3 Plans on paper

The engineers who took on the job of transforming my sad little old house into a real home, Harald Kellner and Dietmar Frohn, can't possibly have known how the original idea would mutate between their first estimate and the finished building. I clearly remember my initial meeting with Harald Kellner. I had just been talking to a firm of architects who specialized in restoring old buildings with natural materials such as clay bricks. They had a fairly impressive website and their firm's logo could be seen attached to a number of as yet not restored houses around the city. They evidently had big plans. I, however, felt somehow uneasy. Would they listen to me or would they have a style they wanted to impose? It was perhaps significant that when I asked a question the boss addressed his replies to my son. His first concern seemed to be with the safety of the current building and he was not prepared to venture up the shaky stairs, although we had already tested them. Not long after the meeting an estimate arrived asking for around 1000 Euros for making the house safe, but no proposal as to how they would restore the building.

A day or so later Harald Kellner came to look at the house. He had a nice firm handshake, an open smile and an enthusiasm which was absolutely not phoney. He was easy to talk to and a good listener. At the time I had no idea what huge projects he was accustomed to running as a civil engineer: many of the major roads in this area and a large number of public buildings. Doubtless he decided there and then that the timbers in the little house were too rotten to be worth saving and that reconstruction, not restoration, was the only viable way. Shortly afterwards I received via email back in England his offer in the form of three variations on preserving the façade but reconstructing the rest of the building with either new or old materials, and with or without retaining the vaulted cellar. He stated clearly the costs involved and we arranged a meeting to discuss details.

The actual final shape of my house must have been a surprise to everybody. In ground area it is smaller but in height quite a lot taller than originally planned. Surprises seem to have been the order of the day almost every day of the construction process. But none of them turned out to be disastrous and I was no way threatened with bankruptcy, as one or two people probably feared, though I did spend a lot of my evenings doing anxious sums with my none too reliable mathematical skills. Every time they turned out to agree with Dietmar Frohn's own much more reliable calculations it gave me quite a boost.

Every meeting I had with the engineers, and we had them just about every week for over eighteen months, was a fascinating learning process for me and they were kind enough to make sure I had understood every tiniest detail. Building construction was a new world full of impressively logical and sometimes excessively restrictive regulations. I was amused to learn from Dietmar Frohn that there was an official average splash height for raindrops against the exterior wall. Sort of thing you wouldn't normally dream of measuring. But it was comforting to know that fire and safety regulations were extremely tight and that the authorities would inspect every so often during the construction process.

Talking of raindrops - our street is on a slight hill, so that flooding is unlikely, though Mühlhausen lies on the River Unstrut which does flood sometimes. However, cobbled streets do develop large puddles, especially after they've been dug up for pipe-laying, and I had a fine one threatening to splatter my nice new façade. Of course, the men came back to get rid of the puddle but what really did the trick was the approaching date of the local carnival. Mühlhausen has the biggest single town carnival (called Kirmes and originally a church fair) in the whole of Germany, or so they say. It is in the last week of August and for that the streets have to look their best - road builders duly arrived and the puddles ceased to exist.

What do you do first when dreaming up your new home? If you're me you write as detailed a description as you can of which rooms you need, what shape they ought to be, how many bathrooms, how many loos etc. That part is obvious. In addition with my son's help I drew up a list of all the original materials that we wanted re-used. We definitely wanted to keep the ancient cellar which lay under the front room of the house and protruded above the entrance hall floor level by about half a metre. This meant that the foundations had to be built to protect the cellar vaulting, as you can see in the plan below.

Most important was keeping the façade as similar as we could to the former house and the arrangement of windows in particular. There were ten windows and we ended up with eleven and two dormer windows in the roof. The timbering was to be visible, ie. not hidden by render as before. This was a requirement of the conservation department but it fitted our intentions anyway. In the course of demolition the original timber frame was revealed with the typical diagonal arrangement of struts called ein halber wilder Mann ( half a wild man) which is retained in the new building.

It took long discussions with the carpenter, Frank Jonuscheit, in his large workshop looking at constructions on the computer (see "The Workforce"), and Dietmar Frohn spent a whole afternoon kindly driving me around the area looking at typical methods of half-timbering until we knew exactly how we wanted the façade built. As far as possible old oak timbers were to be included and I was invited up to the workshop to watch the master carpenter and his journeyman cutting mortise and tenon joints and fitting the frame together in sections before it was hoisted into place.

Because the plot is on a bend in the street it is actually shaped like an irregular trapezium. This means there are very few right-angled corners anywhere, a detail I happily accepted until I began to sketch my furniture into the individual rooms. Where to hang my two old but pretty corner cupboards? Would there be room to walk round three sides of the double bed without bumping into the wardrobe? A Feng Shui expert would have given up in no time. Whichever way we laid the big rectangular carpet it was always going to be crooked on two sides.

The roof became quite a test of the carpenter's skill. It had three different planes and an enormous amount of woodwork for such a small structure. The two rear dormer windows looked, when I first saw them, like something out of "Dr Caligari", that early Expressionist film in which all the buildings are crooked.

My son and a good friend of his, concerned at an evident lack of regard for historic craftmanship, have spent several years rescuing from skips around town all manner of items thrown out of buildings about to be modernised or demolished. They can both see through thick coats of paint, rust or grime and spot a piece of good workmanship and both, fortunately have space for storing all their finds. Their intention, I hasten to add, is not to make money but simply to ensure that Mühlhausen doesn't lose its heritage. The items they save are all gradually finding homes with neighbours who are busy restoring their houses in the historic inner city.

The two of them have assembled a wonderful collection, some of which dates back to the seventeenth century, of old window glass, window frames and shutters, interior doors and front doors, elaborate hinges, door-handles and locks, lamps, wooden steps, stone steps, an iron shoe-scraper and from an abandoned factory a furnace door now serving as the cover to my cellar coal-hole.