No doubt I’m not the only person to have been cold-called and urged to take advantage of the grant available under the government’s green homes retrofitting initiative. On both occasions the caller made it sound dead easy until I explained that, like many others in our village, our house has an exposed timber frame with brick infill. By the time I’d mentioned that the village is in a conservation area and that most of the houses are at least 200 years old and some are listed, they’d lost interest. But the calls forced me to confront some fundamental realities.

For practical and aesthetic reasons, it feels very unlikely that the insulation needed to bring our home up to scratch could be applied externally, though that’s generally preferable in terms of performance. With solid walls, the only alternative is to insulate internally. I’m no expert but I imagine we would need at least 200mm of insulation to make a real difference. Like the majority of homes here, our house is detached. As most rooms have two outside walls, ‘the shrinkage’ would be as painful as the upheaval. The shower room would no longer function and the kitchen would have to be taken out, shortened and put back. We would need to excavate the ground floor to install insulation and that would probably require underpinning. We would have to take down all the ceilings on the top floor (again…) to increase the roof insulation and replace all of the windows and external doors. At least £80k later, I can guarantee that however hard we’d tried, we’d be left with gaps, cold bridges and lots of messy bits. And probably still trying to get the local conservation officer to allow us to install an external power pod to charge our electric car.

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