It is generally agreed that turning one house into two homes is a social good where feasible, so my daughter and I are dividing the family home. It addresses the housing emergency in a highly practical fashion and appeases the guilt of an ageing widow content to remain in the neighbourhood that has tolerated her for 40 years, in a house filled with happy memories but now far too big and impractical for one person.
But the outlay is frightening. There will be no glass cubes or extensions, no luxury hotel-style showers or designer kitchens with the wow factor. By far the greatest amount of the scary total is being sunk into insulating an unwieldy 1950s house that comes with roof tiles poised to fly away in a gale, a seized-up oil-fired heating system and a 75-year-old Aga cooker installed when there were regiments of family and farm workers to feed several times a day.
The huge Aga, built to run on anthracite before an oil conversion in the 1970s, has long been a source of existential guilt. It remained the sole cooking source for a succession of families including this one, working off a gravity oil feed and so required no electricity. It dried generations of laundry via an overhead clothes line operated by a pulley system, had a handy warming plate that thawed out hundreds of animals, birds and humans over the decades and supplied just enough general warmth to keep the ice from settling on dodgy windows. Awestruck American visitors reckoned that Wilma Flintstone had probably cooked on something similar.
But for all its bulk and exasperating temperature volatility (heavily influenced by wind strength on the day) it rarely let us down. When I turned it off for the final time a few weeks ago and felt its soft warmth ebb out of the kitchen it was like saying goodbye to a dear eccentric old companion.
It was the right thing to do, unquestionably. But what remains of its sad, cold bulk is tons of cast iron, worthless on the resale market apparently, either whole or in pieces. Our builder – a man of few but perfectly judged words – is keeping it whole for now, holding out for someone to make an offer, if only to take it away.
It will have to be replaced of course. That means expensive new stuff, probably with built-in obsolescence: an electric oven; a cooking hob; some kind of indoor clothes-drying apparatus to supplement the outside clothes line.
As the project proceeds the scale of it becomes apparent. Sure enough in the lead up, the builder and his mate had looked a bit quizzical as I explained my intention to remain in situ with the dogs and cat. Apart from a desire to stay at home no sanely-priced pet-friendly rentals were available anyway. Within 12 hours l had fled to family members willing to tolerate an invasion for upwards of 10 weeks. And that was after a head-melting month of clearing out the house and storing the contents.
Meanwhile floors are being dug up to create trenches for new pipes. Cupboards, wiring, sockets and switches must be moved or gutted to accommodate the implausibly thick thermal padding that will line the walls. Old doors and windows are being knocked out for some form of airtight PVC replacements. To meet requirements for a retrofitting grant all windows must be replaced but apart from the unaffordable upfront expense of it, it just seemed wasteful to replace some sound old teak frames that were fitted with double glazing not long ago along with a few others that seem satisfactory to the same reputable joinery company that installed them. So they’re staying.
It seems that to benefit from the retrofitting grants available – ie to raise the entire fabric of the house to a standard that would make sense for a heat pump installation or similar – the whole 75-year-old house would have to be remade. Note that around 70 per cent of the country’s housing stock is at least 40 years old. A lottery win might do it.
Perhaps we should have attempted to do it piecemeal like Jennifer Whitmore, a Wicklow TD. She managed to live in her house while retrofitting it over a two-year period, so clearly it’s possible. She was well pleased with the outcome but she also described the process as “way too expensive”, “a bureaucratic nightmare” and “a pain in the arse” which sounds pretty accurate. If this was the experience of a member of the legislature imagine how it seems to normal people unaccustomed to big expensive projects.
It’s clear from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland’s own figures that many people – even if they manage to pull down the substantial SEAI grants for 50 per cent of the cost – are in no position to take on such work. Writing here a few weeks ago, Noel Larkin, a fellow of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland, calculated that only around 5 per cent of the SEAI’s 500,000 Ber of B2 target will be reached by the end of the year. The scheme is not working.
We should never lose sight of the prize, but a process this crucial to achieving essential carbon reduction targets shouldn’t be so damned hard.