selfbuilder Diaries


avigating a few significant bumps in the road hasnt deterred ally and Nick from persevering with a conversion from a Class Q to a full planning permission in Devon, knowing that dream can now become a reality


P


eople ask why we decided to undertake a self-build. Well, when we moved back to Devon we rented


a property where the landlord was about to have a house built, he offered part of his land to us to buy and build one for ourselves. We had not even thought about it, but were having such difficulty trying to purchase a house of any decent quality within our budget that we thought, why not? We did a huge amount of research on self-build, and decided we should try and do this. The landlord later rescinded the offer of the land, but we still wanted to go ahead with the self-build. It caused quite a delay to us. We eventually found a plot of land with an old open barn with an expiring Class Q planning permission to convert. We met with the farmer, set in place an Option Agreement for him to reserve the land for us and put in an application for full planning to enable us to demolish the barn and rebuild it. This hadn’t been done in Devon at the time, but there were a few cases elsewhere in the country where people had been successful in changing a Class Q permission to full planning. Two planning applications later we obtained the full planning and purchased the land. Since then we have obtained further permission to move the house completely off its footprint from the edge to the centre of our piece of land. As we weren’t living onsite we started by building our garage and workshop so that we had storage and some inside space. As we are doing most of the build ourselves this building has given us the chance to practise and try out some products to use on the house. We have also put in all our services including a bore hole. It was a very exciting day to say the least when they


8 www.sbhonline.co.uk


This hadn’t been done in Devon but there were a few cases elsewhere in the country


drilled the bore and struck water! Our build is on a tight budget, (even tighter since Covid as all our costs seem to have doubled), so we have had to do as much as possible ourselves. We have had contractors in for the big things (foundations and concrete slab) but we have done everything else. We decided to build the house with a woodcrete ICF block from Italy as, with this, we could build it ourselves. The shape of the house is similar to the barn, so quite simple. We dug out hundreds of tonnes of soil to give us a flat area on our sloping site and started the build. All was going slowly but well until


March 2023 when we were waiting for our ICF blocks to be delivered and we found out that the UK distributor


(to whom we had paid a considerable amount of money to) had gone into liquidation. The shock of this took a few days to sink in and then we realised we had no money and no blocks. The power of Facebook and self-build forums meant we managed to get in touch with other people in the same situation and this helped us to work out a way forward. We were lucky as I had part-paid for my blocks by credit card, so I was able to get all of the monies refunded, but again this delayed us.


Finally our two artic lorries of blocks arrived in June 2023 and 93 pallets of blocks were unloaded onto our slab and land, giving us just enough room to start laying the perimeter blocks. Lots of moving and carrying of blocks has


sep/oct 2024


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