January 27, 2016

Boxing Day Floods – Our Story

IJM Construction Ltd is a local family run construction firm with over 20 years of experience in the building industry. We are a relatively young company that offer a wide range of bespoke construction services, from new builds and renovations to extensions and conversions. We are based in Halifax, West

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Issue 324 : Jan 2025

January 27, 2016

A study in light and space, looking out to the beautiful slopes of Bennachie

John O’Grady is an offshore drilling supervisor who spends a lot of his working life looking out over wild and dramatic seascapes, but when he comes home to his new Scotframe house, the outlook is equally stunning.   Not only is the house – which he and his Texan wife Courtney built with the help of Scotframe, the UK’s leading full kit manufacturer – a perfect study in light and  form, it also enjoys unparalleled views across the rich and rolling Aberdeenshire countryside to the distinctive silhouette of Bennachie.   The beautifully-proportioned home is in the hamlet of Daviot, five miles north of Inverurie where Scotframe established their first manufacturing facility and headquarters over 26 years ago. The house is on a site with seven others all of which have been individually designed.   Courtney O’Grady, who now works from the house in her own business as a virtual PA, said securing ownership of a plot was something they had always hoped to do.   She said: “When the site came on to the market, it had permissions for 12 homes. We joined together with a few other like-minded people and purchased the full site, then received permission to divide it in to eight individual plots. We were as surprised as we were delighted at our achievement.   “We worked with locally-based architect Ian Duncan, also based in Inverurie, who helped lay out the positions of the homes on the site and also helped design our house. The brief was our wish-list of the essential elements we wanted – light, space and warmth.”   The most immediately attractive feature of the O’Grady’s project is the bold and adventurous use of glass. The central section of two and a half storeys has windows from ground to apex. The living area has glass walls on three sides and more windows on the roof. Light floods the rooms.   Mrs O’Grady said that one of the other things they stipulated was decent-sized bedrooms for their three children, aged 16, 15 and 12. “We have lived in houses in which the bedrooms were really two rooms and a cupboard,” she said, “so this was important.”   The other crucial decision was to specify Scotframe’s unique Val-U-Therm® closed panel timber frame building system with it’s industry-leading insulation, energy efficiency and airtightness performance properties.   Mrs O’Grady said: “Our architect had worked with Scotframe before and told us about the factory injected insulated panels. They do everything that was promised. This is without a doubt the warmest house I have ever lived in.   “In fact, if the children have a complaint, it’s about how hot their rooms are, which is not bad in an Aberdeenshire winter. We have under-floor heating throughout and we keep the thermostat at just 18 degrees, but the house is as cosy as could be.   “We also used the Val-U-Therm® system for the ceilings and floors. In the ceiling, their strength means that we don’t need roof trusses, so I wake up in the morning to a 12-foot high room which is bathed in light.”   The O’Grady’s build took just eight months. Five of the houses on the site have now been completed, all using Scotframe kits.   Mrs O’Grady said: “Scotframe were very easy to work with – particularly helpful – and I can’t speak highly enough of their Val-U-Therm® timber frame systems. They have really lived up to both their reputation and our expectations.”

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Boxing Day Floods – Our Story

IJM Construction Ltd is a local family run construction firm with over 20 years of experience in the building industry. We are a relatively young company that offer a wide range of bespoke construction services, from new builds and renovations to extensions and conversions. We are based in Halifax, West Yorkshire at the Tenterfields Business Park.   In June 2015 we moved into a new office with attached storage unit as the company was expanding. We put everything back into the business to build up our store of machines, tools, office equipment etc. and made internal renovations to suit our business needs, however, on Boxing day this all changed.   Everything we had worked so hard for and built up over the years, but in particular the last 6 months was gone! Washed away in the floods. The pure force of the water blasted a 80-foot hole through the wall of the Victorian Mill that has stood for more than 200 years, taking peoples lively hoods with it.   The destruction and devastation it caused to the whole site was un-imaginable as our video shows (see link below).   We were able to enter the building the following day once the river levels dropped and the sight before us was just carnage. The whole of our unit and office had been 5-6 feet under water. Machinery, timber, desks, shelving, everything, had swirled around to be left in a wet contaminated heap.   It is devastating seeing your business reduced to just the contents of a skip! We work so hard, not only to give our customers satisfaction on completion of their job but also to look after the lads who work hard for us. These guys are what makes IJM Construction the business it is, they rely on us to pay their wages and keep the work coming. It is this and the huge amount of support from family, friends even strangers that gives us the motivation to carry on and start again.   So what next for IJM? At present we have no office or unit and need to begin to re-build our stock and business equipment to get our business back up and running. Although without the equipment there is not much we can do, our lads are down on site helping out where they can and doing odd jobs for customers.   Despite the floods that have devastated the area on Boxing Day, we are now fighting back! Over 100 businesses have joined forces in ‪#‎CalderdaleRising – a crowdfunding campaign organised by Business for Calderdale. If you could share the news of this fantastically positive step, that would be fantastic. http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/calderdalerising   We will be back! #CalderdaleRising will help us do that. Our enthusiasm, experience and love of the job was not washed away – IJM Construction will not be beaten! https://www.facebook.com/andy.brown.1612/videos/vb.1212588884/10208854128129815/?type=3      

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