Well I can tell you now the experience was incredibly insightful and powerful and it quiet simply changed my outlook on life. For those HBOSers lucky enough to be part of this event I can tell you now that I still carry the mental Red Card, avoid drains like the plague, have a solid relationship with Auntie Vera, I never by-stand and love wasps. I can still remember all of the Impressionist painters vividly and have colourful images of them drinking and discussing the virtues of life. Magic.
For those of you left wondering what on earth I'm banging on about I won't bore you with the detail of the seminar - that's for another posting - but one of the key activities involved me writing positive descriptions about my ideal life as if I was living in that future tense. The things I wrote that day remain private to me and my family BUT I will share the three key life-goals that have provided me with the focus, ambition and drive to make a difference in my life - after all if I didn't get up off my backside nobody else was going to help me realise my potential!
I was fortunate enough to already be working towards my first life goal which involved paying off my mortgage by the time I was thirty - all life goals had to be SMART - Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound - and I have always tried to stretch myself! I'm incredibly proud to be able to sit here and tell you that I achieved this goal before my thirtieth birthday - and no I didn't get lucky with inheritance - it was down to hard work, personal sacrifice and commitment to win.
My second life-goal was to build my own house by the time I was forty and whilst I may not achieve the time-bound element on this one, I know I won't be far out - but hey there's no accounting for a global recession so I do have a reasonable excuse. What is important to me though is I am now well and truly travelling along the road on that journey.
My third life-goal is to buy a retirement home abroad by the time I am fifty. My fourth and most selfish and rewarding to me personally is to put something back into society before I retire at sixty but best to leave that for another blog ;¬) And so the list goes on but the rest are far too personal to share here.
Talk about "binding myself to the mast"...anyway back to the main purpose of me posting...
I am deliberately not going to go into the financing needed to do a self build because there are too many custom finance packages available from high street banks through to specialist self-build companies. Besides which I'm out of my depth and not experienced on this field - seek your own financial advice.
For the record I have funded my project by offsetting against the equity in my current home - nuff said. One piece of advice I will give you - and it's common sense but you'd be amazed how many people don't follow it - work out how much you can borrow to finance your self-build first! This is a critical constraint and will inform your design choices and decision making throughout your entire project starting with the initiation or ideas stage.
After all what's the point in creating your dream home design, in your dream location crammed pack with all those Eco-friendly technologies only to find yourself hugely disappointed, disillusioned and dismayed when you come to cost the project and find it's £500K over budget - KISS (see earlier post on my motto)...especially on your first house.
Once you know your budget constraint you can then start looking for a plot of land. This will be the next constraint you will have to contend with. Very few self-builders I spoke to at the recent Harrogate Home & Renovation show had struck lucky and picked up the perfect plot of land at a reasonable price. Most plots tend to be brown-field or infill sites - those odd shaped strips of land stuck between or in someones garden - some sites are acquired by purchasing a property with the intent on levelling the existing dwelling in order to accommodate the new build house. The only developers I know of that have bought a plot with wide-sweeping rural views across a lake, surrounded by trees and open farm land are the very eccentric self-builders I have come to despise and envy on C4 Grand Designs.
Having two children of school age, plot location was as key consideration for me. After all we are going to be living in the house for several years until my youngest leaves further education at least. Equally I didn't want to have to drive for hours just to visit the site as building works progressed so it had to be near my current home. I had a budget limit of £150K to complete the build element of the project. This forced my first decision - I couldn't afford to purchase a dedicated plot of land to develop because as a rough guide at the time (before the banking crisis) most plots were sold as going concerns with outline or full planning permission for £100K+ with the asking price incorporating a %age of the valuation of the newly build house! This would have pushed my total build costs in excess of £250K+ all in.
I therefore had to find an existing property that we could live in but that had the potential for demolition or further development within the curtilage of the existing site. I had used Google Earth to search the local area looking for potential brownfield or infill sites within the vicinity. I had marked all of the candidate areas with a view to approaching the rightful owners (Land Registry is a good source to find this out). At the same time my wife searched Right Move and all of the local estate agents for candidate properties that met our criteria of a) large garden b) low initial investment if demolition was only development opportunity c) easy access to garden from a main road if retaining existing property d) mixed-stock housing area to increase our design options - after all I'm too young to be considering a bungalow at this stage so didn't want to be forced into this design choice from the get-go.
We struck proverbial gold and came across a four bedroom semi-detached property just up the road from where I was living at the time. It was slightly over budget at £250K but had one of the largest gardens I'd seen, completely disproportionate to the size of the property and completely out of context. But it meant we could stick within our build budget.
Speaking to the locals the original home owner had built a row of semi-detached houses on the old orchard, moved into this one and then continued to sell off slices of the rear garden until it's present day layout. Access to the garden was by an existing drive at the rear but there were several other options available should we so choose. The plot size was definitely large enough to accommodate a new build but this forced my next key decision - unfortunately it was a long and narrow plot so the eventual design would be constrained by these dimensions which meant we had to restrict our design choices somewhat when we eventually sat down with the architect - more on this in a later post.
See aerial photo below showing the plot of land (infill)...
...and a close-up view showing the development opportunity that enabled me to retain the existing property and move one step closer to fulfilling my second life-goal...
TIP : Google Earth is a fantastic free utility to help you find and check out plots of land. It's also proved extremely valuable in the house purchasing process because you can use it to check out the area, find out whether the garden receives sun and at what time of day, where the nearest schools, church, library, shops and travel links are. You can see at a glance the standard of the local area too.With budget now in place and a development plot in the bag we then moved to the exciting stage of designing our very own home - well that's what we thought at the time, the reality was somewhat different as you will find out in my next post on "It's all in the Design".
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