Day 4 - Mortgage stress & land split complete.

It's time to finally sort the mortgage.  Reading through the special conditions, (and there are several), it states that we have to sell our current home before we can have the first installment of the mortgage.  Several phone calls and emails later, it turns out it was a mistake by the underwriter and a new offer is being sent out in 36 hours.  Again, another very stressful moment whilst I awaited final clarifcation on this.  Everything else is with the solicitor so I will need to chase this up next week.


When you self build on your garden, you have to separate the land away from the current title via land registry.  We had to gain permission from our current mortgage providers to to release this land and the current equity of the house has to be enough  to cover this split, along with adequate rights of way to satisfy their solicitors.  We had permission to go ahead with this in April and it has taken until the end of August, four months, to finally come through.

The builders have been working hard today.  Our neighbour asked if we would remove an old patio so this has now gone into the hardcore of our drive. 

The base of our house is now cut out and it really is huge.

This will be our patio and garden:

Mum and Dad's base has now started to be dug out as well.  I'm assuming this will be finished tomorrow ready for the footings to be dug after the bank holiday.  

Day 3 - X marks the spot

First job this morning - the digger removed the hedgerow from the boundary between ourselves and next door.  This will be replaced by a new fence and also provides a wider space on the new driveway.

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As I was leaving for work, our builder let me know he was hoping to put the footings in on Friday.  Today, I had to arrange the the 10 year structural warranty insurance and site insurance.  Both of these insurances are non-negotiable with our self build mortgage.  At each major stage of the build, the insurance auditor signs it off - on top of a check from the local authority building inspector - and then the Building Society will release the next set of funds.  One of the stages is for the auditor to check the footings before concrete is poured and this meant only two days to buy the policy and for them to get on site.  I was getting quite worried about this until our builder phoned to say he had rethought it and was going to concrete the footings next Thursday, so the auditor has to come next Wednesday afternoon.  Big sigh of relief!

Mum and Dad's footings are going in on next Friday as well.

Some good news - the land registry have finally completed the land split paperwork and we are awaiting it to arrive with our solicitors.  Once this is in place, the mortgage can progress - until then it's the bank of Mum and Dad! 

All day on site, the land has been cleared on our plot at the back and the team have been working hard to try and achieve the required levels.  We had a visit from the building inspector and our footings have to be slightly deeper than first estimated due to the conifers on the side of the garden (who actually chooses to plant conifers!).  The assessor then came to mark out the site of our house with blue x's and it's huge!  He was really impressed with the plot sizes and said that we easily fit two big houses in them.

In addition, the drive is now in place with most of the hardcore and you can start to see the size of Mum and Dad's plot as well.


It's all starting to take shape and it's really exciting.

Mum & Dad's plot from the back

Day 1 - Diggers in the Mudbath

Today at 7.30am, the JCB Digger arrived to clear the site and to start creating the driveway for the two houses.  It was a brand new digger, only it's second job and it was certainly tested when the rain started to pour down this afternoon.  Apparently, the only new feature of the digger is cruise control with top speed limit of 30 mph.

There used to be a shed at the bottom of the garden that my husband knocked down.  The bricks were moved from here to create the hardcore for the first part of the drive, and then topped up by a further delivery.  It would be interesting to know where this came from.

The poor builder had not dressed for rain and was absolutely soaked, unlike the JCB driver who was very snug in his cab.  He is so skinny and had to borrow some of Dave's shorts that drowned him!

Let's hope for slightly less rain tomorrow.

Our selfbuild dream

Today is the first day of a major project for our family.  We have watched all the house programmes, read all the magazines and bored all our friends and family for 18 months.  Now we can put planning permission and financial hurdles behind us, (we got our self build mortgage approved today!), and start on the actual build.

So what's the plan?  The site is a 1/3 of an acre and used to be the garden of the house we renovated last year.  We are building a 5 bedroom house for my husband, me and two boys (12 & 14), and a separate 2 bedroom house for my parents.

We are looking at 9 months in total  - but we head into a winter build so we will see.  We hope you enjoy following our project and seeing the transformation

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