So much has happened! I wanted to update as we went along but I noticed that this part of the site was getting a surprising amount of visitors and there were a few things happening where we needed to keep things a little on the DL. I had to purposely keep a little quiet. So to sum up what has been happening these past months…. we submitted planning permission, the planner took absolutely ages, made some vague comments that they weren’t sure, we decided to consult a planning consultant (who was great!). We withdrew the planning permission as we thought the plan would have a better chance of going through if we moved the building back a little on the plot. We were poised to submit the amended plans when we discovered that the land had an obscure covenant on it that meant if we built we would need to pay an extra £125000. If we were developers we would have got out a loan, paid off the covenant, built a house, sold the house, paid off the loan, and then have made a nice profit. However as we wanted this to be our long term home, and soon, this wasn’t a great option. So while we were on our West Coast adventure we finally came to the conclusion that this £125000 had to end our building plans…
However there is a very silver lining. We discovered separately that the land is worth much more than we had thought. So what we are doing now is selling the land and hopefully will be able to have some money towards buying a new place. There is hardly any building land within the city so it is very unlikely that we will be building our next place. We may find somewhere that we will improve and add things such as solar panels as appropriate.
To conclude, my thoughts:
The planning process for little folk like us (i.e. not a developer) is AWFUL. There is a reason why all and sundry give out about this system. There is no incentive to build an ‘eco house’, and in fact they are harder to get through planning as a full-on eco house has to look slightly different from the usual developer style boxy house. It is an obscure and odious system. Ha! We never got to see if our plan would go through as we did not resubmit after finding out about the covenant. I think our plan would have gone through. So I am not saying this from the perspective of a sore loser but as a general user of the system.
All along we have been very realistic that we may not end up building a house, I purposely did not start daydreaming about specifics such as door handles, paint colours, how great our new house could be etc. as I knew full-well that the whole thing might not happen. I would recommend this to anyone else considering building too as it makes the potential psychological blow much less!
Hiring an architect that you get on well with and who is on your wavelength is essential. Our architect was fantastic.
If you are building a whole house or a difficult extension a planning consultant might be a good idea in addition to an architect. You only need to hire them for a one-off visit to look at your plans and plot and give advice. Sure it is another person you have to pay but they should be able to give level headed advice.
So thank you those of you who are reading, this ends this part of our tale. To use a house metaphor: as one door closes another door opens. I’ve been wondering what to do with this part of the site now, I’m not sure if I should close it down or keep it going for the next house. What I do know is that I can’t wait for the next stage in our adventure. Whoop! :)





