Urquhart Farm Cottages, ,

Dunfermline

Internal alterations to create an additional bedroom and construction of a very simple ‘double box’ extension housing a kitchen and utility room.

The small box creates a roof terrace (replacing a rotten timber balcony), while the big box increases the ceiling height in both new rooms - carefully designed to allow evening light into the extension throughout the year and to give enough headroom to hang an overhead clothes dryer in the utility room.

It is constructed from 200mm timber frame, insulated with sheepswool and then over-insulated with woodfibre insulation to reduce thermal bridging through the timber frame. External cladding is black vertical fibre cement to the big box to reflect its agricultural shed neighbour, with horizontal timber cladding to the small box, which faces the garden.

Before starting work, an airtightness test was carried out to identify the source of draughts through the whole house. Air-tightness tests for the extension achieved 1m3/hr/m2 @ 50Pa - drastically reducing overall heat loss. The client will be carrying out draughtproof sealing on the rest of the house.