This programme contains strong language
KEVIN SIGHS
As with most industrial relics, it's quite hard
to divine what the purpose of this building was.
In fact, it was constructed to test elevators.
And elevator music.
The factory that was here, surrounding this tower,
is long gone, it was pulled down at the end of the last century
to make way for housing.
Housing which, as you look down at it,
you realise is very familiar -
it's the kind of housing that we all enjoy,
that we all choose to live in.
Not some industrial behemoth like this.
It does have amazing views, though.
Many of us may dream of living in extraordinary spaces,
but very few have the resilience and bravery
to turn their backs on modern conventional housing,
and venture down that treacherous road
to do something unique and risky
to craft their own exceptional home.
KEVIN CHUCKLES
Wow.
What a magnificent brute.
This concrete column stretches over 20 metres
into a cold Northamptonshire sky.
It was built to supply water to a local piano factory,
and it's been derelict for almost 40 years.
It's not the most elegant water tower I've ever seen.
This is infrastructure central -
there's a trainline running through there,
an electricity substation just here,
and this thing commanding the whole site.
It is a colossus, poured from liquid stone,
but never intended to be a home.
Yet a home is exactly what Tassy and Adam, its new owners,
want it to become.
Yeah, I've always had a dream, passion to self-build.
It isn't what we were looking for. We were looking
for old farms or barns or something like that that we could convert,
and then we came across this.
I-I thought it was amazing. I still remember...
No, Adam's always been confident, I'm a bit more like,
"Oh, my God, what have we done?"
They're no strangers to risk.
Adam once raced motorbikes and met Tassy at Brands Hatch.
Together, they travelled the world in a broken-down motorhome
and started a family, before settling in Northampton.
Now Tassy works in a bank and Adam is a plumber.
They have two children and another on the way,
and yet they feel this is the time for their biggest-ever challenge.
The whole idea of what we want to do with it is for it
to be fun but it to be practical as well.
Fun and practical are not the first words to spring to mind
about this conversion.
But now, over a year since they bought this beast,
Tassy and Adam are ready to start building.
Hey, how you going on? Good to meet you.
Good to meet you. Nice to meet you. And your water tower.
Thank you. What a building. When's your baby due? Next month?
Six weeks. Oh, wow.
Building a house with a very young family,
that's marvellous. Yes. Yeah.
So how much did you pay for this, then, this site?
I think we got it for a steal. A hundred thousand,
just under a half an acre of land and a...
And a lot of concrete. ..concrete tower.
There's all these brand-new houses just next door -
were you not tempted just to buy one of those?
No. Never. They've got no character.
The last thing we wanted to live in was
a square box really, isn't it? And all new-builds are just boxes.
No, you chose a round tube instead!
Can we get inside? Yeah. Yeah, lead the way.
Tassy and Adam have limited building experience, which makes this new
challenge all the more terrifying.
Good grief!
But it's only once you peer into the dark cavernous space enclosed...
Echo!
..that the design ambition
and the scale of this project become clear.
It is twice as big inside as you think it's going to be,
looking at the outside of it.
It just gets bigger once you walk into it.
Wow, it...it's huge.
Can you use the structure of this as your kind of support
for what you're putting in?
Yes. It's here, it's not going anywhere.
What about the floor?
Literally smash this out.
Really? I'm hoping it's not full of steel.
Listen, mate, I have seen a few structures like this,
and I can tell you that they are always full of steel.
We will get it out one way or another.
It will come out eventually. OK. Well, good luck with that.
I think that's a monster task.
I mean, it is very, very tall in here,
and this is just you? Just you tackling this?
Mainly me, 95% of the work is going to be me.
To tame and then domesticate this industrial relic will be a battle
of huge proportions and their plans are far from simple.
The current structure is made of 12 thick concrete legs
tied together by four ring beams,
including one in the ground.
All this strength is to support a water tank engineered
to hold almost 1,000 tonnes of water.
Adam's plan is to dig out the old floor
and replace it with a new concrete floor,
but this time insulated
and structural to support a heavy concrete interior.
Crafted wooden formwork will be filled with
a special mix to mould the exposed concrete walls of the ground floor.
This will house one of five bedrooms,
a kitchen and a small extension with a dining room and snug.
On the first floor, more concrete will form the walls
and floor of three more bedrooms,
a bathroom and even a secret room for the kids.
The top floor of the tower will be the open-plan main bedroom suite.
Five pours and over 250 tonnes of concrete will create
a rabbit warren of three and a half floors,
connected by stairs, a slide and a fireman's pole.
It may seem extraordinary,
but it's all quite pedestrian compared to their plans
for the tank itself.
Big enough to hold two three-bedroom houses,
Adam and Tassy want to make
a two-floor luxury entertainment space,
with a swimming pool, a cinema room,
kitchen and an outside sky garden,
formed by removing a quarter of the tank's roof.
The ambition is spectacular,
the materials unforgiving,
and the challenge completely bonkers.
It is a beast, isn't it, this? It's got a personality to it.
Beast sums it up, that's what I call it a lot of the time as well,
a beast of a tower, so, yeah,
just everything about it is big and brutal and it's there.
How much does this gargantuan thing cost to do?
We're getting a self-build mortgage.
We're currently looking at getting 200, 250.
That's going to run out very, very quickly.
We can then sell our current property,
funds from that which will be roughly 200-ish.
We can then push it home.
So just to be clear, your notion of spending
between £400,000 and £500,000 on this now is based on,
not what it will cost but what you have available.
Yeah. I mean, the biggest cost-saver is going to be labour.
It's going to take you years to do this.
Yeah. We're planning two and a half, three years, aren't we? So...
To get living. To get in here and to get living in there.
Living. It won't be complete.
Pray God that it doesn't drag on so long that you end up,
you know, employing your children as teenagers.
If it does go on too long,
then we could grow to hate it. Yeah.
Or each other.
There is no doubt that this task is so big,
it will put huge pressure on their young family.
But their journey with this building will be guided
in part by their architect, Tom Bell.
I do think it's a challenge and I think the sheer volume of
the space sets up challenges with the budget.
There is 550 square metres of floor space.
Size is one big issue, but sound is another problem.
A problem so serious,
it could jeopardise this hulk ever becoming a home.
There's a lot to be done in terms of acoustics,
given the substation and the proximity.
The conditions in planning are set up such that
an acoustic test has to be done on the building once it's completed,
before it can be declared inhabitable. Right.
Wow. So you've got to finish the thing...
Finish the thing. ..before you can find out whether you can live in it?
Yes.
If Adam cannot control
the constant substation hum that embraces his site,
the years of work he plans to invest in this building
will be in vain.
MACHINERY RUMBLES Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Adam starts digging the foundations for
the ground-floor extension in early spring,
with the help of Tassy's dad.
Diggers, dumper, I hired in myself, markings, done it myself,
that's my father-in-law in the digger.
It's literally, there is no real professional
in the term of the word.
We've got to save money wherever we can.
I'm not a millionaire, never have been,
never will be, hence free labour.
Adam's working full-time,
and he wants to hold off getting a self-build mortgage
for as long as possible,
just spending what he has available.
But developments at home suggest that life will soon be getting
a little more expensive.
Peek-a-boo!
Are we going to push you?
Ready? Hold tight.
Whee!
So we had Flint just over three weeks ago.
All well and all good at home, as planned.
So the pressure's on Dad now
to get building as quick as possible.
Adam's eager to get started inside,
so he's planning the removal of
the tower's original concrete floor.
Some initial samples suggest it shouldn't be too tricky.
There's only a little bit of steel in there
so it will break up quite easy.
He'll have to dig down over a metre to allow space
for insulation and the steelwork
which will support their heavy concrete interior.
But it doesn't take long before this concrete beast shows
its true mettle.
Painful. This is very, very painful.
It's this top layer, which, because it's got the rebar in,
it's been an absolute pain in the backside.
It's been a day and a half, and this is all we've got to show for it.
If there were any doubt,
Adam now knows he is in a fight of biblical proportions.
David versus Goliath.
Tassy and Adam have begun chipping away at their monumental
and seemingly impossible dream -
the conversion of this brutal concrete water tower
into a playful family home.
With £400,000 to spend...
Yeah. Mammoth task. I'm not denying it, I'm not an idiot.
..they're three months into a project fraught with risk,
and Adam has stopped digging holes to turn his attention
to an issue that could prevent this building ever becoming a home.
The problem is, if we do not get the bedrooms down
to below 30 decibels at night,
it means we're not legally allowed to live in the tower.
In order to suppress the constant substation hum,
Adam wants to build a wall.
The main wall will be 200mm thick concrete
and then on the backside of it,
it will then have sound insulation on there,
and then hopefully it kills the sound as much as possible.
This planning condition is in place
because noise pollution can have a serious
and deleterious effect on our health.
It's getting increasingly hard isn't,
in this very overcrowded country of ours, to find any peace or quiet?
Actually, it turns out there is a really big link
between background levels of noise in our life,
from planes and trains and automobiles
and, in Adam's case, an electricity substation,
and our health.
Between noise pollution and our stress levels
and blood pressure. So if that's the case,
well, then, what can architecture and design do about it?
I mean, is it possible to engineer structures
to manipulate sound?
Right here, there's an example of exactly that.
These lumps of concrete were designed for defence.
Good grief.
But not to dull sound, rather to amplify it.
Hello!
This is an acoustic early warning system
on the Kent coast, built in the early 20th century,
designed to detect
the noise of approaching enemy aircraft flying across the Channel.
Oh...
Oh, these are surreal.
In their time, they were absolutely the cutting edge.
Of course, by the beginning of the Second World War,
they were already obsolete, superseded by radar.
That sound wall over there is another mirror,
it's curved to deflect the sound in.
Now, it stands to reason, doesn't it, that if it's reflecting sound,
it also means, behind the mirror, well, no sound gets through.
So it's a sound barrier as well.
These things were designed by boffins,
by the most talented engineers of the time.
So it would stand to reason, wouldn't it,
that Adam himself would employ
a really talented sound engineer of this time.
So, of course Adam's wall was designed...
Fucking hell! ..well, by Adam, actually.
Just doing everything I can do, really,
to get everything as cheap as possible and mates' rates.
Can't afford to pay anyone.
He has an army of unpaid volunteers.
He's not even paying for a pump, and he's using a digger to slop
the concrete into his home-made formwork.
I've got another lorry coming
with concrete - can I get another cubic metre added on to it,
a full load, six metres? Do you want me to pay
for it now or do you want me to call you later?
Adam's first experience of concrete has been procured
for the bargain price of £8,000.
When it's revealed, he's pretty pleased with the effort.
I absolutely love my wall. I think it's brilliant.
It would seem to be working acoustically too.
So it hasn't got the acoustic material on
the backside of it, but just by having the sheer mass,
it's already knocked off eight decibels instantly.
So it's actually doing what it's meant to be doing.
Adam will need to reduce the hum inside the tower
by another 15 decibels with glazing and soundproofing.
But he'll only know if the sound defences are enough
when he's finished, and that's a long way off.
As autumn sets in, Tassy and Adam work on removing
the tower's concrete floor together.
And it's left to Tassy's mum to look after baby Flint.
I don't agree with it. I think it's mad.
Utter madness. If they were younger,
no children, plenty of money... But not now.
See, that's what I brought her up to do.
There it is - it's their life, their project, isn't it?
I'll probably be dead and won't see it, will I?
SHE CHUCKLES
Adam and Tassy's hope that some glorious future may be buried
within this structure is soon badly knocked
by the cynicism of the outside world.
We got robbed.
SHE CHUCKLES WRYLY
So...a lot of Adam's tools got taken from inside the tower.
So this is now the thieving toerags coming out of the tower,
and then this is him now trying to bust the padlock off.
Amateur hour.
Adam and Tassy have lost close
to £5,000 worth of essential tools.
But adversity would seem to fuel Adam.
He responds by digging out the floor.
By hand.
HE GRUNTS This is now the lovely, glamorous side of digging.
Adam's working full-time as a plumber.
He comes straight to site after work,
and that leaves little time for his family.
Hello, smelly! What are you doing?
Er, playing at the tower.
Oh.
It's just a hard slog at the moment,
but the hard slog will be worth it in the end.
There's no doubt progress has been slow,
but six months into a three-year schedule,
Tassy and Adam have built a wall and removed a floor -
their first small victories.
This pile of stuff behind you,
this is all the floor, isn't it, out the water tower?
Yeah. I can't wait until we start pouring some concrete.
Oh, I see, yeah, putting stuff in?
Putting stuff in instead of just taking stuff out.
Do you fully expect to be on site by Christmas,
concreting, putting the slab in?
Yeah, if the weather doesn't go absolutely Baltic,
but what we've done, it just doesn't feel enough
in the time that we've been doing it.
Yeah. Yeah. It is too slow for me.
We saw ourselves further on than this.
Yeah, a hell of a lot further on. Yeah. You know,
this is now you versus the beast, isn't it? FLINT BABBLES
Yeah. It's not going to beat me. I've never failed at anything yet
and this isn't going to beat me yet. That, that...
Is that your input? ..those are strokes and messages
of support you're receiving from your son there. I know!
He's saying, "Go, Dad, go. It's good."
I reckon, if you went the procurement route
and employed a contractor, you'd get five blokes on site,
18 months to finish, right?
Well, instead it's one man on site.
Yeah. So at the very least it's going to be five times 18 months,
which is seven and a half years.
Plus I'm working full-time as well.
Oh, yeah, sorry, forgot that, yeah.
So let's just double it and say 15 years.
Sticking true to his new 15-year schedule,
Adam is ready to pour his new floor,
four months later than planned,
in the middle of the first Covid lockdown.
Work's dropped off a cliff,
so no money's coming in.
I'm here all the time now.
As long as I can still keep getting deliveries
and as long as money stays in the bank, I'm all right.
A socially distanced skeleton crew, including Tassy's brother, Taryn,
helps to make a new structural and insulated floor.
I don't fail, I don't do well with that.
Where there's a will there's a way.
By the end of the day, Adam now has a floor to build off.
Two months later,
and the pandemic begins to seriously affect the funding
for this project.
We've had a setback cos we needed to remortgage our house.
But we can't get that money unless we sell the house,
and we had no intentions of selling the house yet.
Because of the pandemic, Adam has not been working.
They can't take any more equity out of their house in Northampton.
The worst that's going to happen is we go bankrupt,
um, we get divorced and I live in a caravan full-time.
So we need to make some plans now
and change...change the way we go about things.
With all hopes of a mortgage now gone,
Adam can only shuffle on with the little money he has in the bank,
and his attention turns to the timber formwork
for the internal walls.
Walls that are already built in Tassy and Adam's imagination.
First of all, you're going to be hit by a mass amount of concrete -
that's going to be going 10m high.
You're going to see these curved walls going round,
and then it'll lead you around the curve
and that's then when it will open up
and then go "boom" to your extension.
A summer of sweat and sawdust produces
hundreds of precisely cut pieces of plywood,
designed by Tassy to be glued together to make a strong
and meticulous wall of patterned concrete formwork.
Adam often works alone,
but does rope in Tassy's brother, Taryn,
and the man who helped design this wellspring of pain and purgatory,
his architect, Tom.
As an architect, you're often thrust together with clients,
so you do have this point where you're questioning,
does this person have the capability of doing this,
does he have the skill set?
But I think slowly but surely, as you see it,
yeah, he can, he can definitely do it.
And he's clearly a talented craftsman.
Ultimately, time can't be the governing factor, though.
I think it will take as long as it takes.
It may be messy and time consuming, but amidst the ambition
and grinding labour, it is a focus of creative energy
for Adam and Tassy, and a distraction from
the biggest challenge ahead, which lurks above.
Right, I'll head on down, yeah?
Bloody hell.
What a weird, weird space this is.
This was never intended to be occupied by people, was it?
Wow. It's weird, it's like being in a sort of huge cave.
So how much of this roof comes off?
It's going to be nearly a quarter.
What?! Yes. I'm not sure I would touch that roof.
There's not a doubt in the mind, it's got to be done.
Why have this space living above your head
and not do anything with it? It's...
Because it will kill you trying to change it.
I think there's a very good reason
that nobody's tried to live in this water tower before,
and that is because it's made out of extraordinarily thick concrete.
I mean, this skin, this drum roof...
..is about six to seven inches thick here,
probably much thicker at the edges,
the walls are ten inches thick,
and Adam, he's sort of meeting, I think,
the limits of his abilities here.
He can't see how big this building is
or how big the task is ahead of him.
Adam and Tassy are mid-battle,
employing all their guile, sweat and creative energy
to tame their monster water tower and somehow domesticate it.
But halfway through their three-year schedule,
it's clear things will take much longer than planned.
If you're going to build a house or you're going to do
any sort of like building project, don't buy a bloody water tower.
Don't buy anything that's got silly angles like this.
Adam is now spending every spare moment on this project
and family life is just on hold.
It's too slow, isn't it? It's too slow for Mum.
We've learnt something, though, haven't we?
Whatever Daddy says it's going to take, we double the length.
It takes Adam almost ten months to perfect the timber formwork
that'll transform Tassy's design into exposed concrete curved walls.
It needs to be right. It's just, I'm worried
that if one of these pieces of steel ping out,
you've ruined a wall basically.
That's it, one shot, one hit, and there's your finished article.
Months and months of work have led to just one day.
The day of the pour.
We were going to keep it quite simple
and then I said to Adam,
"This is...this is our dream house, I want more."
Basically. We've done a pattern
and we're about to find out if it's going to work.
The formwork is not only oak-veneered and curved,
but Tassy's designed it to be inlayed with a complex pattern.
I did pick the design, yeah. I wanted geometric pattern.
The amount of detail that's gone into this bloody wall
and it only takes one thing to be wrong.
To ensure the concrete can shape itself
around every detail of the delicate veneer, its flow is tested on site.
The concrete's been designed to be fluid,
something Tassy's brother, Taryn, is wary of.
The concrete's twice as thin.
Super-thin to get super-detail, virtually like water,
and it will want to find every little weak spot,
and the weight is going to be 25 tonnes. It can't not work.
The heavy liquid concrete is pumped from the bottom, up.
This expels any air and is eerily quiet.
Good to go.
As the concrete begins to flow, the only sound is
that of the handmade timber formwork groaning
and straining under immense pressure.
The creaking, the creaking is nerve-racking.
There is some leakage.
It's flowing everywhere.
But it would seem the formwork is holding.
It doesn't look like... it looks like it has stopped.
After two years of toil, they know any fault would be catastrophic
for the entire project.
It's that far from the top now. It's almost there.
But I tell you what - it's terrifying.
Eventually the creaking subsides.
The formwork has held.
Now it's just a waiting game
and see what we've got pattern-wise and result-wise, really.
A few days later... Push your end out there.
..and Tassy and Adam are ready to reveal what
the exposed concrete walls of their new ground floor will look like.
I'm a bit concerned that you might see the lines and the separation
between the pattern - that's the part I'm most worried about.
It's going to be really tricky,
it's going to be stuck in and pull the pattern off with it.
The imprint of the complex formwork is wafer thin,
so removing these chunky panels requires care and delicacy.
It's coming, it's fighting me, it's trying to come back in.
We knew it was going to be tough, it's just tough.
CREAKING
But it seems this concrete experiment...
It looks pretty good.
..has worked.
I haven't seen one bit of honeycombing.
Yeah, it's good.
It's been a long time waiting,
a long time waiting to see these walls go in,
because this is, to us, still really the first stages of the build.
Yeah.
The concrete pattern is breathtaking,
and its success gives this project new impetus.
The kids are growing up quicker and quicker.
So, yeah, I want to get in now.
Readying themselves for the next concrete pour on
the first floor, Adam and Taryn install a steel deck.
A permanent mould for the floor of the children's bedrooms.
The one thing that could really bugger us up here is if it leaks.
If it finds a hole, it's going to piss through.
As the concrete begins to flow...
..granite lava rains down on those beautiful new walls.
HE GROANS
Adam is beginning to doubt his choice of steel shuttering,
but he is determined to get his floor poured.
The second lorry's here and I think
I'm just going to close my eyes for this one.
They've propped all the possible weak areas,
so they feel they can carry on pouring,
though concrete continues to leak through.
You wanted concrete, babe, and you've got concrete. Everywhere.
They try all manner of makeshift solutions to keep
the concrete in place until it sets.
At which point...
I don't know what everyone was moaning about.
I think it went brilliant. Not one hiccup at all.
The clean-up takes some time.
But when I'm back on site a month later,
everything seems crisp and tidy.
Oh, this is good. A cave of concrete wonders.
This is like...this is like being in a medieval castle.
A great central pier...
Oh, my goodness, it's hollow.
This is special. And it is also beautifully done.
The formwork's actually like feeling a piece of wood.
Oh, my Lord!
Oh... Oh...!
Oh!
This is nuts.
This is magical.
I mean, this is fabulous
but, of course, if they had built their interior out of timber,
which they could easily have done, they'd be living in it by now.
But for Adam and Tassy, this project is as much a concrete work of art
as it will be a concrete home.
You could have finished the whole of the interior,
and it could be made in timber, and it could have been beautiful.
Yes. I will absolutely give you that one.
We could have done it in timber
and we would have been stood on the top now going, "Thumbs up.
"Brilliant job." But the thing with that is,
it's not doing the building justice. It needs to be solid.
At the end of the day, it's just what we wanted.
Yeah. That's the finish we wanted.
The thing, is it's not the end of the day,
it's the end of two and a half years and you've got to the first floor.
I know. I have told him, many a times,
it's not moving fast enough!
Yeah, but you want this. You want this.
Oh, yeah, but Adam wants it just as much. Oh, yeah,
well, I think I've been driving this as much as anybody, haven't I?
How many more floors?
Another three floors. Yeah.
And if it's taken you two years to get this far,
it's going to take you, I reckon it's going to take you
another two years to finish the concrete work.
We will definitely be divorced then.
Yes.
Tassy and Adam have been so frugal in inching this project forwards
that they're only spending what they manage to save from Adam's income.
But these exquisite walls show you
that this project's focus is not time or money, but rather quality.
If there's one tension that the concrete work sets up,
it's - is the building going to turn out as some kind
of giant art installation
or will it be a successful home?
I don't even think they care about that,
because this is just really one big adventure for them, isn't it?
Tassy and Adam's big adventure.
Most people see construction as a process to be endured,
an arduous journey that eventually delivers a result.
Most people want to complete that journey as simply
and quickly as possible.
But if there is one thing
I have learnt since I first visited this Northamptonshire site,
Tassy and Adam are not most people.
Well, you know, it's been five years
since these guys started this project,
two years since I was last here.
So...what's the chance of them having moved in, eh?
This is...this is odd.
The exterior of this concrete monster has remained unchanged
since this project began,
and now, in its shadow there's a dystopian playground,
for toddlers.
It's probably even more apocalyptic than it was.
I mean, it's like they abandoned the site,
and instead a preschool playgroup have moved in.
It's clear the tower has not been finished,
but they are obviously spending more time on site as a family,
redressing an important imbalance on this project.
Hey. All right, Kevin?
Good to see you. How are you? Good, yeah.
You...you've let the site to a nursery school?
Yeah, we've sold the house, released a load of funds.
Yeah. So does that work out,
does that give you a little bit more cash fluency?
Yeah, it's been sitting in the bank for a while, though,
because we haven't had the time to spend it.
It's the time that we struggle with. Last time we met,
it was two years ago, and at that point you had just poured
the first-floor slab, you know?
It was good and you had great plans, I mean, you know, you were
just going to charge ahead from that point. Yes.
And the plan was to have all the concrete done by
the end of that year, wasn't it? Yeah, it was, yeah.
And then I'd been having back problems.
A pretty bad one, wasn't it?
Yeah, I had a really large slipped disc in my back.
I needed Adam's support with the kids and stuff.
This pretty much stood still,
and nobody was here, nothing got touched,
and it just collected dust, didn't it, basically?
I mean, seriously,
is there any improvement on what I saw two years ago?
Is there some stuff to see at all? Yeah.
Yeah, we've got a recent pour. There's a few bits and pieces.
Really?
It's clearly been a difficult few years.
But then, with this project, even small progress...
Oh! ..assumes epic proportions.
A great, big, flying...
It's like a sort of... bit of castle.
A great, big sort of buttress curving tower wall.
It's glorious cos it floats.
In engineering terms, just forming,
shuttering, to these curves is extraordinary.
It wasn't easy. No. No.
But what a glorious thing.
Wow.
There are now two floors of bold endeavour inside the tower.
Tassy and Adam are made of the same stubborn resilience
as the walls they've poured.
Walls that speak of something truly magnificent,
albeit on a distant horizon.
This is like walking through a sculpture.
I just, I love this, you must love this, don't you?
Yeah. It's great. It's good, yeah.
And this is, what, the fireman's pole? The fireman's pole.
Yes. Oh, my word, it's even taller now.
Yes. Full height.
Bloody wonderful.
Downstairs, Tassy's geometric patterned walls set the standard.
And on the first floor...
Ooh, nice.
..there are yet more concrete curves.
These seem more finely jointed here?
I mean, downstairs it's like beautiful board-marked concrete,
this just looks like timber.
Yeah, that's what we want it to be and so it sort of softens
the concrete so it sort of warms it up a little bit.
Yeah, exactly. It's so exquisite.
These internal walls represent over three years of work,
from when Adam first started to make his intricate formwork.
Now, all that effort resonates in this finely detailed tactile finish.
Do you know, I can't go anywhere
without touching and stroking these walls?
I like that.
I like that joint. And, I mean, these edges.
Oh, everything's done so, so precisely.
Exquisitely. What's this room here?
This our eldest's bedroom.
Ooh, what's up here?
So we've got, in the kids' rooms, they've got double-height rooms.
Get away! What, like a mezzanine?
Yes. They will do, yeah.
Oh, bit of a squeeze. Yeah, yeah.
There is real excitement
about what Tassy and Adam are trying to do here.
Each child's bedroom has access to
a curved secret hideout on the central column.
Its floor is, for the moment,
the summit of Adam and Tassy's concrete journey.
So above here, what happens then?
That'll be our bedroom floor, then.
What, the whole floor? The whole...?
Mm, pretty much, yeah. Pretty much, yeah. Rather you than me.
Yeah. It is... Uh, retro-fitting a water tower -
what a nightmare.
It's just one crazy, difficult
engineering challenge after another.
And then that's only one part of it as well
cos then we've got to do the cutout for the tank as well.
Don't.
Cutting the roof out. Don't.
The fins. Don't.
There's three slides, so you've got two connected to the staircase
and then a spiral, ideally, if it fits,
from the first floor,
going down to the front door.
You complete nutcases.
Yeah. Three slides in the building?
Yeah. That's the plan so far, yeah. Why? For adult use as well.
Didn't everyone dream about having a slide in their house
when they were a kid? What gets me is that, you know,
you're taking forever to do this,
you're way behind any deadline you may have set yourselves originally,
you know. Yeah.
And yet you're still clinging to these crazy ideas,
which are going to be... if not impossible,
extremely difficult to pull off.
It's something out of a nursery rhyme, you know?
The mad couple that lived in the...
Tower. ..big water tower. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's like the old woman who lived in the shoe.
Having watched them struggle for so long
inside this stubborn concrete tube,
it's hard to understand how Tassy and Adam can maintain
their ambitions for this project.
But there is a beacon of hope.
Over 200 miles away, on the North Devon coast,
there's a building that shows
just how concrete water tower dreams can come true.
Listen, it's nothing like your place, this, at all.
But it is inside that skin,
it is an old concrete water tower, and it's done.
I tell you what, that's the big distinction
between this and your place.
Here comes the digs! Yeah.
This concrete beast wears a much more respectable
and conventional skin of metal cladding and windows.
The tank is the same diameter as Tassy and Adam's,
but at only ten metres tall,
it is much more tank than tower.
Even so, I'm hoping that inside they might glimpse
a sliver of what their own future home could be.
I like this staircase, it looks really simple
but you just know, to make it, it's not simple at all.
There are no freshly poured concrete walls here,
but two floors of comfortable contemporary accommodation,
holding four bedrooms.
Up above this is the top half of the tank.
One more staircase to go.
And on the top floor, there's something to truly inspire them.
The ceiling looks awesome. Yes.
The ceiling IS awesome. Oh, and the lights. Yeah.
It's Tracy Island. That's my cup of tea. Definitely.
It's science fiction. It's like Bond Villain-esque, isn't it?
The single-domed circular space has views in every direction,
and it's sort of in line with what Tassy and Adam want -
certainly, in their open-plan bedroom.
We'll have this. This'll be like our bedroom ceiling.
Under the side of the tank, yeah. The ceiling's awesome.
It's just like... Yeah, just like what we're going to have.
Unbroken. This conversion began at
the same time Tassy and Adam started work.
That's awesome. It is awesome.
It too was self-built, but with £700,000 -
way more than what they planned.
Now, in a positive move, Adam has given up work
to help bring their concrete ambition closer to a conclusion.
When we first met, I thought, "Uh, not enough money,"
you know, big ambitions, big hopes, you know,
big excitement. But have you got enough drive,
enough energy to do this?
Now that I've packed in work. Last day was on Monday.
That is so good to hear.
The amount of energy I've had to give into work
and to be doing that amount of hours basically work full-time job,
come home, carry on working till the early hours. Early hours.
I think it's going to be case of now just going gung-ho
and throwing ourselves just full in at it.
So I'm probably the one that's worried about failing.
That's quite a big word isn't it, failing? Failure. Yeah.
Yeah, but if you're not failing, you're not trying, are you, as well?
You've got to keep going.
People that don't fail are not trying.
So do you know how much money you've spent so far on the project?
Probably 75 at the very, very most. Yeah. Or maybe just under.
Yeah. And you got the proceeds from the sale of your house.
Yes. Yes. So you've got some cash in the bank. How much have you got?
Not enough to finish. About 150.
OK. That's probably enough to get you through
the next year or so, isn't it? Yeah.
If we put down on paper your circumstances,
your resources, how much money you've got,
what's needed, it does not make sense on paper.
We're just average Joe Bloggs, really, aren't we?
No, you're not. Well, we are, we just...
..we just dream big and that's the way I think of it.
We're just normal people that just dream big.
I think it's about doing something you haven't done before
because if I was doing something that I could already do
that was cheaper and easier, it'd be boring.
I look at the pair of you
and, as I've got to know you,
I kind of now, I'm now betting on you, doing this.
In a way, I'll be surprised if you don't.
Because everything you have shown, all the resolve
that you have demonstrated, all the hours you've put in,
that, at every turn, says to me it'll happen. You'll finish.
It may seem that this polished exterior is an ocean away
from Tassy and Adam's austere building site.
Certainly, they have a long way to go with their project.
But I can't help but feel that for the first time,
the tide may be turning in their favour.
They at last have some money
and some time to help bring their madcap scheme a step closer.
The thing about Tassy and Adam is that they don't conform
to the normal rules of self-build.
I don't even think of them as self-builders,
more like, I don't know, sculptors, you know, making a piece of art.
And in the midst of all this, you see,
I think there are great signs of beauty,
of originality, creativity, excitement.
Which makes this project worth waiting for.
No. For them, the helter-skelter ride is just gathering speed.
25 years ago, I set sail on the first Grand Design...
We're here to meet a couple who have got to build a house
in double-quick time.
Tim and Jules had a hard finish date...
What's the deadline? It's the bumpline.
..but were quickly met by obstacles.
All the work they've done this morning has got to be re-done.
It's overdue, and the house is so not ready.
BABY WAILS Shit.
25 years later, I'm back.
Can't wait to see it.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media