Out of the ashes

The phone call came at 6.45 in the morning, waking us in a hired holiday cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. Inevitably I got to my mobile too late, but found a message from the police. Would I call them straight back? My wife, Judy, sat beside me as I rang. "Do you know your children's whereabouts?" came the alarming question. We did. Our daughter, Eorann, was at university. And our son, Owen, had emailed to say he was staying an extra night with friends in Torquay. Were we sure they were not at home, the police continued. We were, but our minds were racing to work out what might have happened. Did we have any pets in the house? The penny began to drop. "Is the house on fire?" I asked.

It turned out that our house, in Surrey, was indeed ablaze, and they were making sure that the firemen did not need to try to rescue anyone from the inferno that, less than two hours before, had been our home.

It had all begun just an hour and a quarter earlier when Crispin, next door's amiable, black-and-white English springer spaniel – on sniffing terms with our much less well-mannered Jack Russell – had started barking. Our neighbours, Tony and Thelma, let him out and he ran down the garden, still in full cry. Following, Tony spotted a small column of rising smoke. He rang 999, but by the time he put down the phone, he recalls that "the flames had really taken hold". The fire brigade came within 10 minutes, only to find half the house engulfed. The speed, says Tony, "was scary".

Judy and I were soon on the long road home to Surrey. The police had told us not to rush, and the drawn-out drive gave us space to come to terms with what awaited us.

First, there were blessings to count. Chief among them was the extra night that my son had decided, at the last minute, to stay away. He had been due back in the house less than 12 hours before it had caught fire. We could have been driving to the morgue.

Then there was a chance, as we talked, to say goodbye to loved possessions inherited, or accumulated over 35 years of a happy marriage. Everything had a story attached, from a straw avocet bought on a trip to Kenya to a clock that had come down through my family, from wedding china to watercolours painted for us by a friend in the Dales. It helped to recall them lovingly, as at a wake. '

And we made a resolution that both made a difference at the time, and has helped carry us through the traumatic months since. Whatever needed to be done in the aftermath of the fire, we would do in as green a way as we could afford. So far this has led us to have the shell of the old house taken down by hand, so that we can almost entirely recycle it, and to get planning permission for a pioneering zero-carbon replacement. The construction industry is the biggest single source of waste in Britain. And homes are responsible for some 27 per cent of the country's entire emissions of carbon dioxide.

Arriving home we found almost half the house gone. The kitchen, the family-room next door, and – above them – the bathroom and my daughter's bedroom (with all the treasured mementoes of her 20-year-old life) were collapsed together in a heap of smoking rubble.

The hall, if anything, was worse. It had been lined with a couple of thousand books, often two deep on the shelves. They were still there, but scorched and blackened, in burned bookcases on pitch-black walls. It looked like an anteroom to hell. More happily, some of the things we had feared lost had survived.

The cause of the fire is thought to have been electrical – with the fridge/freezer and wiring the main suspects – but no one is sure, despite much searching by the fire service and the investigator appointed by our insurance companies.

It turned out that we would not have to deal with the insurance companies directly but with independent agents, loss adjusters, who they appointed – a wise arrangement, which has worked well.

But there were less pleasant encounters. Two people from a company called to board up the house – a legal obligation upon us, we were told – turned up just before dusk, worked for just over two hours, nailed up eight sheets of chipboard (later valued for us at £6.94 each) and demanded immediate payment of more than £900. Another company wants to be paid thousands of pounds for completing the boarding and for scaffolding a wall; a third tried to charge far more for restoring some pieces of largely undamaged furniture than they cost to buy in the first place.

We also had unsolicited visits from loss assessors. Easily confused with loss adjusters, they are a different breed, offering to negotiate with the insurance companies in exchange for a proportion of the sum paid out. I was in a dilemma. They were expensive and their ambulance-chasing was off-putting. But I realised that we had suddenly stumbled into a strange, new world, and we needed somebody on our side.

Fortunately, a neighbour recommended John Thompson, an independent, chartered loss adjuster who lives locally. Thompson and his company, Hilton Thompson, has dealt with the insurance companies' counterparts in a co-operative, rather than confrontational, way, guided us through the unfamiliar waters and kept us on an even keel. We would have been overwhelmed without him.

We had to decide early whether to restore the house, or tear it down and start again. The first was tempting, as we had loved it – an idiosyncratic three-bedroom "arts and crafts" structure, half-timbered and surrounded by garden. But it was so badly damaged that John advised against. Building a new house is VAT-free, while – perversely – repairing, even one as gutted as ours, is not. The difference ran into tens of thousands of pounds, enough to put restoration beyond our reach. But, if we were to demolish, we had to carry it out in a green way. Again we were fortunate, coming across a small firm, EnviroNomix. Instead of bringing in the bulldozers and the wrecking balls, it has taken the house down by hand, brick by brick – "respectfully", as Eorann puts it. And instead of being carted off to landfill, just about everything has been set aside for recycling or potential reuse. Every brick is being cleaned and neatly stacked, in case it can be used again. Eleven overspilling, huge white recycling bags are lined up at the bottom of the garden, with labels ranging from glass to hard plastic, fabric to metal.

Allan Creaser, who runs EnviroNomix, reckons that just one skip – mainly of ash – will have to go to landfill. In the meantime, as Creaser's men have carefully brought them out, we have been sorting painfully through the remaining contents of the house, the blackened, memory-laden debris of our lives, to see what can be recovered, cleaned and reused.

It has been tough, but it has brought rewards, for fire can be capricious, destroying one object, while leaving its neighbour untouched. A fat-bellied jug that Eorann brought us from a school trip to France has cleaned up beautifully; a hard-to-get stand that Owen needed for his work as a magician turned up just before a working trip to Canada; and Judy's family's Victorian christening gown was found undamaged in a cupboard that was full of otherwise ruined clothes.

Strangest of all, a photograph taken of the two of us 29 years ago – which we had been mourning as lost for two ' decades, having last seen it two houses ago – emerged, from heaven knows where, entirely untouched by the flames.

Sustaining us, too, has been our vision of what we want to build. It has been put on paper by our third happy discovery, Jerry Tate, one of the team of architects behind the Eden Project. The brief was to design a zero-carbon house that people might actually want to live in, a family home rather than a futuristic edifice. He has produced a design that combines the traditional and modern, light and airy, with plenty of glass. It is so close to the feel of our old house that it brought a tear to Judy's eye .

We learnt from the UK Green Building Council – to which Jerry Tate Architects belongs – that the top priorities are first to get the house as energy-efficient as possible, by super-insulating it with thick walls and triple-glazed windows, and then to maximise its natural heating by the sun. Tate has turned it slightly to face due south, giving it plenty of glass on that side, while minimising the windows to the north.

Creaser, who has also put much thought into the house, came up with the idea of insulating the walls with 45cm of cork, which would make it doubly eco-friendly, by helping to save one of Europe's most important eco-systems, the Mediterranean cork oak forests. These are being endangered by the decline in the use of corks in wine bottles: WWF UK says that three-quarters of the forests could be lost in just a decade. Using it as insulation could provide a substitute use – and, if we can afford it and establish it as fit for purpose, ours could apparently be Britain's first cork house.

With enough of the right insulation, whatever it turns out to be, one expert told us "you could heat your house with your dog". But we would still need hot water – and no doubt heat as well, in case the Jack Russell is not up to the job. Solar water-heating through panels on our south-facing roof would provide much of what we need. And we decided that the greenest way of meeting the rest of our needs would be through a ground-source heat pump and solar cells.

The heat pump would miraculously extract heat from the ground beneath the garden. This remains warmer in winter than the surface or the air, and the heat can be captured and brought indoors through buried plastic pipes, filled with a mixture of water and antifreeze. Electricity would be needed to drive the system, and much the best way of providing that cleanly is through panels of solar cells.

After a long campaign led by WWF UK, the Government announced two years ago that all new houses would have to be zero-carbon by 2016. Our aim is to build one now: we are told that we would be the first family to try to live in one.

We have planning permission, but there is a long way to go. There are building regulations to be met, prices to be agreed, contracts to negotiate and sign. Above all, we have to see whether we can afford it in these tricky times. It has been, and remains, an anxious period in our lives. But, just possibly, a blueprint for the future might yet rise phoenix-like from the ashes of our home. n

Geoffrey Lean is the IoS's environment editor