until the work was done.

The journey has been a long one. I like to say that no one thing we have done has been radical, but doing them all together has been groundbreaking to say the least. We used the best local architect for eco-work, and builders who are experienced in this space. But there was still a sense that everyone was learning on the job. 

One of the best things we did was decide to seek a certification. Our contract with the builder only had this as an aspiration as no one knew how achievable it would be. This approach really sharpened both thinking and practice on the project and led to a significantly better result. However, despite this, when we got towards the end of the project it became apparent we weren’t going to meet the certification. 

At that point we adopted a novel technique that sounded wild and whacky but which was spectacularly successful. We have ended up achieving certification for AECB Carbonlite Retrofit https://aecb.net/aecb-carbonlite-retrofit-standard/. This was sufficiently new that our architect and our assessor needed to go on training specifically so that they could conduct our certification. We think we might even be the first house in York to get it. 

It’s been quite a journey. Some elements of it cried out for a ‘waterfall’ approach. Once you have put the mechanical ventilation pipes in, you are not going to be raising the floorboards to move them. With this sort of project attention to detail is really important, and that doesn’t stop at the design – the builders need to understand exactly what it is they are doing and why standard building techniques can give a bad result. Working with other suppliers could prove excruciatingly painful – I’ve previously written about this in Could Do Better.

However there are other aspects that felt more ‘agile’ in nature. As customers we really benefited from being bought into the process. My wife’s knowledge and observation both helped get the design right and highlighted some potential problems before it was too late. 

The thing that particularly makes me think of this in a service management context is the impact of the certification. Without that as a target we would have been a long way off where we wanted to get to. An air pressure test gives you an objective measure that what has been done is not achieving the target. As a result of this, approaches were altered and it really emphasised the importance to the builders of attending to detail.

At the end of the day we still needed some magic to be applied, and fortunately technology had advanced sufficiently to do this. I describe this as being an application of Ockham’s Razor – the simplest solution being the best. All the other work had laid the foundation, but the simplest way of finding and filling holes turned out to be pressurising the house and spraying a sticky substance into the air that then got sucked into the holes. Clever. 

There came a point where we needed to get into the house before it was finished. After that everything became very iterative. In some ways that was messy and inefficient, particularly when we moved 80% of our stuff out for 2 days to do the magic bit. But it had got us into our house when we needed to be, and enabled us to start discovering snagging issues while there were still builders working on the house. It also enabled us to host Christmas with my family, an important landmark for us. 

Inevitably there were times when we said, “Why did we not think of that earlier?” The answer is because we were juggling a building project with daily life, trying to sell the house we were living in, and with busy jobs to stay on top of. Overall though there is very little that we would have done differently.

For anyone wondering about the basics, we have knocked down and rebuilt the utility rooms, installed under floor heating downstairs and radiators upstairs, an air source heat pump, hot water tank, mechanical ventilation, triple glazed windows and external doors to the same standard,  insulated the house internally using kingspan and special insulating tape, removed the chimney stacks (outside the house), put a new roof on, and installed solar panels and two batteries. Doing this led us to move the electric power supply and while we were at it we replaced the lead water pipes and finished it off with a new drive. We mostly kept with the existing structure of the house, but did significantly remodel the kitchen and bathroom(s).

The builders overran by 7 months and were still working on the house when we moved in. They haven’t finished dealing with the snagging list and we are still learning how to set the various controls to work effectively, notably when it is hot outside. However, to compensate, since March we’ve been in credit on our energy consumption, which is a nice feeling. And it feels like home. 

So, some thoughts to finish with…

• What people learn when doing something like this can help with subsequent projects. As such it’s helpful if they can see the context they are working in.
• Everything might make sense separately but when you combine them together the complexity factor, along with ‘life just happens’, can add significantly to the workload.
• Having an external target and a way of measuring progress against it can make a huge difference.
• Alertness to how technology is moving can help you to solve old style problems in new ways.