Blog posts

Blog: Self-Build Story

• Part 14: The Final Installment

  I’m hoping that as you read the final instalment of this diary, Yvonne, James, Lily and I will have spent the first full week in our new home! After almost 18 of the most mentally demanding months of my life, and with a slice of overdue luck, we are now starting to enjoy the fruits of our labour. Yvonne has spent the last few weeks packing up our belongings while I have been on site alongside my dad and Jon Day (07918 736198) of Passivhaus Ltd, driving the build along to try and meet our tight deadline.

• Part 13: Really Coming Together

  As I sit here typing, part of me wonders if next month’s diary instalment will be written from the comfort of the sofa in our new house! In the next three weeks, we are due to exchange contracts on the barn that has been our home for the last seven-and-a-half years. Unless our new property is ready by then, Yvonne, James, Lily and I will either be living on a building site or moving back in with our parents!

• Part 12: This is Going to Be Our Home!

  I don’t know whether it’s just me but throughout the build I never quite believed that the house ever truly belonged to us. Sometimes I would visit the site and feel like I was trespassing, or I was simply an inquisitive guest in another person’s house.

  But I think there is a turning point in every self-build when the penny drops and you finally realise that this amazing house is really going to be your dream home. For Yvonne and I, the sale of our existing property proved to be this defining moment.

• Part Eleven: Falling in Love With it Again

  What a difference a month can make. Over the last year, I must have fallen in and out of love with the property on more than a dozen occasions, but with the finishing line almost in sight, the love has definitely been rekindled.

• Part Ten: A New Lease of Life

  Sometimes it takes a bit of bad luck and a fresh set of ideas to get a project back on track.

  Unfortunately for me, the bad luck had come in the shape of a period of sustained illness and some costly errors from an unscrupulous plasterer.

  Forced to take some time away from my business and the build, I handed the reins over to my dad, Geoff Copeland. He chose to speed up progress by recruiting more professional help on site.

• Part 9: A Series of Setbacks

  As with every self-build project, it was almost inevitable that we would come up against setbacks at some point. No matter how well planned or structured a build programme is, it seems you can’t always count on everybody being as reliable as your main contractor.

  The saying goes that problems always come in threes and on this occasion it proved correct. In the space of a month we faced costly issues with plasterers, windows and roofs that were all completely out of our control.

• Part 8: A New Impetus

  After eight months of watching the house take shape, it was a pleasant feeling to see work finally begin on the inside. All of a sudden there was a new urgency to the build as a fresh set of faces arrived on site.

• Part 7: Attention turns to the inside

  The one thing we were never prepared for when we set out to build a contemporary house was just how costly and time-consuming it would be to make the property watertight.

  I stand by our decision to run without a quantity surveyor, despite the early protests of our architect. I still do not see the point of paying someone to tell you that your house will cost twice as much to build as you actually thought but, in hindsight, we should have priced up the exterior finishes, or at least been warned of the potential costs, at an earlier stage in the build.

• Part 6: "Getting the Roof On"

  When I was a child, I grew up in a pub which had flat roofs. They were the old-style felt roofs which were quite common in the ’70s and ’80s. The pub, barely half a mile from where we are now building, was famous for having a huge collection of porcelain chamber pots hanging from the beams above the bar, and I remember them frequently being scattered across the floor to collect the drips which fell from the ceiling during particularly heavy rainfall.

• Part 5: "A Stressful Month..."

  There are two things that almost always emerge from any self-build or renovation story. One has an unav oid ably negative effect on the progress and the other — completely the opposite!

  In January and February of 2009, the weather took a turn for the worse as temperatures plummeted to a record low. With the sand and water supply frozen solid, the bricklayers found their festive break extended by two weeks.

• Part 4: "The House Materialises"

  The arrival of the bricklayers on site is probably the biggest milestone in any self-build project and after 18 months of what felt like very little activity, the house seemed to suddenly materialise before our eyes.

  Once the footings had been dug, Jim (Arbour Developments: 07715 379793) took the sensible decision to bring in two bricklayers he had worked with on another project.

• Part 3: "I realised my worst fears"

  When we first bought our hillside plot of land some 18 months ago, I’d already resigned myself to the fact that if there were to be any nasty financial shocks, it would be in the ground.

  Almost every Grand Designs-style programme you watch takes great pleasure in highlighting the self-builder’s anguish as they are handed a £100,000 bill for shoring up an unstable sloping site, after involuntarily tapping into the local natural water source!

• Part 2: The Initial Euphoria Dies

  The initial euphoria of planning permission approval came, then went, as we began to realise the magnitude of the task ahead. Neither of us had ever attempted to build so much as an extension before — even the simplest of DIY tasks or the assembling of children’s toys usually involved a call to Yvonne’s dad who would duly oblige.

• Part 1: Time to Bite the Bullet

  Persistence sometimes pays off. If you badger someone for long enough it will eventually end in one of two ways. You are either rewarded with what you want or you scurry away with a bruised ego and your tail between your legs — but you live to fight another day!

  The plot of land we fell in love with lay on the same stretch of country lane we currently live on. Turn right out of our drive and, in just under a mile, you are there. The problem was it was not for sale and, after speaking to the current owner, probably never would be.