With no main contractor, Mimi will be the only person on site who knows how this house goes together.
Her architect won’t be there to help either, as she can’t afford to keep him on for the whole project. The plan is for the build to take just 16 weeks.
Mimi’s house will use solid wood as the main load-bearing structural material. Her numerous subcontractors are spread throughout Europe and her wooden walls are being laminated in a factory in Germany. Once the basic panels are produced they can be cut to the architects drawings. The robot-cut panels will take three weeks to make in the factory. Then they’ll head to the site to sit on the foundations.
This will be such a bespoke house that a lot of Mimi’s time is spent sourcing the right people to prefabricate each little piece of the building. Boat builder Paul Dennis from Norfolk is making the birch ply tube that separates the first floor from the ground floor.
In week five of this very fast build, bang on schedule, the groundworkers are pouring the rest of the foundations. A week later, true to form, the German panels arrive and within the hour they’re ready to be hoisted into the air and onto Mimi’s waiting plinth. Although the panels have come from Germany, they’ll be erected by a team of English builders.
There’s also a lot of steel in this house. The first floor will sit on a steel frame to make a gap between the two parts of the building. The steel and wood fit together pretty quickly and within a week, most of the house is up. Although the whole building is now in position, the project is going to become more complex and demanding as more subcontractors become involved.
Almost half the house will be walled in glass - and windows, of course, generally leak heat. But Mimi’s found some extraordinary glass that actually produces heat and will be significantly cheaper to run than conventional heating.
Three quarters of the way into the supposed 16 week schedule, however, progress is almost negligible. The rain has stopped the builders from fitting the window frames - which means Mimi can’t measure them and order her Belgian glass. This break in the great chain of sequences could delay things by as much as eight weeks, so that’s Mimi’s schedule out of the window.
Eventually the weather improves and soon there are subcontractors everywhere, roofing, insulating, wiring and plumbing the building. The windows frames are being installed and the electricians are providing the power supply. You don’t normally expect to see the first fix going into the building before the windows come, but here this has to happen because the glazing is powered by the electrics - all of which will be hidden through a system of conduits set into the floor and solid timber walls.
For the outside, Mimi’s chosen a furniture maker to make and fit the cedar cladding that will give this building its weather coat. The cladding will be both precise and simple but left to turn grey. It embodies the mixture of rusticity and precision that Mimi’s architect, Nick, wanted in this woodland setting.
The timber staircase, however, is proving more complicated to figure out. Mimi decides she may have to look at using another joinery company.
Not only is Mimi project managing this building, she’s setting herself up as a supplier. She’s been growing thousands of tiny plants for the house’s green roof all from cuttings she’s found on site. In the autumn, she transfers the plants to their new home on the roof - a pleasurable distraction from building but until the windows arrive there isn’t much else she can do.
As November approaches, the supposed four month project is now into its sixth month and counting. Mimi and Andre are containing their budget, though, by taking on a lot of the menial jobs themselves. But they’ve also been hit by the failing economy and have had to use credit cards; an insanely expensive way to finance a project. Better to finish the house soon and get a proper mortgage.
A week later the windows, at last, arrive from Belgium. Over the next week all the glass is wired in. Each pane is the same size and shape – the maximum size it can be for a heated window. The only thing left is the staircase, which Mimi has given to Joe - the furniture maker who did the cladding.
Mimi is now a whole nine months into a project that was supposed to take only four. So it’s a great relief when Joe arrives with the final piece of the puzzle, the staircase. Thanks to the precision cutting it’s quick and easy to put up. It’s also just about the only piece of furniture that Mimi and Andre are planning for their minimalist house so, after nine long months, they finally move in.
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