-Grand Designs The Streets S02E04

A British self-build revolution started at Graven Hill in Oxfordshire. I love this. It's like a liquorice hall sort of a building. One that is beginning to spread across the country. Now Glasgow City Council have launched Scotland's first urban self-build scheme. I don't know if I would have managed to do it on my own, out in the middle of nowhere. Not far from Glasgow city centre, plots of land have been sold at affordable prices to a handful of budding self-builders. Give it a tap at the base. I've always thought it would be really good to do that and then thank God I get the opportunity. They've been given the freedom to realise their own self-build ambitions. Beautiful. And witnessing the journey of these remarkable pioneers with me will be a local architect, Natasha Huck. Have you done it before? No. It's not as straightforward as just buying it into place. It's got to line up. In this episode, we'll be following the fortunes of two brave guinea pigs, Joanna and Ben. Made by hand, bit analogue building. To build their unusual vision for a traditional American ranch home. Everything is ordered exactly the amount we need. We might run out of concrete. Everything's stressful. I can do some drying up. Joanna and Ben live in central Glasgow, where Joanna works as an animator and producer and runs online life-drawing classes. Ben, meanwhile, is a carpenter and sculptor who builds timber-framed extensions and conservatories. Ben made this. He turned it, he made it from a piece of wood and we took it on our honeymoon and these were the bowls that we had. Camping. In their spare time, they indulge a shared passion for American country music and all that is homespun, rustic and yee-haw. We both love being outside, we both love camping and we both love being away from the city. It's just kind of a rural honesty thing, just being outdoors and if I have fires and guitars and not being particularly proficient, but having the desire to make a noise. You can sing, you've got a voice. They plan to build their American dream home on the range here as part of Glasgow City Council's pilot self-build scheme. On this strip of land below a canal, just two miles from the city centre, six plots have been sold to budding self-builders by the council for under £50,000 each. My co-presenter, Natasha, is a Northern Irish architect who's worked in Scotland for over ten years and knows well what it is to build here. We're actually building a ranch. I've always called it the ranch, I think it's quite ranchy. What makes it a ranch? Well, it's got the cowboy stoop. Every time we watch any kind of western, any film like that, we have that porch. Little House on the Prairie, that's it. George Bush's Holiday House is basically that house. Yeah, that's a weird design reference, but yeah. So it's like a representation of your lifestyle or what you want your lifestyle to be and your personality? I guess ranch styles come about as an idea. It's like a house that is built for kind of throwing you out into the world a wee bit, to encourage us to live the life that we want to live, which is like much more outdoors and stuff. I'm going to do pretty much all of it by myself. I've simplified things, taken things out or added things because I can see how to achieve it. He can make everything, so if we change our minds about a room size or anything, Ben can change it. What about budget? How do you keep a hold on that? What is your budget? It's a very tight budget. Our budget is basically as much as we could borrow. We were able to get a self-built mortgage. Based on our incomes, the loan does £170 and there's no extra money. There's a lot of information online, there are so many forums and he's free as well. You've got to make it work. You have to. Limitations cause creativity, right? Yeah, exactly. Joanna and Ben's home will be the first to go up in the street. At its heart, this is a traditional heavy timber framed house, jointed by hand out of Douglas fir, but then wrapped in modern insulation on the outside. At one end will be an open plan kitchen and living area under a double height ceiling. Behind that, a bathroom. The main living area will be lit by a wall of glass facing south and overlooking the garden. Halfway down the barn, a staircase will lead up to a snug, a bathroom and a first floor bedroom under a steep sloping tin roof. And outside, along the entire length of the building will be a porch or stoop to enjoy the outdoors come rain or shine. Grass? So, in November 2019, work gets underway, digging out the foundations for their house. To be closer to site, Joe and Ben move out of their flat into a caravan, which they make their new home. £30,000 of their tight £170,000 budget has to go on pouring the foundations. Meanwhile, they get to work jointing their timber frame in their all-weather workshop, a wedding marquee. And all these holes are kind of slightly offset, so when you put the pin in, it pulls the whole thing back in. Yeah, so the hammering sucks it in a wee bit. Yeah. They're building in a remarkable location. But for all its charm, this historic site is situated in one of the toughest areas of Glasgow. And away from the site, one day, they get some really bad news. I had a phone call and he said, your caravan's not here. Just singed down to the ground. It had all our stuff in it. We put, like, a massive roll-top bath in there, brand-new wooden floors, rug skins. It was so nice. Yeah, it was just a big black rectangle. Do you know what happened? Actual vandalism of some kind. Somebody vandalised it. Oh, my God. That's terrible. They'd slashed the sides of the workshop as well. Oh, so it was vandalism? Yeah. And there was smashed bottles and stuff. It's hard enough. That's your kind of blood, sweat and tears. Yeah, yeah, it was just kind of exhausting. It was relentless for some time. There's a kind of frontier quality to your house and the fact that you're first people on the street. You know, how do you feel about that? Mainly, it's exciting, but it's also daunting because right now it's the only one, so it feels isolated. But when everybody else starts building, it will feel like a community. So when we're all here, I think it's going to be an amazing place to live. Just this bit in the beginning is quite scary. I'll say. However, they are committed now. Every penny they have is invested in this project. So, moving back to their flat, Ben and Joanna press on on site. Ben is shaping the frame completely by hand, helped only by his friend and fellow carpenter Craig. Joanna is project managing, keeping a tight rein on their £170,000 budget. Can we just swing it into the joist? Most timber framing can involve dozens of people, but this is an ultra-paired-back operation. It's not easy, for sure. Everything is big and heavy, and there's just two of us walking around with a wee rusty timber trolley and trying to do all the work. What about when you come home and it's like you've done a full day deadlifting at the gym? Like, literally, you can hardly walk. Such physical work that you're doing constantly. Yeah, it's kind of pacing that out because there's some developed tendonitis in this foot, so I've been hobbling around and it's like, I've got to be able to keep going for the duration of the build. They are pushing themselves to the limits of what they can do. There we go. It works. Sweet. A test of their pioneering carpentry skills comes two months later, as they prepare the frame to be lifted. We've got two days with the crane, and ideally two days to put the whole barn up for the barn raising. That lifting will test the strength of every joint, every peg and truss. It's quite daunting. I had a sleepless night last night because it's just the size of everything and the amount of force required to lift it into place. It's like, yeah, it's a big stretch. There's no screws. Pegs go in, they pull everything together. That's a ticket. The first section to go up will be the gable end. The joints are designed to carry the weight of the building when it's upright. But as the crane lifts each section from horizontal to vertical, every connection must withstand forces it wasn't designed to. With that first kind of 10, 20 degrees, that's the point at which a joint could randomly fail. Oh, my God. If anything happens to one of the sections, the house won't go together. Oh, no, Ben. What was that noise? I don't like that. In Glasgow, the delicate joints of Ben and Joanna's hand-shaped timber frame are being tested by the stresses of lifting by crane. It's all these noises. Oh, my God. It's working, Ben. It's really scary. Everyone's holding their breath. Hard hats off to them. They've successfully raised the gable end. Each bay of the barn is lifted in turn and then joined to the next. It's mostly fitting together. And where it isn't... Give it a tap at the base. Until... Beautiful. Now the wooden skeleton is up, Natasha's come to have a look. Oh, look at that. Looking good. It will look like a traditional ranch-style home when it's finished, but the construction method is very different to American ranches in the 1800s. Houses built by American pioneers would use long lengths of cheap, mass-produced timber nailed together, a method known as balloon framing. Ben and Craig are using a different technique. I'm really interested in the joints that you've made. It's all traditionally jointed, isn't it? Most of it's traditional mortise and tenon joints, all put together with oak pegs. It's a traditional American style. It's very much traditional carpentry from here. It's what you've learned. It's a bit of both, yeah. Yeah, I guess some of the rules of thumb are fairly, not universal, but kind of pan-European. Yeah. It's an incredible material that the more you work with it, the more you learn about how it behaves, about how it cuts differently in one direction from another direction. I just love it. It's like living in a forest. That's it. You are living in a forest. We live in a forest, but we do. Which, in built-up urban Glasgow, is a pretty extraordinary thing. When you think of Scottish architecture, you think of stone, and Glasgow is no exception. It's a city built of stone. But if you look closely, you'll uncover a strong tradition of building in timber. This is Glasgow Cathedral, originally built in the 12th century. From the outside, it might appear as just another stone building, but it houses one of the oldest wooden roofs in Scotland. It's just amazing to see the timber structure exposed like this. These beautiful rafters were rediscovered in the early 20th century, when plaster that had been covering them up was stripped away. The oldest timbers in the cathedral are high up in the bell tower, across a narrow balcony at the top of a vertigo-inducing ladder. It's amazing to be up close to the timbers like this. I can't believe these are more than 800 years old. It just shows how tough and durable this material really is. This wood is Scottish oak, which there's actually precious little of to build with these days. So recently, there's been a drive to champion other types of native timber in all aspects of construction. The COP26 house, designed by architect Peter Smith, hopes to encourage that. Why is that special to use homegrown timber? Surely everyone's using local timber. No, that's the thing. The timber we can grow in this country is predominantly the lower structural grade of timber. In an average build project, often engineers will specify a higher grade of structural timber. We spoke to our engineers, who helped us design this building, and said, how can we do this using only timber from Scotland? And we have to make the timber slightly bigger. We have to think about how we put it together, how we fix it, what the connection details are like. And the idea that you can use it in every possible way. Yeah. It's the cladding outside, it's the roof as well. Exactly. It's the... Inside the floors, the walls, the roof. The insulation, exactly. We have tested the limits of what we can do with homegrown Scottish timber. It took a jaw-dropping 20 years to develop the design for this house, with intensive research by architects, designers, suppliers and engineers. What Jo and Ben have done is actually something very similar. Except they're doing it without all this expertise behind them. They're just making it up as they go along. Joanna and Ben are using native timber for their frame, Douglas Fir. Except they've supersized it, using extra-large sections to guarantee the structural strength. I'm in awe. They're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in every way. I've come to see for myself. Quite epic. Thank you. Yeah? On a good day, when you come here and you look up at the building, what are the feelings that it engenders? It's just so exciting. I love it. I love when you walk in, it smells like wood. It always feels like we just built the house, because we did. Yeah, it's yours. It's ours. Every square inch of it has got your touch to it. It's been handled, and that's the joy of building a sort. Their ambition for their home far outstrips their £170,000 budget. £1,000 a square metre. There we go. That is cheaper than social housing construction costs. But that's fine, because you're doing it yourselves. Joanna's slogging it out... We're fine. ..to make sure that we have enough cash to keep going. At the weekends, we come and look around, make plans. One of their many ingenious ideas to help build their home with the money they've got is to dispense with those things that other self-builders might deem essential. If your carpenters also happen to be climbers, then all you need is a rope and some kit. What you don't need is scaffolding, which is another major expense avoided. Rope's coming down. Chuck her. No scaffolding or crane. They're saving themselves over £20,000 by building this way. So your climbing harness means that you become the anchor. Yeah. And the brake as well. Yeah, you put a belaying device on, which means that if you let go of the rope, it just hangs there. It doesn't fall. Yeah. It's dead cool. All right, I'll stay out of the way. He's in the danger zone. Oh, up, up. All good. I'm coming off belay. Yep. We've got a third roof layer. Third window, yeah. It's got all the spirit of traditional barn raising cos your tools are on the whole pretty simple and straightforward and you're still using these basic engineering principles of pulleys and ropes. Modern, medieval building. Yeah. You guys are just using, you know, your strengths and your skill. It's glorious. Three months later, when it comes to installing the wood-fibre insulation, strength, skill and balance are pushed to the limit. Go! As Ben and Craig fit the great heavy wood-fibre panels onto the roof. Please be careful. Please be careful. I'd be very happy to see the end of going up there on ladders. Yeah, I don't like heights at all. The panels are too heavy and big to hoist up by rope, so since they have no money to hire scaffolding, they've built their own. Took about a day to put up. It was a lot of fun, yeah. And then Craig looked up the regulations on what scaffolding was supposed to be and we added the wee kick plate and, yeah. It worked very well and it's very sturdy. Well, that's good. Lucky for them, their next job that day is on the ground. It's the installation of the key element of the homestead. The porch frame or stoop, that's all getting put up today. I'm very excited to see that. I think the shape, now it just looks like a wee cartoon house, like, OK, gable end. This bit is like, OK, now that's cool. It's a wee bit more dynamic. Five separate structural braces need to go up and as with everything on this project, the work is a mix of careful planning, brute force and trial and error. Nah, this isn't going to work. You can't reach. And it always feels... precarious. Oh, it's getting safer all the time as you drive that peg in. Meanwhile, the house is starting to draw the attention of neighbours. We've been watching it for probably ten months, 12 months maybe. It's fantastic to see. Yeah, yeah. But still, Joanna and Ben's is the only house being built on the street at the moment and the more complete the house becomes, the greater the anxiety. With no movement on site, I mean, we are a little bit anxious because of security. Obviously we'll be in the house working on it for a long time but, I mean, once we're in, if we ever want to go away or even if we're just out for the night, I mean, it's just a lone house in the middle of the city and it's a bit scary. In Glasgow, the pioneers Joanna and Ben are halfway through building their Wild West home. After eight arduous months of doing almost every job on the house themselves, they're taking a step back, handing over to specialists to fit the roof. I like the idea of letting go. I don't think I manage it particularly well. It's a big hand over this bit, it's quite stressful. There's like 200 square metres of roof. It's a big thing. The roofers get to work fixing the great lengths of sheet metal into place. The team seem to know what they're doing and there haven't been any complaints yet. But as they come to fit the tin around the first window, they hit a snag. There's a lot of thinking going on now. Are they making a mistake? I don't know, there's a lot of conversation going on. This is the kind of steel roof normally used on factories and big barns, put on in huge sheets. I don't know if I need to climb up the ladder and go up and have a chat. I kind of get it. Oh, I see. The roofers can't work out how to fit the corrugated tin around the windows without letting water in. The flashing, the skirt below the window, has to be installed to let water drain down the roof. It kind of has to be both under the roof and on top of the roof at the same time, which is impossible. At this point, there's nothing that's going to stop the water from coming in at that corner. So we're cutting it back here? That's the suggestion now, is just to cut it to there. That's what we're talking about, but I don't know how it's going to fix the problem because it's all just floating about. It's time to make a difficult call. There's not really a way to carry on. It's like we have to make a decision now on how we want it done. Or wait till tomorrow. That's what I'm saying. As the light fades, the roofers head home. But the next morning, they don't return. One of them has tested positive for Covid. Yeah, the roof has kind of fell through, so I'm going to have to do that myself. I wasn't planning on doing that job. Have you done that before? No. Because it's not straightforward as just buying it into place. It's got to line up, especially as it's not just a plain roof. You've got those roof lights, so those corrugations have to line up with the edge. But handling the big materials, that's scary. Yeah, and it's not just kind of lifting it. You're working at height as well. Easy enough. Everything always goes to plan. I hope it does. The corrugated roof promises to be an authentically rural addition to their ranchy vision. I really like this tin. It's nice to see an industrial material used in a project like this. And the colour actually works really well with the surrounding trees. It makes it blend in. And by the next day, Ben's found a way to fit the tin around the windows. I went online and found a useful video for how the window flashing is supposed to be fitted. There should be a way that we can get it to work. I don't like working at heights generally. It has to be done and there's no-one else to do it. That's the ticket. So, Ben and Craig set to, with the help of a couple of friends, lifting up six-metre sections of crinkly metal onto the roof. This one's going to be easy. It's a lot like rock climbing. It's a little bit less fun. And then sliding the great heavy sheets up to the ridge. And if it starts going, just let it go. Don't try and hold on to it and fall off the roof. No B-roof as yet. Full-body workout. It's not half. Inside, Joanna is also doing a job she's never tackled before. We don't want pipes to run under any of the internal walls. Laying the underfloor heating pipes herself to save money. So you want it to come in 150? Taking on specialist jobs without previous experience... So, yeah, just keep going. ..is a great way to save money. So, yeah, there you go. Perfect. I'm so scared I break it. I know. But it is risky. I think it rights itself. You just need to bring it in. That's it. With most of this stuff, it wasn't... Was it planned? I mean, we had absolutely no option to have people come in and do things because of budget constraints. I mean, I always knew that I would be doing a lot of the project managing and Ben would be doing a lot of the building, but I guess the way that it's worked out is we both do a lot of all of it. But nobody else does anything. To save money, Joanna and Ben are acting as main contractor and tackling jobs that would normally be done by specialist trades. It's a rare and scary route to take. What toll is that taking? Do you worry or do you just, you know, do you just wing it and kind of see what happens? Sometimes I just think, in my darkest hours, be like, somebody's just going to come and put a stop to this thing because, like, you're not supposed to be able to just build your house. It's like, no, this is unreasonable. And building more and just be like, you know, you've got to lift that whole thing off and start again. Completely irrational. I mean, I trust that you guys know what you're doing. You've built the house to this point and so it's standing up. The thing is, you've got control over everything, so if something does go wrong, you'll know why and you'll be able to fix it because you've built it. That's something nice about having the responsibility of everything, you know, rather than having to call a tradesman and go, why is this not working? And them saying, oh, it's somebody else's fault. Yeah, that's true. I completely agree. It's a rewarding way to build, if slightly nerve-wracking. Just a week later, there is one final major job that needs doing. The poured concrete floor. Yeah, two per bay works. Joanna and Ben were originally going to do it completely themselves. I was obviously sounding quite nervous on the phone because I was asking lots of advice. Eventually she said, I might know some people who can help. So we've got a wee team of people who know exactly what they're doing, which is just making me feel so much more chill. The money they save doing the roofing themselves, they've spent on a professional team to help pour their floor. Joanna and Ben have ordered in the materials. They've calculated they need 7.5 cubic metres of concrete. We're just trying to, like, stay on budget, so everything is ordered exactly the amount we need. So if there's any cock-ups, it's like, oh, that's the risky one. The contractors have brought 10 cubic metres just in case. But even so, as the hours tick by... What did he say he's at? There's only ten in total, and we've used eight. Do you think it'll be all right? ..the concrete supply starts to run worryingly low. It might run out of concrete. He's only got ten cubes, they've used eight. 75 mil times 100 square metres. How many did we work out? We worked it out as seven cubes. Seven and a half, should have been. Yeah, but he's used eight already. Maybe it's all running out of the side of the building. Yeah, I'll bet. What's the plan, then? Well, it might be that we just have to get another lorry load. Getting more concrete will blow their finely balanced budget out of kilter. Are we going to get it done with the ten? God willing. Is that the end? Do you think? Barry said they'll have enough. Yeah. Yep. Great. He knows. They're not going to leave us in the lurch. Everything's stressful. Luck is on their side. By the skin of their teeth, the contractors finish the job with the ten cubic metres they had. It was so close to the bone there, literally, just like, oh, we don't have enough stuff, and then we did. This is the remains. That's all we have left. 0.3 of a cube. One wheelbarrow. Really happy. Perfect. Back at their flat, Jo and Ben are packed up, ready for the big move. One week to go. We cannot wait to move into the house, even though it's not finished. We don't have electricity in the sockets, we don't have running water in the pipes. We don't have a front door, Ben. We don't have a front door. So it's not quite luxurious yet. Yeah, let's just do exactly like that, and we'll do it as a two. But it's a very good location for Joanna's work, her life drawing classes. You know when, actually, you were looking, like, kind of right at the lens, or just over the top? Yeah, that was really good. So she celebrates their moving in with a photo shoot. That's really nice. That's actually really lovely, just as is. I'm going to head forward. This is a very, very unique space. There are so many places to shoot from, there are so many amazing angles. It's really good. It's the kind of space I would always go and look for if I wanted to hire a venue to do this. Yep, the arm's good, the hip, that's really nice. It's also just amazing to be using the house as the backdrop to this thing that I do for a living. So I'm really, really proud of it as well. It's not like hiring a venue and saying to people, oh, look at this beautiful old gallery, or look at the work of this person in the background. The backdrop is the thing that Ben and I have made, so it's really, really, really incredible. No, no. Oh, oh! OK, that's a one-minuter. At the moment, they're camping in their house. They still have no interior walls, fixtures or fittings, and £40,000 left in their budget. So when it comes to making the kitchen, they're burning their own. Let me light it up for you first. Is this a way to, like, turn cheap wood into nice-looking wood? Yes, OK. This Japanese technique, called shu-sugi-ban, singes the surface of the wood, which makes it more hard-wearing. Wow, it's amazing to see the grain. It really pops out, and the knots and stuff, and the resin coming through. And actually just set that on fire. No need to be precious about it. After that, you want to get rid of the loose soot. Oh, you can see it, yeah. Brings out the grain as well. Just goes deeper. Each piece is finished with a coat of Danish oil. That's all there is to it. I know it's fine, but it looks beautiful. I love it so much, it's hard not to use it everywhere. Making a kitchen by hand is one thing. Making your own clay plaster wall finish... Right, so I'm using the ordinary builder sand. ..is a whole new level of DIY. I'm going to put a little bit of red chalk in. What do you think, Natasha? Yeah, try one part water first, and then we'll see. I mean, I think it should be... It should be wet. Yeah, yeah. So much of this project feels like an agricultural experiment. Weirdest colour for a wall. I'm going to put in some chopped straw. This could be the best wall finish ever. Looks good. OK, that's just ridiculous. Too much grass. Or not. I really have no idea. The ranch is slowly but surely becoming a home. But there is one big thing missing. Neighbours. At the moment, we're the only one of six who has even started building and we're nearing completion. But we're completely isolated and it kind of feels like we've been abandoned. It's just frustrating because we all, all six of us, wanted this to be a community build. We're part of a project that was to do something good for the community. If only one of six builds, then surely it's not worked. Having felt so isolated for the best part of a year while they built, Joanna and Ben now have company. Work's begun on four more projects on the Glasgow site. But while they're just beginning to dig holes, Joanna and Ben have reached the end of their journey. Doesn't that look just charming? We could be in Oregon today. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's rustic. Yeah, it's welcoming. It is. It is. Well, howdy. Glasgow has its first American ranch, complete with a steeply pitched tin roof. Super insulated large clad walls and full-length rainproof stoop. This is a handcrafted building worthy of the most intrepid 21st century pioneer. Hey. Hiya. I really, really like your house. It's my dream house. Very good. I had an image in my head of my dream house and that's what this is. And you made it? And we made it. It has a very strong character. It's rustic, it's kind of chunky posts with these diagonal braces, but it's also, you know, it's sleek with your kind of thin, dark frames. I'm glad it didn't turn out very kind of cheesy American barn, which it could have. So the cladding's worked out really well. It feels really kind of homely and tactile. Yeah, that's Scottish luch. Yeah. I think we should toast the stoop. Let's do it. Because it's something I've always wanted in my life. And you've got it. I'm very envious. It's a halfway space, isn't it, between public and private? It should be welcoming. That spirit of generosity is a wonderful way to mark the beginning of this extraordinary street. At last, Joanna and Ben are no longer alone. It's so nice to have them starting and to see machines on site because it's been so quiet here. So it's really nice to have the start of what is going to be a community here. This is actually inspiration for them. You know, they've not done it before, and just to know that there's an end in sight and that you've gone through all those difficulties and you've survived. While Natasha's off to see what's at the back of the house, Joanna's showing me the interior. Oh, wow. If you didn't know how this building was made, it tells you it's all here. It's a world of wood. The open-plan, double-height living space seems more cathedral than ranch. The timber frame is all visible, a tribute to all their incredible hard work, and Ben's magnificent carpentry. It would be horrible not to be able to see all the timber and all the hard work and everything, so everything's exposed. And this is not a white box. I mean, you know, there's plenty of stuff going on. We're not minimalist people, so we have so many things. There's stuff populating it, and of course that's an expression of who you are. But of course it's all dealt with, in a way, by the void. I mean, you've got this enormous space above your head. I mean, look at it, it's large enough to fly a plane through. I mean, literally. But that glorious empty volume, it sort of helps compensate for all the activity down here. Yeah, absolutely. There was a few weeks ago, it was so busy and so messy in here, and I lay down on that sofa and looked up, and I realised this is how you get calm in this house, you just look up. This is like a man-made forest, where the branches and twigs serve as coat hooks, and the frame reaches up and out to embrace everything beneath. It is natural and simple. Concrete floor. Nothing posh about that. It's like a workshop floor, which is how you want your house to feel. Which is how you want your house to feel, not everybody. Not everyone would be brave enough to go for a fully glazed gable end, either. Here's the wall of glass on that southern gable, which is brilliant because, of course, it drinks in the light, and this time of year, you need that because the sun doesn't get very high above the horizon here. In Glasgow, you can wake up in the winter at 6, 7 in the morning, and it's really dark and it's grim and you don't want to look outside, but it's so beautiful waking up in here at any time of day. It's quite a view, and for those who pass by, it's also an extraordinary feature in the landscape. So when you see the house from that side, it kind of feels quite low-profile because you've got the porch and it's kind of horizontal, whereas when you come round this side, it's so dramatic and it kind of peeks to the sky. This is the big shout, the big hit in the high notes at the end of the thing, like the mullet part of the house, there's all the party in the back. I love this aspect of it, it's always been my favourite. Because it's private in a sense that it's kind of round the back, but then you're still kind of exposed on this side. Who we are, what we're up to is on display to the world. I guess we did that on purpose, we didn't want to give ourselves that option to live quiet little lives of isolation. You're going to get to know a lot of people. That's the truth! Every inch of this building speaks of the independent, creative, pioneering spirits of Joanna and Ben. From the steel balustrade on the stairs, designed and welded by Ben himself, to the downstairs bathroom, hand-built from leftover timber. That's a bath, I like that. It's elevated, it's torn, it's like a sort of a, I don't know, sauna. All lined with timber, it's beautiful. Oh, and more timber! This is a repurposed carpenter's bench, which, of course, is hugely appropriate in this house. With its own toothbrush holder. Upstairs, there's a simple cosy bedroom and a snug mezzanine sitting room, all dressed in clay plaster. In the end, Joanna and Ben opted for an off-the-shelf product, but lovingly applied it themselves. You feel like you want to touch the walls. I just did. You just did, exactly! On so many occasions, they've been told, oh, no, you can't do this, and they've just decided, we'll find out how to do it and we'll do it ourselves. And they've done it. And it's, you know, there's bits that are imperfect, but that is what makes it the way it is. It's that sense of human touch, human engagement. It's home, it's the idea. It's home. It should be genuine, shouldn't it? It should somehow reflect who you are, all your idiosyncrasies, all your passions and your love. And the best homes are idiosyncratic, are kind of sculpted, made, formed by people in a very personal way. It's that kind of emotional quality that we can just feel. Yeah. This building is certainly alive with the human energy that's gone into making it. It takes a special kind of self-builder to take on a project like this. You're not just pioneers, really. You are the first of the first of the experimental pioneer guinea pigs. It's like when you're at school and you're starting a race and they say, get ready, set, go. But it's like they called a false start and me and Ben didn't hear and we just kept going and then we turned around. Where is everybody? This is the start of a place, which is really exciting. We've set the tone. I mean, it's a lot of responsibility. It's a bar. Yeah. Yeah. But it feels really nice. I don't know many self-builders who would be prepared or even capable of taking on as much as Joanna and Ben did. What they did so is thanks to their pioneering spirit and their ridiculously undersized budget. So now you've finally got here, can you start to think about how much things have cost? Is that starting to come together? Our budget was 170, as in that's the mortgage that we applied for and that we got, and so that's what we've spent. Amazing value. I mean, astonishing value. Pacing ourselves along the way to make sure that we hit that was quite tricky. But there were so many moments where I would score something out of the budget that there would be a workaround that was free, but very, very exhausting, time-consuming, and meant that Ben had to do it. What it demonstrates is that actually, if you are prepared to learn, if you are prepared to work hard at developing your skills and crafting something yourself, then anything's possible. What we do together is the thing that makes it work because I could never have done it without Ben. I couldn't have done it with any other person. I love it. It's raw and it's real, but everyone can feel the emotion and the love that you've put into it, and that's something just intangible. Oh, goodness me. It's so lovely to see this building finally out of the ground. It's the first in Glasgow's citywide programme of self-build. So it's a landmark building. But, you know, if you are first out of the gates, you've got to be prepared to be alone. And, goodness me, Joe and Ben learnt very quickly that this was going to be a very isolated process, that they had to dig deep to find tremendous amounts of resilience and resourcefulness in putting this building together, but also tremendous amounts of humility in being prepared to learn new skills, to adapt and change. Oh, and there's one more quality that you need to produce something as idiosyncratic and as energetic as this building, and that's something they have in spades, which is imagination. How much building have you done? Zero. It's definitely pink, isn't it? Violet is not on my radar for the colour of my house at all. You're an army medic. You fight conventions. You don't like to salute. Oh, bollocks. Five years on from leaving the military, the creativity is starting to come back out now. It's beginning to make sense. On all four, an unlikely pairing tackle a failing film. Chivalry from Sarah Soleimani and Steve Coogan stream it all now, or it continues here tomorrow at ten. Next, Gordon Ramsay's feasting on the beach, foraging in snake-infested wilderness and landing on a lake, uncharted, is new. .