Original subtitles

There is a sort of universal truth in self-build,

a golden piece of advice, which is that you should spend

as little time as possible building your house

in order to spend the maximum amount of time living in it, enjoying it.

Of course, some people get that the wrong way round.

They become addicted to the process.

They spend years digging and delving and constructing,

enjoying the process of putting something together,

often to the detriment

of the quality of life of their family.

You have to ask, you know,

are there any exceptional circumstances in which

that approach is somehow allowable?

And I can only think of one circumstance -

where the family's way of life, their culture, if you like,

is all about digging and delving and making and doing,

where the entire family collaborate

towards producing a masterpiece.

Ten years ago,

Ed and Rowena Waghorn embarked on one of the most ambitious

and long-running projects Grand Designs has ever undertaken.

I've been dipping in and out

of their lives and their project ever since,

in it for the long haul,

following their story all the way to its conclusion.

Back in 2007,

they'd bought an eight-acre smallholding in Herefordshire

on which Ed had already built some temporary accommodation.

They lived almost exclusively off the land,

with sheep for wool, chickens for eggs and goats for milk.

Having so much to do outside

is hugely important for the children.

The jobs have to be done.

Doesn't matter whether it's beautiful sunshine

or pouring with rain.

I think they have a really good grounding

in the things which, I suppose, Ed and I put a value on,

which is your home and feeding yourself

and what we deem to be the important things in life.

They had life savings of just £100,000

and yet they wanted to build

an extraordinary handcrafted family home on their land,

using skills Ed picked up years ago as a furniture maker.

I've always liked making things anyway, with whatever,

with all sorts of different materials, so I'm very happy

building things, so I feel fine about building a house.

From the start, it was clear that Ed and Rowena's house

was going to reflect them and every aspect of their lives.

It's quite organic in nature and very much of the ground.

We're sort of amassing materials all the time.

We have chestnut from a woodland,

we have a certain amount of stone that's on site that we can use.

Have you got a budget? Um...

In a vague sort of way.

This was unlike any other project I'd seen.

No hard-and-fast schedule and an approach best described as fluid.

It might be that we don't finish for another five years

but it's all part of life, isn't it?

Ed and Rowena's handmade house

will be tucked into the hillside.

The structural frame will be locally sourced timber

and in-filled with straw and clay.

Downstairs, family life will revolve around a rough and ready kitchen,

hand-built by Ed, of course.

This sits next to the heart of the house,

best described as a medieval hall,

heated by a great stone hearth

and lit by a cathedral-scale cruck-framed window

that'll enjoy the vast panoramas across their Herefordshire valley.

Behind the hall will sit a snug

and a small workroom for Rowena.

In the centre of this arrangement,

a sculpted timber staircase

will lead to a first-floor gallery-cum-landing.

On one side of this, Ed will build

three bedrooms for the children and a shower room...

..and on the other, two more bedrooms and a family bathroom.

Above this handcrafted building,

Ed plans a dummy thatched mansard roof.

The plan was to build with as much found material as possible -

economical as well as ecologically sound.

And it all started with timber from the local woods.

It feels really good just to be getting it from two miles away,

cutting it, sawing it and building it at home.

The children see this happening and really, for them, it's quite normal.

It's so much how we live and how our lives are.

That's it.

By exploiting his carpentry skills,

Ed knew he could save money and do most of the work himself.

A noble ambition, of course,

but the result was a glacially slow project.

How much do I get into building a lovely dry stone wall?

How much do I get on with

getting the house built so everyone can move in?

The latter. LAUGHTER

That would be my advice.

When building work began, the kids were young...

I'm having that one.

..and keen to get into their new house and their new bedrooms.

When will it be done? Oh, no time at all.

When?

You said at the end of this summer. I know.

When we're leaving home you'll be like, "The house is finished!"

Rome wasn't built in a day, and nor is anything else worth having.

But this is smaller than Rome, so...

It's smaller! ..it should be able to be made in a day.

One reason why everything took so long

was Ed's desire to recycle and re-use materials.

Ed's quite good at sort of scavenging things.

He's a great collector of things that might one day become useful.

This was helpful in stretching their modest 100-grand budget,

especially after Ed had been made redundant as an estate manager.

Progress on the project was leisurely.

One year stretched to two.

It's going to be magnificent, isn't it?

But it's not going to be done by September, is it?

Because we're in September.

Then three...and four.

So when do you suppose you'll have all these done,

ready for the...working surface?

Um... Well, um, hopefully by Christmas.

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

You say that very confidently. I am very confident.

But four years after starting, the house was still a shell

with no internal walls.

It looked as though Ed and Rowena

might never have a finished home for their family.

What's "finished"?

There's finished and there's finished.

I'm just looking for finished.

I don't... I don't need...

No, I... Ed will have little somethings, you know,

he'll have... There always will be something. Exactly.

But this project and the ideas behind it are powerful,

and I've wanted from day one to see what original delights

will spring from Ed's idiosyncratic, highly creative mind.

I think this project is so special

that I'm back to pick up their story again

and follow it to the end.

It has been some time since I was last here,

which means I've now, um, sort of forgotten where it is.

The big question, of course, is whether Ed and Rowena

have... Oh, is that it? That's it.

I missed it.

Whether Ed and Rowena have done anything.

Oh, here we are.

Hello, goats, hello, sheep.

Hello! Hello! Hello!

Hi, Kevin. Hi, how are you? Good to see you. And you.

Hello, Rowena. Hello. How are you?

Good. Very good to see you. Nice to see you've dressed up.

For the occasion!

Yes. You've done the animals, I guess, this morning.

Yeah, I've been doing a bit of work. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Good. Is the kettle on? It is.

Come on.

That's the most important question I had to ask you.

The house is still wrapped in scaffolding,

but the scale is already impressive.

Ah, yeah.

What a lovely space.

Just as I remember it. It makes for a great workshop.

Yeah, it's a great workshop!

However, that's not its purpose.

No, of course not!

I keep forgetting. Yeah.

I can see incremental progress.

Walls are beginning to emerge and floors are appearing.

The beautiful oak floor is down. Or is it chestnut again?

Chestnut. Hard to tell in this light, but it's fantastic.

I've chosen to put them just down as sawn boards.

And then we'll... And then we'll sand it afterwards.

Meanwhile, the children are growing up

and the family are still living in their "temporary home"

as Ed fashions his masterpiece.

I understand you're perfectly comfortable here

and life can go on here for as long as you need it to,

but at the same time, it would be good to be living there.

It would be. Yes. It would be great.

It's hard to explain, really,

the...the sort of dynamic within the family.

I mean, it's been happening all their lives!

So... So it's just... "Daddy's building something on the hill,

"and we're going to live in it one day."

So, money.

Any left?

Yes, a little bit left, but we're eking it out.

So are you still working full-time on the project?

Er, yes. Really, yes. So no income. Yeah.

But it's eking out surprisingly well.

To have made the money last so long is surprising.

But that's because Ed and Rowena aren't like other self-builders,

or other people, for that matter.

I mean, on most projects, there's insurance,

there's some kind of welfare unit for the builders

and there's a site toilet to hire and scaffolding and fencing,

but here, there's none of that.

They've got somewhere to live, they're all happy.

And the project actually benefits from a slower approach

because it allows Ed to solve problems as he goes along.

There is another way, isn't there, in construction? And this is it.

Let me take you back to 2013.

At this point, the Waghorn family have already

been building their house for a whopping six years.

It's of a scale, scope, design and schedule

that very few would contemplate attempting.

A friend came round and said he always describes it as,

"Oh, he's building a cathedral."

But the reason he said that

was because cathedrals take more than one generation to build.

And I thought, oh, nice.

LAUGHS

One of the most daunting jobs,

just because of its sheer scale, is the roof.

Ed has jettisoned thatch in favour of long wooden shingles.

He can make them himself, shaping each one individually

and overlaying them like tiles.

Lovely, but of course labour intensive.

To shape the planks that will fit around the dormer windows,

Ed starts by steaming them, eight at the time.

Then they get very hot and then the cells soften

and that's when I can twist them.

I did watch a YouTube video, and you get sort of Americans

in the middle of nowhere, you know,

just saying, you do this, you do that.

And it's great.

And so you can learn lots from that.

There we are. Whooph, and it's alight.

So now we just leave it for two and a half hours

and then we take it out and put it in the jig.

The jig holds eight wooden tiles.

And they stay clamped for about three days.

Ed will need 2,000 of them.

Oh, this is beautiful!

They look, from down there, like super shingles

and that's what they are - they're an inch and a half thick, mind.

I like the fact that they're staggered.

And these are made from what - is this cedar?

Yeah, Western red cedar. Western red cedar.

It's surprisingly soft, but extraordinarily durable.

You're fixing them to conventional battens on cross-battens.

It's quite tricky round the dormers.

The cedar boards are in twists, they have to be in twists,

to get round the dormers. Oh, Ed, this is beautiful!

I'm looking at a piece of finished building.

We are, almost. And if there were no scaffolding there,

I'd imagine that this was all done.

It's quite something.

You're halfway there, aren't you?

Maybe a third. Yeah, a third.

It's just a matter of motoring on and getting it done now.

Just a matter of motoring on and getting it done.

Motoring at Ed's speed, of course.

It's taken him three months to cover a third of the roof.

The floorboards are going down.

Oh, right, these are the real...

Yeah, these are floorboards. Yeah. These are the ones.

What are you insulating with? It's cork.

Oh, it's granulated cork. Yeah.

It looks like rat droppings. It's nice, though, isn't it?

It's good stuff, isn't it? Yeah.

It doesn't compact in the same way that some materials do.

And when it does, it springs back, doesn't it, cork?

Yeah, so if there's any spillage or anything in the kitchen,

it could get wet, but it can dry out again.

It can dry out. Nice.

So, in terms of insulating,

going into the building to keep you warm, you've got this stuff,

the cork underfloor, you've got this stuff, that's newspaper, isn't it?

Yes. I can tell because something's been at it there.

And you put that through a machine and blow it in. Yeah.

There's the machine. Oh, there's the machine. Have you been blowing?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We've already got quite a lot on the back wall.

On the back wall? For all the wavy edge stuff, which I love,

and it's brilliant at doing, and it's exciting to see,

I'm as excited by that back wall insulation.

Because that says to me - properly-made, airtight building

that's going to be insulated.

Everything in this house has Ed's fingerprints on it.

From idea to execution.

In every detail, from the building's technology to its construction,

this is one man's hand-made house,

exemplified by the enormous cathedral window.

It took three years for Ed and his part-time carpenter, Sylvain,

to choose the right-shaped cruck timbers and put them into place.

OK, one, two, three.

For Ed, so much of this project has been about the pleasure

of making a beautiful object,

however long it takes.

One, two, three.

Ooh!

This has taken rather a long time, making this window.

So I do believe in getting attached to the materials we're working with,

but perhaps not quite as attached as we've had to,

with this particular window.

But it is a very important window.

Oh, that was all right, wasn't it?

What impresses me most about this, Ed,

is the symmetry of the window, left to right.

And I'm guessing you've done that by splitting...

Yeah, that's one tree that grew that way

and we've just sawn it down the middle.

But what's interesting is, yeah, it grew that way,

but it sort of fits in an almost perfect parabolic shape.

It's now almost seven years

since I first met Ed and Rowena.

Inside the house,

Ed's divided the vast interior into recognisable rooms.

And upstairs, the partition walls are plastered

to make three spacious, very longed-for bedrooms for the girls.

True to form,

Ed can't resist spending weeks on the smallest of details.

This is a stand for a basin.

So the basin is upside down

and I'm building the stand...

the wrong way up.

And the stand is made of

loads of little bits of off-cut off the floorboards.

I'm building it like this in little chunks and that will taper up

and then I'll sand the whole thing off.

I probably could have bought in some sort of base for that basin as well.

But, for me, that would have been a bit boring.

Everything is hand made,

Ed made...

and nothing goes to waste.

A commendable principle that extends to every corner

of Ed and Rowena's lives here.

Ed is very much the builder and the house.

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

There's a daily routine.

There's a weekly routine.

There's a seasonal routine. And we live by it.

Choosing to live like this slows down the pace of everything,

including the project,

as Ed continues to craft every element from scratch.

It's the collar that goes around the top of the post

just before the sort of petals, as I call them.

And it just needed something to just stop before branching out.

So that's all it is, really.

It's like a little necklace, really, that just makes the head better.

Seven years since building began,

the day I had doubted would ever arrive

finally does.

The children are now teenagers,

and the family are leaving their old place and moving up the hill

to the new house and doing it their way - very, very slowly.

I said I wanted a big kitchen, a larder and a veranda.

That was it, that was my requirements.

And I've got my big kitchen and I will have a larder.

And I will have a veranda...

..when that end is done.

There's still a mountain of work for Ed to do,

but mains electricity, solar panels and water are now in place.

The house is warm and the children are getting used to the space.

I've never had my own room,

so I'm not having to share with other people.

Cos that's been quite annoying.

A door would be nice, a wall would also be nice,

I'm missing a wall on one side.

Yeah, I don't really mind.

Now the girls have rooms, they want to paint them.

They're used to making and doing things themselves,

so they're mixing the paint from raw pigment.

That's nice. Is it a bit bathroomy?

I think I should put a bit more green in. A bit more green.

Shall I show you how to cut it into the wood?

So you just drag it with the bristles pointing in towards

the... OK, I'll try. Then you can stroke out

with the weight of paint behind it.

I'll start off doing it in the middle

so there'll be too much to go on the edge. Yeah, that's right, yes.

So a bit close to that. That's exactly it.

You see how what a good line you can get? Yeah.

There's one very large wall that needs more than a coat of paint.

Yeah, that looks lovely.

As you come in through the door into the hall,

you're presented with this wall.

So it's a really important wall in an important space.

This space will be probably

the most beautiful space in the building.

It's a lime render going on. So it breathes nicely and it looks lovely.

It looks soft, it almost looks like a sort of porcelain as it goes on,

but it'll dry much lighter.

Over the next year, work progresses at the usual slow and steady pace.

But the meagre budget is running out.

And the bigger jobs, like the floor and ceiling,

can't be completed by Ed alone.

So, now we're at a point where we're not finished on the main house,

but this part that we were living in,

we need to make use of that, we need to probably have people

come and stay and have people pay us to come and stay

cos we need to just raise a bit of money

to make the main house moved on and completed.

Ed can now only spend two days a week on the new house.

For the other five, he's here,

renovating the old one with the same meticulous attention to detail.

Concealed within this wall, there's the chimney flue

and this is the vent from the bathroom.

So I'm just making a little guard to go on the end of the vent,

so that little field mice don't fall in.

This is classic Ed, spending precious time on the tiniest detail.

And now, with two projects to see through,

I'm starting to think that it's purely

the pleasure he takes in building,

not the finishing, that's driving Ed.

Ed and Rowena have now been living in their new place for two years.

I enjoy myself so much on this project.

For once, I've found myself not saying to the self-builder,

"Hurry up, get on with it, because life's about living

"in a completed house and enjoying what you've built."

Here instead, it's about something else.

It's about finding the pleasure in the making

rather than in the having.

Hello. Hello!

How are you? Good. Very good to see you both. You're cold.

Well, hello, Ed, how are you?

Good, yeah. Very good to see you.

I mean, look, it's been three years since past I came.

So the house is still unfinished, but you're here and happy, yeah?

Yeah. Using the space.

I know you've got great plans for this space, haven't you? Yeah.

We're going to have... The ceiling is going to be going in.

That's going to be a domed, vaulted ceiling, which is going to

be very beautiful. How do you work out the design?

Is it all done with paper and calculation, or is it...?

I can't imagine it's your way.

No, I'm just going to...tink it up. What? What?!

Well, I've already experimented with the idea with the chicken run.

It is basically a geodesic dome principle.

Unlike the chicken run, which is just, you know,

form follows function, at each joint, there will have to be,

like, a boss just to conceal or detail that joint.

Just like in a piece of Medieval fan tracery. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

But in a, sort of, woody more rustic way. Obviously not quite as...

Yeah, you're obviously not expecting to do heads of the saints, no. No.

No, that might take too long.

The ceiling may still be a work in progress,

but the staircase is a testament to what Ed is capable of

and why it's worth waiting for his magic touch.

Wow.

This is, em... This is spectacular.

It's unfinished, but it's spectacular.

Presumably there'll be plaster on this board, yeah?

And there might even be a handrail.

This is all beautifully knifed, this is scraped. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Drawn timber. Really exciting.

That kind of spans contemporary design,

craftsmanship, medieval design.

Everything - it just crosses all of those boundaries.

Can we go up? Yeah, let's go. Yeah?

These are very generous and beautiful. Is this oiled?

It must be. Is it? It feels very silky underfoot. Yeah.

So where are we now? These must be the girls' bedrooms. Right.

Robert's bedroom is where? He's down there. Little stairs.

You're over there? Yeah. We're in the middle.

So through the arch window. Arch window.

Great.

Of course, it doesn't matter hugely to Ed, Rowena or the kids

that doors are missing or the plaster isn't finished.

This place is such a major improvement on where

they were living, with the added luxury of space.

The electrics aren't completely in and all the switching

isn't completely where we'd want it.

The floors aren't all in and we've had lots of fun doing

decorative things with the floors.

Forgive me for asking, I can't even remember if there was a budget

for this project, whether or not there was a kind of...

We played around with it in the early days, didn't we?

It's probably still in budget.

So much of what's here isn't bought.

It is just made out of what's here... Yes, exactly.

..or what you've found or scavenged or bought in such a raw

state that it was pence, as it were.

Is that still the case?

Are you still able to get your chestnut cheap? Yeah.

Actually, this chestnut was firewood grade,

but I just selected out the bits that were useful.

Just picking out he nice bits.

So that's how it is.

The doors for the girls' bedrooms, which I am now...

They're starting to happen. That's off-cuts from the roof.

I just hang on to all the bits and pieces

and they just come in for something.

The smallest cut offs go in the wood burner, presumably.

They have to be very small.

Doors have been low down on Ed's list of priorities,

but he's finally made one.

It's for Manie's room.

I've lived without a bedroom door for so long.

Now, obviously, a bedroom door is going to be nice.

The first thing is we bang these two bits in.

Bits in? The hinges. Can I see these?

These you've made. This is a split pin, rather like a clothes peg.

Once it's in, we bang a wedge in.

Wedge in the top, then it can't come back out again.

Exactly. Have you got a mallet, then? I have a mallet, yes. Good.

In fact, I think I'll probably use a hammer.

May I? Thank you.

So now we slide the other parts of the hinge into the door.

That's in. Wow. It's really elegant, that dovetail.

So now we lift this up. Drop the pins in. Exactly. Yeah.

That's it.

So that now, in theory, should just open and swing.

There we are.

Door. Lovely.

Across ten years of building and making,

Ed has tenaciously held on to his vision for the most dramatic

space in the house, the double-height living room,

to be crowned with a vaulted ceiling,

first trialled in his chicken run.

I'm not quite sure where the idea for this came from.

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

That's sort of my nature. I think it's going to work brilliantly here.

The panels are obviously plastered in.

But I think it's going to be really, really exciting.

Ed's crafting a hand-worked lattice across the ceiling

from very low-grade chestnut.

It's fantastically cheap. I mean, it's firewood, effectively.

Then split down the grain and it splits in whatever way it sees fit.

All that grain is intact.

It's very strong and obviously very lovely and very shapely.

Quite difficult to fit,

but it is a lovely looking thing when it's done, you know.

I reckon, on a good day, I can maybe fit eight of these.

There's 40 pieces in each quarter.

So that's five days.

That's on a good day.

So, um, I reckon it may be taking about a week, I suppose,

to get all the pieces into one quarter.

So once I have this lattice completely in place,

I'll then roll out a reed mat on top of the lattice,

and then plaster the little sections between the chestnut.

Then that will obviously be beautifully painted.

It's going to actually just completely make the space.

To complement the ceiling of almost gothic complexity,

Ed plans a robust medieval floor here.

We're planning on doing a rammed earth floor.

So that's just earth from outside with some gritty material

laid in and rammed, and oils.

It's a lovely, lovely finish.

There's one area of floor that will receive a more lavish treatment -

the triangular section at the centre of the house.

Thank you.

OK. That's for the centre, actually.

These stones are just...

It's just bits of slab that have come out of a hill.

They all have to be cut to fit into my puzzle.

My brother Will is out there cutting the stones for me to place.

It is a local sandstone, but quite a good, solid one, which is

quite good for a floor.

It made sense to do it life-size, full-scale,

rather than just with little bits of paper or with drawings.

I'd have just got through loads of paper.

I wouldn't have ever quite seen how it was going to look.

With this level of craftsmanship,

it's no surprise it's taken ten years to get to this point.

As the house has grown up, so too have the family.

They've all caught Ed's bug for making things.

Dad's asked me to make these light surrounds

aesthetically more pleasing.

I've made them out of stonework and clay, then he sort of set me

free with the designs that I choose to put on them.

As he renovates their old place,

Ed is even reinventing the humble light switch.

Where we used to live, that's turning into a great place to

trial some of these ideas that are perhaps more experimental.

One of the things that I'm working on at the moment is switching

all the lightings on pulley systems.

This is the rope that operates the switch.

So basically I tie that off in the right place. It's the switch.

That's on, that's off.

It's just the joy of having the rope running round and everything.

This action is transferred through the rope,

through to the switch over there, and then the cable to the

light comes off that and goes to the light. It's all very visual.

It's all very visual and all very experiential.

I'm not sure I dare say it,

but it almost feels like the end is in sight.

Ed's now finishing the ceiling of the new house.

Given the scale and difficulty of plastering it,

he's brought in a master of the art, Jonathan Gilbert.

It's been a challenge, because it's all different shapes within

one panel, which means you can't...

I mean, Jonathan would just love to get his trowel and just smooth

the whole thing off with a trowel like a plasterer would normally do.

We can't do that.

We have to actually work in to all the shapes that the curve is

presenting, which is challenging. But it's fine.

We've managed to get a finish that we're happy with.

For a decade of building, I've watched this family grow up

and flourish alongside this project.

I now have one more visit to make to mark what

I hope is the culmination of Ed and Rowena's long,

epic journey through a world of craftsmanship

to their final destination -

a beautiful, permanent home.

It's over ten years since I first met

Ed and Rowena on their Herefordshire hillside,

now marked by a very substantial house.

Well...

It is so gratifying to see what looks like a finished house.

It's sort of like something from a fairy tale, this building.

Mrs Tiggy Winkle's mansion.

The woodcutter's stately home.

Now, that is a surprise.

I don't know if you remember,

but the dugout where they lived had no roof on it to speak of.

Now look at it, it's manicured, it's beautiful.

It sort of promises great things up the hill, doesn't it?

It now commands the hillside,

and at the same time looks as if it's been here for ever.

And so far, it's all looking beautifully spruce.

That looks like a door within a door,

in the finest tradition of medieval castles.

Inside a frame, which is inside a window, which is inside the opening.

It's magnificent, isn't it?

How do you get in?

Hello! Hello!

Hello! Hello!

How are you? Good.

Very good to see you both! Good to see you. It's lovely to see you too.

Thank you, it's great to be here. How's your house? It's coming on.

I can sort of begin to see. Come on in. Can I? Yes, thank you.

Straight off the entrance is the great hall.

The experience of the ground floor

is now a seamless juxtaposition of hall and kitchen.

Oh!

HE CHUCKLES

How extraordinary.

It's glorious, Ed.

The most striking thing is the great hall's vaulted ceiling.

At six metres,

a real crowning glory.

Without doubt, technically accomplished

and visually remarkable.

And unequalled on the planet.

Every joint is covered by a little boss,

but the boss is like a timber rope.

Yes. We thought they looked like ribbons.

I'm overwhelmed by this.

I've never been in a building like it.

I don't think another building like this exists.

I don't think so, Kevin, no.

Is it like roof structures should be, is it stronger?

It's really robust actually. It's really robust. Remarkable.

Yes, so that's encouraging. The window.

The window I always admired seems completely right and appropriate.

Before, the inside was quite chaotic and darker, so you were kind

of drawn to this as sort of relief, but now it's a proper fourth wall.

The main window is another wonderful piece of handcrafted joinery,

built on the same scale as the tree it came from.

The big window is part of that big statement. The big room.

There's something gorgeous about its proportions, and its grand scale.

I'm clutching onto medieval fan vaulting, but frankly it seems...

I suppose with those grander buildings, they always had

the best materials and the most perfect timbers and stones.

We've created those forms with the poorest materials.

But equal levels of craftsmanship. I suppose.

It's a different craft, isn't it?

What they were doing was very beautiful,

and they were very skilled, but this is a different craft.

Despite the baronial scale, this building still feels domestic,

thanks, I think, to its wibbly handmade nature.

Although it still needs

to be honoured with some crafted wibbly Ed-made furniture.

It's hard to know how to furnish a space, so we thought...

Yes, I can see that!

It sort of suggests though, Ed, that the next and final

remaining thing for you to do is to make some...

I can't wait. I can't wait!

Yes, we're all waiting for that.

It needs big chic sofas. He's got some really interesting designs.

We're now getting to that point, which is good. Yes.

I didn't think you would pull this off.

Ye of little faith!

So, this floor, which wasn't here, this is earth, is that right?

Yes. It is.

The pressed earth floor comprises sand, straw and clay, dug up from

the nearby fields, with a hardening topcoat of linseed oil and beeswax.

Underfloor heated. Yes. And these are your stones.

I view it as sort of the centre of the building. It has a different...

Such a very rigid and demanding quality,

compared to the wandering nature of the split chestnut. Yes.

If you look at the colours of the stones...

And then you look outside, it's all in keeping.

More coherent as a result. Yes. And the kitchen, too, is lovely, homely.

Wood burner, and a post.

Although the post itself is very, very unusual, Ed. Yes.

It started out as one thing?

Yes, that is one tree, but it has been split, cleft, exactly.

The trunk was split into four, and then clamped back together.

An engineering experiment, open and seemingly light,

but strong enough to support the floor above.

What I really like about it is that it has this space.

You see through it. So it suddenly isn't this sort of lump.

What's this?

That's our calendar. Turn it from the top. We just keep adding to it.

And it goes both ways?

Yes, well it's a prototype, Kevin,

but I would like to have one that you could wind from just one end,

but you have to change the handle,

so you keep winding it and you will see history.

If I wind back 10 years, perhaps I will see a slab.

It's wonderful.

Other people buy a small book in which to write things,

but I like that. It's analogue.

Ed's wild designs are practical, too.

He made the worktops from sycamore,

a wood with supposedly antibacterial qualities.

The supports are the familiar split chestnut.

Having a circular counter... If you come this way, walk round it

and you just follow it round, there is no hard...

To the sink to do the washing up! You can do that later!

But the sink itself is also curved. That follows the same curve.

That's not a common thing, is it?

A great big Belfast sink with a curved edge to it.

No, it is unusual.

The stove, though, a more familiar rectangular shape. That's kind of...

That looks very new.

A family that we've known for many, many years make those stoves.

Seriously? I love that the one thing you buy that's new in the house,

the one bit of bling,

still actually has a very strong personal connection.

It's great. It's great.

Not everything, though, has the same degree of finish.

What's behind the door?, That's the... That's the sitting room.

That's the sitting room in there, Kevin.

But at the moment, it is the workshop. Yes, I see.

That's not a sitting room, that's a spares store.

All the little bits that didn't quite make it.

Every bit of the house is sort of here, almost.

You never know when it might come in useful though. That's your motto.

When I was last here, this was as it is - beautiful.

But this is... Actually, this is very different up here.

Flooring is down. The balcony is in.

This is quite...

This is quite a special moment, isn't it, in the building, this?

So we now see almost entirely land, a little sky.

As opposed to...

Actually, probably three quarters sky and a little sliver of land.

I noticed that. That's a very interesting change.

Tell me, up here, how many have you got -

one, two, three bedrooms there?

Three. And the bathroom.

Two that side. Five.

My question here is, you've been building for ten years,

you started building when they were kids and they're now...

The youngest is 17.

So it's not long before you find yourselves with quite

a lot of empty bedrooms quite a lot of the time.

Has this happened too late?

No. It's hard to, sort of...

..talk about that concept of,

"Oh, you've built your house and they've all left."

It doesn't really matter, does it?

The experience of them growing up

and it all happening around them I think is incredibly valuable.

Can you see a time when one of them moves in here

and you're down in the...? Absolutely.

I mean, there's no reason why we should be hanging around in here

if they have families, or a few of them. Whatever.

I think the future just takes care of itself.

Things that'll happen... We don't fret about that, do we?

So all this time, Ed has, it seems, been building an adaptable home

to suit the family both now and down through the generations.

That long view, taking time to think, has defined this project.

This house is more than a home. They want it to be their legacy.

At this point, I normally ask people how much they've spent

and how long it took, but I have the feeling you have the right

to tick the "not applicable" box in this case.

Although you did start by saying,

"We think we have about ?100,000 to spend on this."

Do you have a notion of how much you have spent?

To be honest with you,

we've never actually just gone through counting it up.

We tend to spend when we can afford it.

So this is living within your means. Yes. It is, yes.

That does mean it takes longer,

but it means that it feels comfortable, what we're doing.

It's not scary.

So you spent, obviously, the original 100,000.

That's gone, presumably. Yeah. Yeah.

You spent money from income,

but how have you earned the income looking after pigs?

Well, I do get little jobs here and there.

I designed things for people along the way, so that's helpful.

So what happens now to the dugout? Does it get rented out or what?

Yeah. We would really like people to be able to come

and experience how it is to be here.

I think it would be really fun to share that with people.

In the meantime, the small holding continues to feed you. Yes.

We don't... We're not big spenders. No, I guessed that.

In fact, the house is furnished

and decorated with the work of both family and friends, in keeping with

their passion for keeping things personal, hand-crafted and slow.

Rowena, what sacrifices, if any, have you made in the past ten years?

What do you miss? Oh, I don't miss anything.

That's a good answer, isn't it?

What is there to miss?

Holidays.

We've got animals.

We're tied because of a lifestyle that we've chosen.

So it's not a tie, then? No. We're not tied, it's a choice.

We don't really have that yearning to get away.

Yearning to stay!

I feel pretty happy with things.

Yeah, I feel pretty happy with things.

Has the building shaped and changed you?

Has it changed your family?

Has it changed the dynamic between you and the kids

since you moved here?

It's bound to has changed us, isn't it?

But you want to know how, and I don't know how.

You tell me.

Like everything, it's happened slowly and you haven't noticed.

I supposed timing-wise, moving into here from the dugout, it was timely,

because they were getting to an age where they needed their own space.

From each other and from us, and vice versa. So that was great.

Moving up here and there being space was very exciting for everybody.

I was going to ask you what happens when the project's finished,

but first of all,

I don't think it's going to be ever completely finished. Secondly...

What's the confines of the project as well? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's the grand universal project of life, isn't it?

Maybe it is, yeah.

I had wondered, over the past decade,

whether this project would ever finish,

but now I realise that Ed and Rowena have never really wanted it to,

never really intended it to end.

After all, why, when life itself is defined by,

bound up with the ideas of craftsmanship and utility,

by the acts of making and doing, why would you want it to ever end?

You know, it's lessons like that that, over the past ten years,

have made it such a privilege to follow this project.

Come on. Come on.