proving easier said than done. “We’d been looking mainly in south west Wales, Cornwall and Devon, but there wasn’t much available,” Ian explains. They were also unsure about moving to an area so far from transport links such as motorways and airports. It was at this point they realised their own substantial back garden, in Fareham near the Hampshire coast, could be perfect. “We thought ‘we’ve got a building plot, let’s use it,’” Ian explains. They knew good healthcare was available locally and had built their lives there, so they “decided to stay put,” and subdivided the plot. The added bonus of this was, as Tina explains, that “the plot was free! And we had no one competing with us for it.”
They set about appointing an architect and went through a few designs before settling on their favourite. “The first was a basement option with bedrooms downstairs, using insulated concrete formwork (ICF),” Ian explains. “I liked the idea of ‘upside down living,’ but the costs of that got horrendous.” There was also more risk: “you don’t know what you’re going to find until you start digging the hole,” says Ian.
They also looked at a more conventional house design with a roof garden on top but, explains Tina, “that got thrown out at the pre- application stage.” She admits they began to get slightly despondent, but they persevered and eventually settled on a timber framed
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76
