Building Dreams

Building a home is easier than you might think. So much so, that this is the second building project we have managed. Sharon and I and our three children, Jake, Ella and Max have moved out of our first self-build and in with my dad at his house in Lakenheath while our new Potton timber frame house is being built.

Our first bungalow was designed by an architect. It was nice but I think we just made decisions on the design too quickly. The flow of it didn’t work. It didn’t feel warm and cosy and it wasn’t really a home to us. I don’t think that even if we had spent money on it, that would have changed.

I spotted a plot of land for sale at Holywell, near Lakenheath where I work, so I put the idea of self-building another home to Sharon. At first, she wasn’t too keen at the thought of all the hassle of selling the bungalow and moving the children to a new school. But when she realised they could stay at the same school, and that we could rent he bungalow out, live at my father’s during the build and then move, she had second thoughts.

Last time we built a brick and block house, but it lacked the character of the timber frame house designs by Potton. I didn’t really know much about timber frame package homes. I knew they were quicker to build but that was about it. We visited the Potton website at www.potton.co.uk to find out more about the Potton package. Potton have hundreds of house designs and you can see three of them at the Potton Self Build Show Centre in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, so we went for a visit. We fell in love with the Caxton showhome the minute we saw it, so as soon as we went home that was it, we had decided to self-build again.

We managed to get the land for £100K, £30K under the asking price. Initially, planning permission was granted for a 1700 sq ft property but we managed to get that increased to 2,000 sq ft in order to build a Caxton with a large breakfast dinner sunroom area added to the design. We worked with Richard Hall at Potton who helped us through the process of getting out house design exactly right for us.

We chose the Caxton because we wanted the garage that is featured on the existing design but we also wanted a bigger kitchen dining family room, so Potton suggested adding a sunroom to the house design. Upstairs we modified the plans to change one of the ensuites into a walk in wardrobe in order to stop the kids from fighting over whose bathroom it was. Potton were very good, they allowed us to go through eight revisions of the plans free of charge. We plan to live here for the rest of our lives so it was important to get the design absolutely right. 

Potton managed to get planning permission granted for us to build a 2,300 sq ft modified Caxton L from their Tudor style Heritage range on June 26. The build itself started on Thursday, September 24 when the timber frame arrived and within a week, the skeleton of the house was complete. I’ll tell you more about that in my next blog.