Our Renovation Project

THE STORY SO FAR 

In December 2021 we moved into our new home, a 1950's ex council house which had seen better days! With no heating (just one coal fire to keep us warm), its original 'kitchen' and bathroom (both in very poor repair), 1970's blue patterned carpet in the hall and stairs, 1960's wallpaper and its very own coal bunker we knew we had our work cut out but we wanted a renovation project and we saw the potential. Our home is set in a large corner garden plot surrounded by fields and amazing views with plenty of room to extend. We knew we could create the home we wanted for our growing family.

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We donned our thermals, jumpers and wooly hats through the start of 2022, picked up our power tools and set to on Phase 1 of our project - making the house liveable in the short-term for us, our two kids and the dog! We stripped wallpaper, white washed walls, knocked down a couple of walls, learnt to lay carpet off-cuts, installed a £300 second hand kitchen, installed a bathroom, tiled, put down laminate flooring and even had a go at plastering.  After 6 months of hard work we were into the summer, had swapped our thermals for shorts and t-shirts, with Phase 1 complete at minimal cost and in as a sustainable way as possible using second hand or surplus materials, off-cuts and repurposed and recycled items.

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PHASE 2 ..... EXTEND & RENOVATE

After enjoying some down time during the summer of 2022, we then turned our attention to the main event - extending the house and fully moderising and renovating the existing property. After seeing a female electrician working in Ipswich and drawing on our own experiences of under representation of women in construction (both in our own careers and in getting trades to do work for us previously), we had a conversation about whether it might be possible to do our extension using only women. We agreed how amazing and inspirational that would be if we could make it happen and so our All Female Design and Build Project was born.

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We realised our small building project could be the perfect vehicle to showcase the talented women that are currently working in all fields of the built environment and construction industry, as we would be following the full design and build process, from conceptual design to final build. When there is such a low percentage of women working in the industry attempting this on a large scale project where you need a larger team would be problematic. On our smaller project though we thought that it may be possible to achieve and if we couldn't then it would give us an insight into why the gender balance is still the way it is in 2024 and allow us to raise awareness based on real life experience.