Original subtitles

Looking out at Central London from here,

it's hard to understand how you could possibly add to it.

Where can you build in amongst all of that, eh?

But there are some really gutsy individuals out there

in the cracks and the crevices,

looking for plots of land to build a home on.

No matter how small those plots are.

London is one of the world's greatest cities

that has evolved over millennia.

It's an organism which feeds, moves,

and houses a growing population of nearly 9,000,000 people.

The city's growth springs from the energy,

the creativity of those that live here -

like 26-year-old design engineer Joe Stuart.

I've always been fascinated by making things,

and seeing how things work.

If you can make something better or design it better, then why not?

I've had lots of ideas, but there's always been a...

either a funding constraint or a priority constraint.

What's great is that this

is really the first opportunity where the funding's in place,

the timescale's in place, and it's about just going ahead and doing it.

Joe's now challenged himself to design a new home,

a house for himself and his Swedish girlfriend, Lina Nilsson.

It's a chance to own the property in a housing market

that many believe is out of control.

You don't have to pay rent to someone else, you can

build something that's not too expensive, and actually find a place

or make a place that's beautiful, is good quality, and is yours.

Joe and Lina know both work full-time, and spend close

to £20,000 a year on renting a small flat in west London.

The cost of doing the build,

although there is the time involved in doing it, is still going

to be much cheaper than buying the equivalent property.

It's a big thing were going to do together. Yeah.

Building a home together where we can live. Yeah.

It's going to be exciting.

After a painstaking search, Joel and Lina scraped

enough money together to buy an old workshop in east London.

Just three miles from the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf,

this is an area rife for regeneration.

But their plot is tiny.

That's it, is it? Just the length of those three fencing panels?

Yeah. Oh, wow.

And a little bit extra at the moment, while we're doing the works.

Yeah. It's a whole nine and a half metres by four metres.

Nine and a half by four? Yeah. That's...

small. What was this place?

It looks like there was a building here?

Yeah, originally it was a coffin workshop.

We're digging the whole plot down to about tjhree and a half metres.

I've designed it so it's on half floors.

You've designed it? I designed it.

We've got what's officially the smallest two-bedroomed house

possible in London.

Based on the new London regulations. The design guide?

Yes.

Small does not mean easy,

and Joe and Lina have never attempted anything like this before.

What do your mates say about this project?

They say we're crazy sometimes,

but I've always dreamt about building my own house.

I love creating things. I mean, in your culture it's normal.

Yeah, it is. But I don't have the skills,

but luckily enough, I have Joe. I pretend to have the skills.

You're so passionate about it.

You do so much research, which also means it takes a little longer,

just to make sure that it's going to work.

So how do you fit a two-bedroom house on such a tiny footprint?

To start, Joe's putting a third of it underground.

He wants a three metre deep basement,

the exact size of the site, poured in reinforced waterproof concrete.

That'll require high levels of engineering accuracy.

Joe's designed his own insulated brackets,

which will support two floating concrete floors.

The top two thirds of the building will be made from structural

insulated timber panels, made off-site,

and then precisely assembled in east London.

The structure will then get even more insulation on the outside,

before a covering of cedar cladding.

Inside, this highly engineered,

and insulated building is a very smart layout.

Basement storage, a workshop, two bedrooms, two bathrooms,

a study, and a snug, which leads up to the full-length kitchen

living room are squeezed onto three floors and three half floors.

The top floor will be a single kitchen living room crowned

with a full width slanted window to wash this space in light,

and provide access to a small roof terrace.

This house might turn out to be cramped and compromised -

or it might just be a new exciting model for building on tight

small spaces in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

So how much is it going to cost, then? To build.

About 160,000.

Oh, including your basement? Including the basement.

That's pretty good.

You would do a lot of the work yourself as well,

that brings down the price.

Yeah, so it could be less than that, it could be more.

OK, I'm not holding you to it. An arbituary figure. It's all right.

Yeah. And how much was the site itself?

It was 73.

Which anywhere is a bargain.

It certainly didn't feel like that when I bought it, though.

Definitely. It was the biggest risk.

A lot of money for not a lot of space. Yeah, wow.

Joe's giving himself just one year to finish this house,

and is investing £50,000 -

every penny he has.

The majority of the funding will come from his parents,

who have such faith in their son they've remortgaged

the family home in the Midlands.

We've been quite happy to help Joel out,

because it's easier for us to sport him in lending in the money -

rather than him getting a building loan.

We trust Joseph to commit to something he knows he can complete.

It'll be quite an achievement.

Yeah.

Joe has designed this building.

He's done all the calculations.

He's project managing. He's the main contractor.

He's the client.

He's everything. And he's going to be labouring,

and working on the site as well.

Now, that is in most circumstances is a bit of a recipe

for some form of minor disaster.

But here...

I'm not sure.

I mean, never underestimate the energy, the dynamism of youth.

It's early autumn, and at last, this shoe box design

on a shoestring budget can take its first steps.

When I was discussing this with my engineer,

you were saying the most difficult part of the build,

of the whole house, was the basement.

The most difficult part of the basement was doing the excavation.

Basement construction in London will always present risks.

The risks of damage to neighbouring properties,

the uncertainty of what lies beneath the surface.

Joe has entrusted his excavation to Phil Sacre - a basement expert.

This is a bit of a new challenge to put a basement the size of a postage

stamp on a piece of land the size of a postage stamp.

We've normally got a lot more space.

With excavation,

there are a standard methods that are pretty common practise.

Just have a mile from Joe's site, these methods are fully understood.

Crossrail is one of Europe's largest holes.

So this is not how to dig a big hole in the ground.

Get your mechanical digger and just start taking big chunks of it out,

cos if you do, the deeper you go,

the more likely it is to collapse in on itself.

There you go.

So what people do, ordinarily, is to take a steel ring.

In this case, it's a cake tin.

But, in the real world, it's lots of sheets of steel interconnected

locked together and vibrated into the ground.

It's then a fairly straightforward matter of then digging out

the ground within that ring.

Then build your concrete wall inside this,

and if you're really clever,

you can take your shuttering and maybe even remove it.

Ta-da!

But only if you've formed your concrete walls first.

Because Joe's site is so small,

Joe and Phil are taking the unusual step of not using steel shuttering.

The site is so tight,

to get the minimum accommodation required in London, the client

could not lose anything to temporary supporting of the basement hole.

Phil's worried every inch the site will need to be excavated to

reach the full 83 square metres of living space required by planning.

The normal form of constructing a basement would have prevented the

whole project from going ahead.

The hope is that the dry earth walls will support themselves.

The soil has been sent away for analysis and we are told

will be stable for long enough, but the challenge is going to

be that we keep it stable throughout the duration of the build.

It can be dangerous. It's one of those jobs you don't want to be

hanging around, and you get it done before the weather comes,

because that's when the sides can cave in.

As the dig to the full depth, Phil discovers that three metres of

dry earth is sitting on a layer of wet silt and clay.

We've dug slightly into clay, that means we've effectively dug a pond.

This could well destabilise the dry earth above.

Two weeks into this risky excavation,

the exposed walls begin to weaken.

Yeah, if you dig a bit there!

I think we'll leave it like that, thanks!

By early November, the excavation is put under more pressure.

This time by the weather.

Phil needs to crack on.

Steel mesh and wooden formwork are hastily put up,

so the concrete walls can be poured.

THUNDER RUMBLES

By the next morning, the earth slips have stopped,

but now Phil has a new problem.

The wooden formwork holding the concrete has been moved.

Unfortunately, although I'd propped the stop ends,

I hadn't propped the roof from moving away.

So what's left is out of plum

by 250mm over two metres.

That is a lot.

This is a very wonky wall that needs to be fixed.

Six weeks since work began,

Joe and Lina are paying a visit to side with Joe's parents.

Just watch where you put your feet.

It's clear there are more problems with the walls.

There's a gap here, because this has gone out in the middle here.

Looks like it's bowed behind.

It's not quite uniform and straight and...

Yeah.

So the contracter you've got for digging this hole,

how's he performing for you?

Erm...

I wasn't expecting that.

Somehow, I can't see it being done in two weeks.

I'm worried that stuff is not going to plan, but I trust Joe.

It will be fine.

Joe wanted this project to be a learning experience.

It's just taught him his first painful lesson.

Urgh!

Joe and Lina have been stuck into their east London project

for two months now.

Which has meant two months of headaches with their basement.

The excavation didn't go as we were led to expect it to go.

We were told the sides would stand up and they didn't.

And from then on it was a firefight.

Joe and his basement contract, Phil, have now parted company.

Oh, I was definitely disappointed that I didn't finish Joe's basement.

So, Er...

My word. I have seen some holes in the ground but this is...

This is spectacularly shambolic, isn't it? Yes. And not save.

Can we go down? Yeah. This is hard hat territory, isn't it?

This is a bit soft and pliable, this concrete.

This is where they broke it back because it was so bad.

Another couple of hundred mil... Leaning right in.

Right to this line here. And that bow over there that wall, the Hoover Dam over there.

You can live with that? I think, if...

My preference would be to start again but realism.

To rip it all out? Yeah, the realism is you can't.

When all this is covered up, you will have forgotten about it,

eventually. The X-ray will disappear. You will forget.

Yeah, it can be made good.

With so many issues to fix, and a third of the basement still

to dig, finding a new contractor will take time and money.

What are the financial consequences of this? I have paid in stages.

Which is the upsetting side of things.

Because the stages haven't been completed to spec.

So, I have lost 30 grand on this. So...

This pregnant wall here. Who would want that in their house?

All that can be made good, it can be sorted

and in the end it will be super-strong and enormously heavy

and well built but it will have just cost them a lot of angst and money.

And I feel for them.

Joe and Lina search for a new contractor over a long winter.

I can feel that Joel is feeling the pressure. He has been very stressed.

For me, it is a bit worrying too. I feel a bit helpless.

It takes three months of searching.

But in the early New Year, this project has new energy.

The entire site is different.

Just the way everything is managed,

there are eight people in there working.

It is going to be plum, a correctly built basement now rather

than something that was going to be difficult to work with.

It is a nice thing to be involved with.

Joe is a nice guy to work for, especially

when someone is building their own home.

This is his baby and he wants it to be right.

Joe is spending over ?80,000 on this basement

but now with the problems fixed it will be the right shape and size.

What they will do is lift this framework up now they have this

to brace against and finish it out to the top by the middle of next week.

A plastic sheet acts as a drip tray and extra waterproof barrier.

Through this, Joe will fix his two basement floors using

insulated brackets that he has designed with a structural engineer.

So these are the brackets we will be fitting those this coming week

so it is interesting times, no-one has seen these be used before.

In five weeks, Joe's muddy hole has been transformed.

Complete with two suspended floors.

Joe's ingenious little brackets will allow him

to fit a layer of insulation between the wall

and the concrete floor preserving as much heat as possible inside.

I have been doing this for about 25 years

and I have never seen anything like this.

Normally this concrete slab would be connected into that wall

so what they have got here is five tonnes of concrete all

sitting on these plates that balance on these little brackets.

Pretty amazing.

I don't know what it's going to be like when you have the house-warming

party inside, everybody jumping up and down at the same time.

After nine months of struggle, Joe has his engineered basement.

The rest of this project should be a much simpler prospect

and most of the work has all ready been done.

In Scotland.

Welcome to the world of structurally insulated panels.

Otherwise known as SIPS.

Everything is done in the factory, everything is thought out before.

Everything is cut to the right sizes

and you when you come to site, it is just a case of putting it all together.

It is building by numbers almost.

Insulation foam is sandwiched between sheets of sterling board

and the panels precisely cut and profiled to Joe's drawings.

I don't know about you

but I am really looking forward to seeing this. Yeah, yeah.

I have spent 20 years waiting to see a ready-made house in a factory.

I hope it lives up to expectations then!

Look at that.

Whoa. This must lift your spirits, doesn't it?

After all those months of concrete and mud.

You must be relieved to see this. Yeah.

Yeah, it is a lot cleaner and crisper and straighter.

Bigger, as well.

We are not just here to admire Joe's house.

We are also here to learn how to build it.

F1 11 and F1 12 we are going to fit them today.

Joe wants to manage the assembly of the SIPS himself.

Take the top here, locate it onto the soil plate like that.

A decision could save him over ?10,000.

And you and I lift up, Joe.

Having no experience of using these panels before...

You tilt it back on the head a wee bit. I will pull it in here.

This is an important lesson from the experts. OK, that is us.

And then you drop it in like that. It is in. Bingo.

So, this house is growing in an eruption of foam

and chipboard out of the plains of Persia.

The thing is it still has to come its windows, cladding

internal installation, plasterboard, first fix, second fix, plumbing.

The lot, yeah. And it is in the wrong place.

It is 444 miles in the wrong place.

With the SIPS panels set for delivery,

Joe and Lina make some domestic changes east London.

They have moved closer to site and halved their rent,

a good move financially because Joe has taken another important step.

In order to focus on the house,

I have left work so it means I can be 100% house as it were.

It is all on me now.

Time to shine!

He has employed a cheap makeshift team of mates to help

assemble the SIPS.

This is a house on the back of a lorry.

Yeah, excuse me, ladies.

Sorry, we're just coming around here.

Five tonnes and ?27,000 worth of SIP panels have journeyed

south from Scotland.

Easy, peasy!

To be greeted by a beefy tele-handler. Sorry, mate.

You're going that way, aren't you? Swing it out if you want.

Whoa! Whoa!

What you doing? That's all right.

Stop!

Tip it back. It is damaged the corner. That is the only one.

That's all right. We can fix it. It's fine.

The team now proceed with a little more caution.

To me a bit more, Jim.

Just stop.

To me.

And up. Whoa. Stand up.

That is one way of doing it. Everyone save? I'm learning.

I'm learning. Just don't do a third one!

Watch yourself on the steels.

Unpacking done.

It is like a scene from Carry On Camping or something!

It's summer in the city.

Almost a year into his East London project,

for the first time Joe is properly running his site.

Hopefully, a week from now everything that's here

will be in here.

Relying on what he learnt at the factory in Scotland,

Joe takes lead in piecing together his SIPs.

So, glue on this inside edge here and all of these inside edges.

Mind you, it seems to me experience isn't always a prerequisite

for working with the system.

Give it a push to the bottom.

He gave himself a week,

and eight days later he's fixing the roof,

admiring his new view.

Now we're at the top of the house, you can see most of London, really.

That's not a bad view...that way!

With the full structure up, it's possible to see if such

a small footprint can really deliver a comfortable, usable space.

In through the front door into the lobby of the building.

Downstairs to the semi-basement.

Not a big space, but big enough for a double bedroom

and down another layer to Joe's man cave.

This remarkably now looks absolutely plumb and true.

Up, then, to the...first floor.

And tucked around here, Lina's office.

Now, up to the snug.

It looks very snug at the moment because it's quite dark.

But there is over there, look, an enormous window.

Up the metal staircase to the top floor

which is the, sort of,

sofa-eating-cooking living area, really -

one big space.

And, again, it looks a little dark at the moment.

That's because the plastic is covering this opening,

which is going to be one huge skylight.

All of this fitting onto this tiny, tiny footprint.

This is, sort of... This is the miniature house

which keeps on giving.

You've given up your job, you've committed yourself thoroughly

to project, you've moved house. Yeah.

You're the boss. Or are you the boss? It says you're the boss.

She's still the boss.

I'm just encouraging you to follow your dreams.

As soon as Joe decided to leave his job,

he was so much happier just because this is what he dreams about.

So you're keeping body and soul together, presumably?

I mean, you're earning money still.

Yeah, but.. At the moment we're all right,

but I'm going to have to ask Lina to support me

if it takes longer than I expect.

So we're hoping that Christmas, or just after Christmas,

that we can be moving in and maybe doing the finishing touches.

It depends how many changes we make.

Just make sure he doesn't change his mind too often, would you? No.

Simplicity will be key if Joe and Lina

are to finish this building before the New Year.

But by the end of the summer,

Joe hasn't been able to resist tinkering with his design.

That is the thickness of the wall that you bought from Scotland.

I mean, that's a SIPs wall.

On top of that you just stick your roof

and then you can skin the outside and skin the inside.

What you've done is you've stuck a four inch timber on the outside

and another one, a three inch one, on the inside. Yep.

In order to do what?

That's to get to the thermal barriers

we need to be very highly efficient.

So you end up with a wall of conventional thickness,

which is completely insulation.

It's not just the walls, Joe's also upgraded his windows,

which are super thick and triple-glazed.

This new drive for high performance will have big

implications for this tiny house and its tiny budget.

Eric here has ordered his pie with mash and liquor,

which is correct, it's traditional.

It's understood in these parts of the world.

I, on the other hand, of course

have gone for chips which is far more controversial.

It's a bit like Joe's project because he started out with

a scheme which was really straightforward -

a simple home for him and Lina.

It was small and affordable.

What he's got is a building that's now being driven by another agenda.

Anything to do with this house,

if you can do it better, then why not?

I think if you're not pushing the boundaries and trying new things,

then where are you going to get the innovation

within the building industry and within design in general?

By early autumn, Joe's design skills are tested as he grapples with

the engineering of the very big roof window for the top of the house.

Not happy with it being triple-glazed,

Joe wants it quadruple-glazed, which will make remarkably heavy,

maybe even difficult to open for access up onto the roof.

So, if we were to say we will try and reproduce this detail...

..like so, I don't think that will be necessary.

A site meeting with a glazing supplier might give Joe

his window on paper but it won't be delivered until December.

This new resolve for high performance has put an end

to a Christmas deadline.

As much as I'd love to have been in before Christmas, I've got to

be realistic with the circumstances. They changed, I have to adapt.

It's not how I would run a project going forward, no,

but that's because I've learnt from this project

and because I know more now than I knew yesterday.

Joe's new ambition isn't just costing time,

it's costing money, too.

With ?30,000 left of their 160 grand budget,

he has to pull in favours wherever he can.

This is George. George is my neighbour who very kindly

is letting me have power to the site

so we can crack on and light during the winter.

Exactly, so you can finish it!

A long wait for a complicated roof window means Joe can focus on

over-complicating other aspects of this tiny house,

like the cladding.

Hours and hours spent on the computer boils down to

a small piece of cardboard with some numbers on it.

With the help of two friends, Joe's revised his cladding design.

Once made of uniformed pieces,

Joe now wants a pattern made up of varying widths and lengths.

With this there's more of a process

but it's sort of celebrating the joint rather than trying to hide it.

A job that could have taken a week, will now take four.

And for most of that, Joe works alone.

I don't have a very lavish life.

I get up, I come here, I work, I go home, I sleep.

By early November, winter begins to bite.

Working 15 hour days, Joe's learning that ambition has a cost.

Lina's support has never been more important.

How was your day?

I'm tired and hungry.

What did you do today?

I put some more cladding up.

It sounds like not a lot, but, yeah, it was busy.

He's very passionate about this project.

I think he's getting a bit frustrated

when stuff is taking a bit longer than he wants it to.

Every little task takes usually double or triple the time.

After a gruelling 14 months since work began,

at long last this building gives Joe his first glimpse of a finish.

It feels great now the cladding's on.

95% of the nails I've hammered home myself.

So, it feels like quite a personal accomplishment, I think, at the end.

Two weeks before Christmas, and the roof window Joe's been

dreaming of for three months arrives on site.

That's the opening section...

..coming up.

This glass is about twice as good as all the other

glass I've got in the house.

And all the other glass is about twice as good

as the glass in most people's houses.

So, this is the magic glass.

200 kilos of the latest eco-glazing technology

is positioned with millimetre precision.

Just keep coming down.

Now it means that the whole house is going to be, like, insulated

and airtight because all the windows are in.

Six months behind schedule and now all work has ground to a halt.

It's nice to just design for design

but it's the real world and, yeah, money is unfortunately a drag

on things and you've got to find it finish.

I've probably depleted pretty much the entire original budget

to get where we are now.

But I'll find a solution and I've just got to be confident in that.

To keep things moving, Joe turns to Lina for support.

The project starts out as a simple idea,

you two building a home

that's relatively affordable in East London.

It's grown into something that's far more adventurous.

You've put some money in as well? Yep.

So how much is that now? ?25,000.

OK, so you've got an investment in the project, a stake.

Everything is taking much longer than we thought.

I try to push stuff to go faster but it's difficult

because I love him and I can see it's really painful for him

to compromise on certain things. So...

You have needs too, though. Yeah, definitely.

But that will have to wait till the house has done.

You're putting all that on hold, are you?

Despite Lina's cash injection,

by April this house is still a long way from finished.

You were meant to be living here at Christmas.

Times change. How are you? Not bad. Yourself?

Yeah, I mean, look, it's fabulous from the outside.

Beautiful. Thank you. But it's not finished.

What have you been doing?

It's a little bit harder, I think, than I thought

just working a bit on your own sometimes.

So, yeah, things take a bit longer.

"It's a bit harder than I thought". Yeah.

Inside, this house is obviously not complete.

The fundamentals are all missing -

electrics, plaster, stairs.

I think there's no excuse for falling short and if you know

there's a better solution, what do you have to do to get there?

But I don't want to fall at the last hurdle, if you know what I mean?

Yeah, that isn't the problem.

The problem is that you keep making new hurdles for yourself.

Yeah, there's been some compromises in time

and where we're living and everything.

I think the house that I was planning to build for 160

is not the house that I've built here.

Two years ago, Joe hadn't planned to install the latest high-pressure

misting sprinklers or a cutting edge low energy heating

and hot water system.

Throughout the summer progress is slow,

but still Joe's commitment is steadfast.

Part of the frustration is I can see what this can all become if it's

all done exactly as I want it,

and I think it's about staying true to that.

The real question is will Joe's vision for this house

ever become reality?

It's been just over two years since I first met Joe and Lina

and heard about their plans for a tiny two-bedroom house

with a big pioneering spirit.

Now I want a different perspective

on one of East London's smallest buildings.

Oh.

Will you look at that?

What a skyline.

This part of London in the East End, 200 years ago, it was just fields.

It grew, effectively, as housing to support the docks as they grew,

and then it was an area that became heavily bombed

during the Second World War

to the extent that there are big holes

that have since been plugged with social housing programmes

of the 20th century.

And in amongst all of that,

the occasional little shining example of something new,

of regeneration.

There's Joe's house.

This is all very tidy.

And neat.

And so is this house.

Very tidy, very polished.

Very nicely detailed.

It may be small, but this building packs some punch.

The contrast of sleek cedar against Victorian brick

is genuinely exciting.

This is young, trendy, sustainable housing,

what you might call box-fresh.

Hey, Joe.

How are you doing?

Yeah, I'm very well. Good to see you again.

I'm all the better for seeing you and this place.

Hi, Lina. Hi. Nice to see you. And you.

Look at this.

I just hadn't expected it to be so precisely polished in the way it is.

All of this new tarmac,

who paid for this?

this was a collection of, you know, the landlords... And you.

..and homeowners and myself here. Everyone.

And then who paid for the wall then?

So, that was done with the council. So all these guys benefit.

Exactly, yeah.

I think it would have been quite rude to have just done my place

and not really look at the residents and surrounding area.

It feels safer to come in here and we all get to know each other now,

we talk to each other, so good community.

Well, regeneration always starts with individuals. Yeah. Yeah.

So, well done. Nice job. Thank you.

From the outside, it's actually shrunk

cos it had scaffolding on it for so long.

It's shrunk back to its correct perimeter, hasn't it?

Yeah, it was almost on the same land again borrowed.

I really want to know how big it is on the inside.

Come and have a look, then. Come on.

Or small for that matter. THEY LAUGH

Come on in.

What a light building.

White walls, open staircases and natural light

make this building seem to expand as soon as you cross the threshold.

No longer a drawing or a building site,

Joe and Lina have made a real house.

It's funny, every time I've stood on one of these mezzanines,

I kept thinking to myself, "Surely this isn't big enough to live on,"

and yet, actually, we are in a really generous-sized hallway.

And your staircase, it's very minimal. Do you like it? I do.

It's very white too.

It's also got holes in it to let the light through.

The open, flowing interior fools you into thinking

this building is much bigger than it really is.

An illusion that continues upstairs in Lina's office.

That is very clever.

The area that's defined is about five feet by four feet,

it's titchy, but it's great.

There's plenty of space, yeah.

It's almost suggesting more space than there is.

And ceilings that you can't touch.

The master bedroom is also tall, full-width

and just big enough to be civilised

thanks entirely to the way Joe's designed the storage.

That's a key thing, isn't it? Yeah.

Make your fitted furniture full-height for storage... Yeah.

..but also, then, make it a wall.

For all the complications Joe has brought to this building,

the finished space is elegant, simple and even generous.

As though it could have been slotted together

with a rubber mallet and an Allen key in just a few days.

I just love the choice of spaces, and choice of views, really.

Do you know what? It is - it's not uncomfortably warm,

it is just really, really pleasant this building. It's not...

It keeps the heat in it, doesn't it?

Yes, I mean, the maximum heat demand, I think, in the winter,

is about 650 watts which is almost nothing.

That's very... Yeah, exactly, very, very low and super insulated. Yeah.

Wow.

That is one complicated view, isn't it?

As you come up the building, the views get less constricted

and it sort of takes you somewhere else, you know?

Yeah, the most, I think, dramatic view is probably the one on the next floor.

Oh, yeah, yeah, from the sky. The skylight, yeah.

But meantime, there's a room which is remarkable.

Great, isn't it? Really generous kitchen.

This is the point in the house,

the only point where you get to sort of really see the full width,

almost the full length of the place. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's not subdivided.

What's interesting is that as you come up,

the spaces get more interesting.

They get bigger, each one gets bigger.

That is bigger than the two rooms on the previous landing. Yeah.

And, at the same time, the windows get larger,

they take in more sky

until you end up with this view,

which is like tiny house, view to infinity.

The whole idea was that it was a crescendo to this space.

That's one of the beauties of this house,

is that it's all bespoke.

It means it's everything we want, really.

Wow.

This small house has two bathrooms - one off the hall

and a wet room in the basement,

the basement that was such a challenge.

Down here, hides the subterranean spare bedroom,

and in the depths...

The hallowed ground of the workshop.

This is a place with potential, creative potential. Exactly.

Are you past the horror?

I've moved positively forward from it.

It was horrible at the time.

Yeah, you can dwell on it or you can build the rest of the house.

Both inside and out,

Joe's fastidious eye for detail

and uncompromising attitude to quality is in evidence.

There's no hint this is the work of someone learning on the job.

The impact of this house will not only make itself felt

on the local community,

but also undoubtedly on the future of the young man that built it.

You started out with kind of a whole different agenda here.

It was about making yourself a simple house

that you could both enjoy and live in.

You thought you'd carry on working

and who knows where the future would lead you.

You gave up your job, you became entirely focused on this project,

you altered what it was meant to be.

It's all been reactive,

so it has been designing it as we go along

rather than having this predefined design.

There's also, though, the element of overcompensation.

Having not got the groundworks where you wanted them to be,

with the rest of the project it seemed to me

you really wanted to, kind of, super perform.

This is a project where I've compensated for the issues

and also then been rather creative

in going, "Well, how do I find what I want?"

And I think it had to be in this sort of detailed and sort of long-winded approach.

So, yeah, it's been tiring at times,

but every time I look at it and try think, "Was it worth it or was it not?"

It's a resounding "Yes, it was worth it."

Joe was always saying this is about him learning how to build a house,

and there's more layers to it and there's more things to do

and you feel like the list is just becoming longer and longer,

but we managed to get here in the end,

we managed to finish everything.

Lina, you're the partner in this,

but you're also the investor,

you're the backer to an extent. Yeah.

As are your parents.

Do you feel that you have supported an indulgence?

Joe has worked so hard on the house.

It hasn't felt like it's an indulgence.

I sometimes turn around and say to him,

"You don't have to do this if you don't want to.

"We can find another solution," but he wants to.

Do you feel an equal sense of ownership?

LINA AND JOE LAUGH

I think because Joe has put 90, 95% into the house,

I will say it's Joe's house but it's our home.

How much did it cost in the end?

We probably...

It's probably about 250 all in.

As opposed to 160, which is 90,000 over which is...

Well... Come on, yeah, it is.

I was expecting I was a bit low,

but I wasn't expecting to stretch quite so far.

This way of building isn't the most affordable way of doing it,

but for what we've got here, could we afford to buy it?

Absolutely not.

It's been a longer journey than we both expected,

but I think it now gives us a bit of a framework

to look at what we want to do.

With this house we managed to create a dream together... Yeah.

I think it's galvanised our relationship.

It's really sort of added another layer. Yeah.

And, yeah, I'd do it again with her if she wanted to.

Would you?

If I can stay here whilst you're building the other house.

You know, we should stop measuring houses by

the number of bedrooms and bathrooms they've got

and measure, instead, their energy.

By which I mean the human energy that goes into making them.

Cos this place, you see, is only the powerful little space capsule that it is

thanks to all the genius and the design ideas

and the passion and the commitment

and the time spent building it by Joe and Lina,

by their collaborators, their friends.

And now this place is poised to give it all back,

to change Joe and Lina's lives,

to improve where it is,

to actually, perhaps, make a contribution

to the wider regeneration of this part of London.

What an extraordinary potential it has.

Powerful, big ideas can come in small packages.

A friend came round and said, oh, he's building a cathedral

cos cathedrals take more than one generation to build

and I thought, "Oh, nice."

HE LAUGHS

Ed is very much at the hilt of the house

and mine is very much more the land and the animals.

I just can't resist experimenting with pretty well everything,

that's sort of my nature.

Do you think that Ed is going to deliver? Yes.

Absolutely. You say that very confidently. I am very confident.

Wow. This is spectacular.