Losing the plot, repeatedly
Our journey to finding the right self-build plot.
I loved our old house, like really loved it. We had worked really hard to make what was a converted office building into a home we were proud of.
The biggest talking point was always our flooring. I sourced the original gym floor from Kelvin Hall in Glasgow and had it driven down, tape and all, to Kent. When I presented it to my builder he said ‘well you’re gonna remove all the tape yeah?’.
It’s fair to say he didn’t get our ‘vision’.
We lived in the house for five years when Covid hit. We had two small children and the courtyard garden just wasn’t working for our resident mud-lovers. Mat and I had always dreamed of doing a self-build and it felt the time was right.
We viewed three different projects/plots but lost out everytime to developers who weren’t in a chain and were cash buyers (b*stards). We just couldn’t compete - so in late 2020 we took the leap, sold up and moved into a tiny rented house.
In this time we viewed so many things; scraps of land, rows of garages, barns and do-er up-ers.
For me the one that got away was a mid-century time warp.
Realistically we should never have viewed it because it was so out of our price range and in hindsight wasn’t in the right location for us but god she had good bones.
It was at this point we started to get desperate. Mat hated living in the rented house and was prepared to settle for anything as long as it got us out of there. I was still holding out for the right one so we cast the net wider.
Enter the house of many outbuildings! It was the location that drew me in, it was the potential for an art studio that sold it to Mat.
We put in an offer the same day we viewed but we had done this multiple times before and never succeeded so when the estate agent called and said it was ours we did have a slight wobble - did we really want this one?!?
It was a project on a great plot but it involved changing schools and moving away from the town we had always assumed we would stay in. But we knew this was a bit of a unicorn in the area so we decided to go with it.
So in January 2021 we moved into our 1930s bungalow that had not been updated since the 50s. It has no heating and single pane windows but we had grand plans.
We invited our architect around immediately to start scheming, when she asked when we wanted to start building I optimistically said ‘within six months’.
How wrong we were…