Emma and Dan: A 1970s Bungalow That Grew Up

Prestbury, Cheshire. A blank canvas, three children, and a house that was never going to be ripped out and started again.

There's a version of home renovation that exists almost entirely in glossy magazines. Sequential, fully budgeted, every decision made before the first wall comes down. Underfloor heating throughout. Smart everything. Heat pump on the gable end. Signed off, photographed, finished.

That version exists. For most families, it isn't what happens.

What happens is closer to what Emma and Dan went through. A 1970s bungalow in Prestbury, badly insulated, with buckets in the kitchen catching water from a leaky roof. Three young children. An ambition for a proper family home rather than a postcard. And the same financial pragmatism that quietly governs almost every renovation in the country.

“Over the last few years we've literally spent an absolute fortune on our heating, due to the bad insulation of the seventies bungalow that we were in. We lived with the leaky roof, buckets in the kitchen catching water.”

That sentence is the start of most renovation stories you don't read about.

The Brief

Planning was secured for a first floor extension. Bungalow up, two storey out. The downstairs would open up into the kind of kitchen-diner-snug arrangement most family life now happens in. Four bedrooms upstairs, an ensuite for the master, a family bathroom for the kids.

The heating decisions were made early, because heating decisions on a renovation always have to be made early. They drive the floor build-up, the plasterboard, the joinery, and what the rooms look like when they're finished.

Downstairs went underfloor. With a new slab, no existing floor to lift, and an open plan layout that was being designed from scratch, it was the obvious call. Different zones, different thermostats, constant ambient warmth under the kitchen, the dining table, the snug.

Upstairs was the harder question.

Why Not Underfloor Upstairs?

This is where most renovation projects make a quiet, expensive compromise. Underfloor heating upstairs sounds great on paper. In practice, it adds floor build-up that eats into the headroom you've just paid to add, lengthens the programme, and roughly doubles the cost of the upstairs heating system.

“The reason we didn't put underfloor heating upstairs is because of the expense. And it just wouldn't have been practical at all.”

So the default would normally be radiators. Six to seven of them, in a four bed, two bath layout. White metal panels on every external wall, in front of every window, dictating where the wardrobes go, the sideboards go, the bed goes.

Emma and Dan had spent two years designing rooms in their head. The last thing they wanted was a pre-determined furniture layout decided by where the plumber was happy to put the rad.

“At the time when we were making all those decisions, you're not sure what furniture you're going to have. With wardrobes, sideboards, you've got radiators in the way. You've just got more options really with your ThermaSkirt.”

This is the bit the heating industry tends not to talk about. Radiators don't just heat rooms. They constrain them.

The Heat Pump Question

Like most families doing a major renovation in 2026, Emma and Dan had the heat pump conversation. They've kept their gas boiler for now. The capital cost of the renovation was already substantial, and the boiler had life in it. But they wanted to keep the door open.

“At the moment we're running the underfloor heating and the ThermaSkirt off the boiler, and for now we're sticking with that. It was all down to initial expense, just wanted to get it over the line. In the future we may change to a heat pump.”

The phrase that matters there is heat pump ready.

A heat pump runs at a lower flow temperature than a gas boiler. To deliver the same warmth, you need more emitter surface area. That's the whole physics of the thing. It's also why so many heat pump retrofits run into trouble, because the existing radiators were sized for 70°C water and now they're being asked to do the same job at 45°C.

Emma and Dan don't have that problem to solve. The downstairs underfloor heating was always going to work at low flow temperatures. The upstairs ThermaSkirt was specified to perform at 45°C, well within heat pump territory. The day they decide to swap the boiler out, the emitters don't change. The pipework doesn't change. Only the thing in the utility room changes.

That's not a marketing line. It's the same principle that's now being applied to thousands of UK retrofits, where ThermaSkirt is increasingly used as the heat pump enabler rather than the heat pump alternative.

The Specification, Room by Room

The upstairs spec is worth setting out properly, because it's a fairly typical heat pump ready Cheshire family layout.

Master bedroom and landing. BM3, the deeper 170mm profile. Higher output per metre, which matters in the larger room volumes and the open landing. Colour matched skirts. Controller behind the master bedroom door. Pipework brought across under the window in black to follow the run, then back up the wall and round, all colour coded so the flow is legible if you know what you're looking at.

Smaller bedrooms. BM2, the standard 114mm profile. Lower height, slightly less output, plenty for the room sizes. Each one with its own controller, set to whatever the occupant of that room wants it set to.

Ensuite and family bathroom. Towel rails. ThermaSkirt can run a bathroom on its own, but most people, including Emma and Dan, want somewhere to put the towels. The system is designed to take both. Towel rails sit on the same circuit, controlled in the same way.

The visual difference between BM3 and BM2 ends up being a quietly effective design choice. The deeper skirts in the master suite match the proportion of the room. The shallower ones in the kids' rooms feel modern and discreet. Same product, different posture. Most people walking through the house wouldn't be able to tell you what's heating it.

“You can notice the different heights in the ThermaSkirt. These are much deeper to create a more Victorian look in here in a sense, and lower in the bedrooms.”

The Juliet Balcony Problem

Every renovation has a moment where the design ambition meets the engineering reality. For Emma and Dan, that moment lived in the master bedroom.

A floor to ceiling Juliet balcony. Sliding doors across most of the gable. The kind of detail that makes a bedroom feel like a hotel suite and pushes the headline price of the extension up by a meaningful amount. It's also, from a heating perspective, the worst wall in the house.

Glazing loses heat. Big glazing loses a lot of it. Building Regs pass it, but anyone who has stood in a glass-fronted bedroom on a January morning knows what U-values feel like in practice. Cold air falls down the inside of the pane, slides across the floor, and finds your feet.

The conventional answer is a tall radiator either side of the door. Two metal panels eating up the only two pieces of solid wall in the room, in front of where you'd ideally put a chair, a bench, a bedside table.

The ThermaSkirt answer is the heated threshold.

It does two things at once. It carries the heating circuit across the doorway, so the run continues uninterrupted from one side of the room to the other. And it puts emitter directly under the largest sheet of glass in the house, exactly where the heat loss is greatest and exactly where the cold downdraft starts.

In other words, the bit of the room that should be heated hardest is the bit being heated hardest. The physics aligns with the architecture rather than fighting it.

There's no visual concession. The threshold sits flush, finished to match the rest of the BM3 run, and most visitors would walk over it without noticing it's there. The wall stays clear. The doors stay clear. The view stays the view.

This is the bit that most heating specs miss on a renovation. The clever spec isn't choosing the best emitter for the wall. It's choosing the emitter that lets the room work the way the homeowner wanted it to work in the first place.

The Install

Heating installations on renovation projects are usually one of the points where the programme slips. Carcass first fix into second fix is a notorious choke point. The plumbers are waiting on the joiners, the joiners are waiting on the plasterers, and someone is always waiting on a delivery.

The ThermaSkirt site visit was the kind of process most homeowners would recognise as how things ought to work. Survey first. Measurements taken back to the factory. Components precut. Two plumbers on site for two days. Aftercare check.

“They were brilliant from start to finish. They came and measured up, said leave it with us, we're going to get everything measured up, take those measurements back to the factory, get everything cut. The lads will arrive on site, it'll be really straightforward. And it actually was.”

The reason this matters isn't just convenience. Pre-engineered systems compress the install window, which is where labour cost lives. On a four bed two storey extension, that compression is the difference between a one week heating package and a three week heating package.

Living With It

The upstairs is, in Emma's words, a blank canvas. Colour will come. The walls are calm whites. The bedrooms look out into the trees. Nothing on the walls. Nothing under the windows. The eye is allowed to land where it lands, rather than being constantly drawn to a metal box on every external wall.

“It's just really nice just living with it. Quite tranquil with the gorgeous views outside. The bedrooms are very calming. ThermaSkirt definitely the way forward, just in every way. Aesthetically you don't even notice it. It's brilliant.”

That last bit is the highest praise a heating product can get from a homeowner. You don't even notice it.

For 60 years, the heating industry has asked homeowners to design their houses around its products. ThermaSkirt is one of the few products that lets the house come first.

The Wider Pattern

Emma and Dan are not a hypothetical case study. They're a Cheshire family who did what almost every Cheshire family doing a renovation in 2026 is trying to do. Make the house more efficient. Get the heating right. Keep the bills survivable. Don't lock out the future.

What they ended up with is a 1970s bungalow that no longer looks or feels like a 1970s bungalow. Underfloor heating downstairs. ThermaSkirt upstairs. Towel rails in the wet rooms. A boiler today. A heat pump tomorrow, if and when they want one.

It's not the version that exists in glossy magazines. It's the version that exists.

And increasingly, it's the version that works.