How To Self Build During A Recession - My Experience Of Building A Large Family Home

I've spent this morning with my architect going over our preliminary designs (I will put up lots of images once we have our planning permission in place). We have now agreed on a specific design and all the various elements. Here's the story so far...

Over time, I have been compiling something called a 'brief' which contains hundreds of images from me and my wife on what we want from our self build. Things like how we want our structural glazing to look, elements of other properties we really liked, images of kitchens/bathrooms/living rooms and so on.

All these images have either been scanned in from magazines, from Google images or pictures we have taken with our digital camera. Here are two really good websites you can use to get ideas for your self build or development project:

Mainstream Images

Darren Chung Photography

(by the way for copyrighted images send your architect a link to the specific website so as not to break any laws concerning the distribution of copyrighted material)

The brief gives the architect a detailed insight into the 'feel' of the property you want and how you intend to live there. This is important from his point of view because the more direction he gets from us in the early stages the better ideas we will get from him later on.

He looked at my initial brief as well as all the amendments we'd made over time. He then went away and created four quite different designs for us to look at. Three we're traditional and quite standard which didn't excite us. One of them however struck us as really fun and funky - modern and contemporary without losing the homely feel you tend to get from traditional properties. We picked our favourite and sent him a bunch of images to reinforce various aspects of the design for clarity. We then decided a face to face meeting would be appropriate.

So that is what we did this morning with sketch books and pencils to hand! I'm really enjoying this part of the process because we can let our minds run free and just dream of the kind of house we want to live in. I looked on the web for technologies and other people who have achieved something similar to the kind of dream house I have in mind - this meant looking for examples of structural glazing, or looking at how other people have incorporated basements into their design and so on. My architect and I examined one by one the practicality of my ideas based on building regulations, cost and any other problems we might have in incorporating certain ideas. He's now back at the office creating detailed designs. We will present these to the planners in the next few weeks for their thoughts, and if they are positive, then we will go ahead and apply for planning permission.

We also discussed my renewable energy strategy. We are almost certainly going for a ground source heat pump. I also looked at photovoltaic technology however the payback is just too long. We do have a windy site however which lends the project well to some kind of wind turbine. We decided the traditional propeller design would look out of place there. We then talked about a commercial building in Leicester which has used a comb design similar to this one http://www.inhabitat.com/wp-content/uploads/windfreeways.jpg (ours will not be anywhere near as big nor horizontal but you get the idea). I then asked the architect to look at ways in which we can incorporate some of these into the design in a way that complements everything else.