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Danehill, The Extension, Sauna & Workshops

The story of 50+ years living in this house

When I bought Danehill in 1967 it had not changed since it was built in 1934. It still had the original gas lighting pipes to every room and an ancient back boiler hot water system with enormous pipes, not even an immersion heater in the steel hot tank.

It had a rudimentary electric supply with lights in all rooms and just 2 power points, one in the kitchen and one in the living room.

The major problem was a brick (or block) wall had been built on the edge of an unsupported upstairs floor by the stairwell that had sagged over the years giving the stairs a slope of 5 cms for one side to the other.

The steel window frames were excessively rusty and window replacement was a condition of mortgage. I chose a galvanised Crittal frame that would take the new double glazed units, and these were replaced in a few weeks.

The house was tiny with 2 small rooms and a micro kitchen downstairs and just 2 bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. There was also a large hall and landing. The main bedroom went right across the front of the house including a wardrobe/cupboard above the stairs.

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Firstly the upstairs wall had to be removed and the floor leveled. It was jacked back up and a downstairs wall built with supporting steelwork.

We then decided on an open plan downstairs to make the most of the space. This meant removing more walls that were not supporting anything.

Now was the time to remove the hideous plumbing and fit gas central heating, I got a local plumber in to help fit it. Everything else I did myself.

By the time the house was fit to live in I was working for Philips and beginning to think it was time I started out on my own. Matt Skipp was  trying to get a 'lip sync' 8mm sound system to sell in his shop. I helped him develop it and made the equipment. I needed somewhere to work. My parents had a beach hut on Ferring beach that the Council wanted to revamp with smaller huts. I went down with a friend and his lorry and brought it back and set it up in the garden 1973. I insulated and lined it, fitted a power line and I was ready.

I worked in it for several years until the old garage workshop was partly rebuilt with insulation and heating.  The electronics moved into it, the old garage part became the mechanical workshop.

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Having got the house fit to live in and a rudimentary workshop, the next thing was to build the sauna. I applied for planning permission to knock down the greenhouse and rebuild the utility room to have a flat roof and extend it to include a sauna. I designed it all myself and it took just over a  year to build in odd moments. In those days I was with Philips, doing a lot of travelling with not much time to myself. A old boy, George (Redpole) Gibbs who I met in our local, The Prince Albert said his son Reg would be pleased to help me with the brickwork. He was a super bricklayer and I did everything else. Dug the foundations, mixed all the 'pug' and humped everything.

The Finnish Embassy put me in touch with a supplier of the special heater, amazingly from a local shop in Reigate. The heater cost as much as the whole building including Reg's share.

I had bought the timber for the sauna 9 monthe earlier and it had been stored in the garage so it had become perfectly seasoned. Even now, nearly 50 years later it is still near perfect. 

House Extension 1980-83

Now, with the boys growing up, it was time to take on the job of extending the house as we only had 3 bedrooms (the old bathroom had become a little bedroom.)

The obvious thing was to have a new large garage on the side with an extended living room behind and a couple more bedrooms above. The first plans I designed were rejected as our neighbor on that side complained of loss of light to his kitchen.

I amended the design with a sloping roof that cut a little of the room height on his house side and they were passed first time.

Reg agreed to do the bricklaying and as usual I did everything else. One feature I really wanted was not to have a beam going across the living room ceiling holding up the wall above it. Brother Colin, a civil engineer, designed a steel beam to go above the bedroom ceiling in the loft space to hold up the roof and the whole wall below it was to be removed. This allowed the living room ceiling to be perfectly flat from end to end. Colin designed and made more steel work to hold the new roof so in fact the whole new upstairs extension including the old second bedroom were one big room.

The old second bedroom was partitioned off with a timber studding wall that was suspended from the new loft beam, and the new bedroom was divided in two with a built in double wardrobe, one for each bedroom.

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It took me 3 full years to build. I remember having to lift over 20 sheets of 8 x 4 plasterboard upstairs from the garage below, an arduous task which I managed on my own, Likewise all the flooring and roofing timbers had to be lifted up.

Sadly when it was all done I ended up with a double hernia, but that is another story.

When it was finished and decorated and the boys had moved in to their new bedrooms was the time to fit out the garage as the mechanical workshop.

This freed up the old garage which was fitted out as a darkroom as I wanted to do more photography. 

NCR FORMSLIDES

At this time, 1983, my friend Jon who was with NCR running the microfiche division, approached me with a problem they had. Their microfiche system needed exacting images of customer's forms to be made on glass plates with incredible accuracy. A linear and positional accuracy of 50 microns was needed. See 'NCR'  for how it was done.

The darkroom was set up for this work and an Eskafot superb computer controlled camera was set up for the artwork  and I designed and made a special camera / projector for the glass plates.

NCR formslide work kept me busy for the next 8 years until they were swallowed up by the AT&T empire, which brought an abrupt end to the business in 1991.

Museum work had continued and more workshop space was needed. In 1988 the beach hut was removed and the old workshop extended by 12 feet, as I had big museum jobs on, notably  the Taiwan Natural History Museum exhibits for Sir James Gardner through Freeborns.

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This set up remained as a workable system until 2002 when I got thoroughly fed up with the damp and generally mucky conditions, working in a leaking  building that had been bodged together after WW2.  I could think of no other way than to knock it all down and start again. I was 63 now and fancied somewhere cosier and more open to play around in for the next few years

So I applied for planning permission to knock it down and then had to apply for permission to replace it with a building the same size, (the largest permissible so near to the existing house).

I decided on a precast concrete garage that had a proper pitched roof and no low level rafters

Now I was beyond heavy work so I got our friendly builders to do all the hard work. This comprised knocking it all down, clearing the site and building a base for the new garage. They also removed the hedge and replace it with a fence, strip up the old patio and relay it. We had already built a conservatory a few years before.

Plus digging a huge soak away for the rain water from the garage and the new patio.

Conservatory 1998

We decided to get a conservatory.  I bought it from B&Q as a kit. Friendly builders did the low walls to fit it on and I erected it and laid the floor. It took most of the summer to complete.

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Summerhouse 2003

There was an odd corner of useless ground beside the patio. I decided to have a go at a little 'folly'. It was nearly triangular shaped plot which the builders concreted over as a base.  I wanted to build a covered area to sit and relax, in the open air but didn't want a 'box like' shed. I didn't have any plans, just added bits and stood back and looked at the result. It took a couple of weeks to build and was a lot of fun. There are almost no right angles in it.

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