Self-build homes

roundthebend

Anybody here done this or thinking about it?
Our kids are coming towards the end of their formal education and my wife and I are still quite young - I'm 40 later this year, she's 38 soon.

We like the idea of living somewhere with hills and scenery, which is not Peterborough. And we like the idea of designing a modest home to suit our needs. Nothing too grand, but the project would perhaps be a fun hobby for a few years from researching land through to design and build.

Eco-friendly homes are of interest, flat pack builds are too. We'd even look at buying an existing property and enhancing it.

Biggest hurdle would probably be finding land that we could get planning permission for. I guess we'll join some forums and visit shows.

Axe_meister

Have been looking into this. The biggest problem is finding land.
Most Land that already had planning permission is usually for high density housing.
Seems the easiest thing to do is to buy a wreck and knock it down and start afresh.

boogieman

My ex brother in law did it. He gave up full time work and got a lot of skill training when the government were paying people to retrain as brickies, plasterers, plumbers etc, so he had a good grounding in basic building work. He still came out of it completely knackered and with a spend of 40-50% above his original estimate.

Don’t underestimate quite how hard a job this is... it will probably take a lot longer than you think too. I don’t know how qualified you are but don’t forget that you won’t be legally able to do a lot of trades work yourself (gas and electrical work are definite no no’s without the required tickets), so you need to factor that in to the costs. The rewards are undoubtedly good but it’ll put a lot of strain on you physically, mentally and financially. At least you have age on your side. 

Neill

 I agree with everything @boogieman says.  Britain, or at least England, is not sympathetic to this sort of thing - given the housing crisis it should be, but for some reason the British have never been keen on self build so it's an against the grain thing to do. 

If you go down this route thinking it is a "fun hobby", please think again. I was talking to my dispensing optician the other day - she and her husband, who is a professional carpenter, built their own house.  Her words - "never again".   

The motivation for a lot of people is to get exactly the house they want, forgetting that your needs and preferences change over time so what suits you today might not be right even ten years on. 

Renovating a run down property is a much more feasible proposition, but finding such a property in a nice country location is a bit of a pipe dream. (Anybody see the ridiculous ending of "Detectorists"?)  

57Deluxe

man-who-lives-in-a-sandcastle

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-latin-america-42761099/the-brazilian-man-who-lives-in-a-sandcastle

Sassafras

ToneControl

you need a lot of actual cash, you can't get a mortgage at all until certain phases are complete, and obviously, it needs to be fully built before you can get a full mortgage

easiest way AFAIK is to find a house that is falling down, and demolish it - you can usually get permission to replace a house with something a similar size

Dominic

Find your plot
get planning consent
Put the build -out to tender
The builder will probably make £25 ,000 profit at the end
It will be the best £25000 you ever spent
and the bonus is you'll still be married ..............25k is certainly cheaper than a divorce !

Neill

Dominic said:

Find your plot
get planning consent
Put the build -out to tender
The builder will probably make £25 ,000 profit at the end
It will be the best £25000 you ever spent
and the bonus is you'll still be married ..............25k is certainly cheaper than a divorce !

That's good advice - just a case of finding the right builder...

ToneControl

Dominic said:

Find your plot
get planning consent
Put the build -out to tender
The builder will probably make £25 ,000 profit at the end
It will be the best £25000 you ever spent
and the bonus is you'll still be married ..............25k is certainly cheaper than a divorce !

yes, if you are not an experienced professional builder or project manager, seriously consider hiring someone, even if you intend to do some hands-on work yourselves

Luxxman

I’ve done it twice and the key is definitely finding a good site. Once you own a site (and Planning Approval) you can get a self-build mortgage using the site as the deposit with stage payments available as you progress. We got our last one from Norwich and Peterborough Building Society (now amalgamated with the Yorkshire BS). The first site was an orchard at the side of someone’s house, the second was a small industrial site in an inner city housing area - you often need some imagination to understand what has potential and what is possible but a good Architect can help. It’s generally easier to find a wreck and demolish it or extend. You can often get approval to extend or demolish and rebuild houses in the countryside increasing their size by 40-50% ( depending on the Local Authoriy policy) if they haven’t been extended before. If you’ve got some decent building skills and are well organised, then doing a self build can be great fun but does take long time ( my second took 4 years) and it can save you 1/3rd of the cost if you are careful. It certainly can be a strain on family life as it becomes all-consuming and once you start there is no turning back. Not for the faint hearted but also very rewarding. A good tip is to rent somewhere close while building so you can keep an eye on the site and not to move in until it is finished if you can afford it! 

Phil_aka_Pip

I've sometimes thought (as an alternative to my own custom-built design which I could witter on about for ages) of modifying an existing building. Suppose there were a row of 3 farmworkers' cottages in a small terrace. The one on the end becomes a kitchen/diner/dayroom, the one in the middle becomes a lounge/hifi room, and the one at the other end becomes your studio/music room. You can fit bedrooms/bathroom/computer-room-cum-library upstairs.

Myranda

My uncle did a self-build spent a couple of years ... 

He started with a farmhouse plus some outbuildings, and knocked down the old house. 

Being an engineer it was practical to do a lot of things himself
- hiring a JCB to dig foundations and demolish a house and push the rubble into the foundation hole is expensive, but buying a scrap one and fixing it, then selling it whn the project was finished brought in money...
- labourers like to be paid, but friends and family are happy to help for beer and bbq.
- to an engineer projects like underfloor heating, or wiring a house are easy if they have enough time...
- sandblasting an old barn costs a fortune, but buying a sandblaster and striping the old rotten bits yourself means you get a pretty barn you end up using for wedding/reception venue hire for less than the cost of just hiring the sandblaster.

After buying a house, doing it up, and selling it... time after time after time they had a big metaphorical bag of cash that meant that he was able to take a couple of years as a sabatical. His in-laws lived there when there was enough there to live in and they were retired an helped...

Self build projects are LOT of work, he might have wound up with a multi-million pound property but it took years and several people... there were challenges and set-backs and without being able a to work on it all day every day because he didn't have to work he'd probably still be doing it... or have gone mad and gotten divorced 

Axe_meister

Think about a kit home. Often the manufacturer will have approved builders who will work to a fixed price

Rocker

Include the price of a sturdy car or van in your calculations. Hundreds of runs to hardware shops etc....

Fuengi

If you are going to do this once, do it right and build what YOU want, not what a builder or architect wants you to build. 

Kit homes.... might be cost effective, but are they really anyone's dream house? Why give up the only opportunity you might have to design and build a bespoke house?

jonnyburgo

Those German kit homes look good, saw them on grand designs, that is the way I would go personally. However in this country its all fucked up, they won't let you build an eco friendly low impact house but they will let a developer with a suitcase full of cash build a new build estate of egg box houses.

roundthebend

Fuengi said:

If you are going to do this once, do it right and build what YOU want, not what a builder or architect wants you to build. 

Kit homes.... might be cost effective, but are they really anyone's dream house? Why give up the only opportunity you might have to design and build a bespoke house?

I believe the kit homes manufacturers will build whatever design you like, as long as it fits in their factory and on a truck. The term "kit home" just means that it is constructed offsite and arrives in segments on a truck ready to be nailed together.

JAYJO

whatever happened to real musicians? The ones without a pot to piss in.

Axe_meister

If you knock down and rebuild you save 20% VAT on building materials.
If you keep the existing structure but strip out and make new, you still have to pay VAT.
If you have the cash available, why not build a standard kit home, it does not have to be your dream home.
Then sell up after a year and make a large profit to fund your real dream home.

57Deluxe

Dominic said:

Find your plot
get planning consent
Put the build -out to tender
The builder will probably make £25 ,000 profit at the end
It will be the best £25000 you ever spent
and the bonus is you'll still be married ..............25k is certainly cheaper than a divorce !

and make a TV series out of it...