Kevin McCloud's clifftop cabin constructed from cast-offs By contrast, in the previous television series , we were concentrating more on crafting and creating things out of natural resources. A viewer inspired the new series by questioning, on planning grounds, whether the cabin they had built was really a mobile home," explains McCloud. "We decided to prove it was," he adds. "So we affixed a sign to the building during transit which read 'Caution - Shed On Tour."" Mind you, before the cabin could be taken on the road, a new location had to be found. They needed somewhere that would be a bit hidden away, while at the same time overlooking the sea - and they found the perfect spot. A small, triangular patch of ground, tucked out of sight, at the end of a long caravan park not a million miles from Minehead. They have asked us to keep the precise location a secret. And while it might not sound the best idea to balance a four-ton house-on-wheels on the edge of a 100ft cliff, the team used the laws of physics to keep the cabin in place. They inserted a counterbalancing iron girder at the front end, and put the decking on top, making it possible to stand at the structure's most forward point, and look straight down at the rocks below. Another view of the property (CHRISTOPHER JONES) But it's not just fresh air and a sea view to which the McCloud residence has been treated. The most noticeable new addition is the wooden veranda, which is not only designed in the shape of a ship, but actually was once a ship. The Sanu was about to be broken up in a Cornish shipyard before it was rescued and relocated, albeit in pieces, to Somerset. The same goes for the aeroplane windows, which were retrieved from a breaker's yard at Kemble airfield, in Gloucestershire, and joined together in what looks like a cross between a chandelier and a Sixties miniskirt. These provide a covered area for sea-gazing, whatever the weather. No question which is the most surprising improvement to the property, though. That's the observation platform. One minute, it's at ground level; the next, it's rising 60ft into the air. "The platform is lifted by a second-hand scissor lift, from an old fairground ride," McCloud calls down, as he is conveyed skywards on what looks like a giant metallic section of fence trellis. We aren't connected to the mains here, so the power is being provided by electricity we've generated ourselves, from wood and from animal dung. It's poo-power, if you like. And should the unexpected aerial journey leave the first-time visitor a touch sweaty under the collar, there's a ready-made outdoor shower unit at hand. It comes in the form of an old, see-through British Telecom phone box, in which the handset has been converted into a shower head. "It's extremely simple," explains our host enthusiastically. The water tank sits on top of the phone box, and when you want to shower, you just take the phone off the hook and hold it over your head. These see-through phone boxes are the KX100 models, which aren't really that popular among collectors; you can pick one up for around £200. It's much harder to get hold of one of the traditional, red K3 phone boxes, which go for thousands of pounds. Mind you, an even more dramatic idea than turning a phone box into a shower room was to blow up an egg-shaped Russian sea mine, and turn it into twin ovens. "It was actually a very clever piece of work," says McCloud " We split it in two by wrapping an explosive strip around its middle and st ood well back. Instead of shattering the thing into pieces, it divided into two pretty neat halves. We've even made use of the built-in spring that stops the mine from bobbing about too much when it's in the water. It works really well when you need something to stoke the fire with. It's not just in the hardware department that recycling and repurposing have been the guiding principle, either. When it comes to holiday hygiene and cleanliness the unlikeliest of throwaway ingredients are pressed into service chez McCloud. "We found that snail slime has a skin-regenerating protein that makes it effective as a face cream," he says (come to think of it, his face does have an extra-youthful glow). We made our own soap, too, out of a mixture of rotten mackerel and lime, crushed in a cider press and mixed in with seaweed. Not for the faint-hearted, clearly. Even less so is his ingenious recipe for toothpaste. "It's a rather grey-looking substance which is very effective," enthuses McCloud. It's made from ground-up cuttlefish bone, mixed with human urine, boiled down to a glue. Clothes, too, are fashioned from unusual sources. "Whereas the Inuit people use sealskin to make a waterproof parka, we got a rather talented designer at the Pitt Rivers Museum, in Oxford, to make us a parka out of pure pig gut," he says. As for the more edible bits of the pig, they were cooked on the sawn-off portion of a supermarket trolley that he turned into the oven grill. In true backwoodsman fashion, no part of the trolley was thrown away, either. The smaller offcuts were converted into hand-held clamps, big enough to cook a whole fish over the flames. And if there were a television award for Most Inventive Use For a Tesco Trolley, it would undoubtedly go to the member of the McCloud team who came up with the idea of converting it into a lobster pot. "We actually rescued these trolleys from a water-filled dock where they had been dumped," he explains. We did some work on them, and then they went straight back into the sea. We divided them into two compartments, used trimmed-down traffic cones to act as funnels, through which the crustaceans could crawl, and removed all traces of red, because that's a colour lobsters don't like. When we pulled the pots up a few days later, we had caught three crabs and two lobsters, which actually we released back into the sea, as the crabs were too small, and the lobsters were females with eggs. But it just shows what you can do with what some people might dismiss as junk. And that, explains McCloud, is the whole point of the show. Rather than overtly preaching the virtues of recycling, he'd rather let his ideas do the talking. "Television is all about entertainment," he says. So I'm much happier letting people make up their own minds. They get the chance to follow us on our adventure, and see which ideas work and which don't. They also see how, if they look in the right place and use a bit of ingenuity and improvisation, they can pick up things that will not only make their home more fun, but be a talking point among their friends. You don't have to spend a fortune to impress people. You just have to show a bit of cunning. There's an exception that proves every rule, though. And there's one aspect of Kevin McCloud's empire that most emphatically isn't recycled: a garden gnome, left, whose features distinctly resemble his own. Nor is it freely available - unlike the rotting mackerel - from the natural world. A man-made holiday gnome, you might say. Make do and mend: McCloud's 10 top tips on how to give used materials a new lease of life around the home Public phone box The perfect outdoor shower cubicle. Aircraft windows When joined together they make a sun-filled conservatory. Inflated sheepskins Buoyancy aids for McCloud and crew's home-made sea raft. Fish oil Used in the cabin's oil lamps (mackerel works best). Ship's timbers Ideal for decking and decking supports. Tyre rims Stable supports are used for the braziers in the beachside hut. Traffic cones Passageways through which crustaceans enter McCloud's lobster pots. Shopping trolleys Various uses: oven grill and fish clamp. Lorry wing mirrors Wall-mounted candle-holders and oil-lamp holders. Copper water tank Flattened and cut into roof tiles, sourced from the Hinkley Point Power Station, near Bridgwater. Kevin McCloud's Man Made Home starts on Sunday September 22 at 8pm on Channel 4 .