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A house! A house! My kingdom for a house!

A blog by AliMcLeod in General

  • Entries

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About this blog

With apologies to Shakespeare and King Richard III, this blog will be about our experiences in buying a plot and building a house in the Kingdom of Fife.

Entries in this blog

Spot the Pipeline

Those beyond a certain again will remember Spot The Ball, the competition on the sports pages back in the 80s/90s.   It was an action photo from a football match with the ball missing – you had to mark the picture with an X where you thought the ball was and send it in with your entry fee. If the middle of your X aligned with the middle of the ball, you won the prize.     Except, it wasn’t quite like that. What actually happened was that judges also guessed where th

Missing In Action

So, after a flurry of initial blog posts back in March and April, I went quiet. Real life (home and work) got a bit mental and I just didn't have the time to post more. And, my wife and I have also done a fair bit of reflection on the way forward.   I'd gotten about 2/3 of the way through the journey to where we are today. I've covered finding the plot, and the decision whether to buy it, initial view on wayleaves and servitudes, tweaking the design that came with the plot, clearing to

Act VII - Internal Examination

We were making good progress with the architect; we had agreed on the new external look and received an updated internal floorplan, which was a big improvement over the layout that came with the plot.   We received the first draft from the architect on 7th July 2016, and agreed on the drawings to submit to Planning on 18th August.   During those 5-6 weeks, my wife and I sat with the plans, "walking" through the house, working out how we’d use each space, and going back to the

Act VI - Scene II - The Consequences of Space

Based on our brief, our architect had taken the original designs that came with our plot, utilised the same house footprint, and had come up with a new set of designs and internal floor layouts.   We had two choices for the external design - a flat roof or two mono-pitched roofs. After a little discussion between my wife and I, and with to the architect, we agreed on the two mono-pitched roofs design.   The house to the west of us had an almost flat roof (they initially submi

Act VI - The New Design

The first decision to be made with the new architect was how to change the external house design to remove the lack of head height in the roofspace, but stay within the existing footprint.    In the napkin sketches, the architect had suggested two mono-pitched roofs to replace the existing dual-pitched roofs and we immediately liked that design. However, he didn’t immediately just go with that design and at the start of July 2016, he sent us through a couple of options, one with a flat

Act V - Selecting an Architect

Its nearing the end of May 2016, and we’d owned our plot for 10 months. In that time we had:   Pretty much decided on a builder, although we’d not signed anything contractually Cleared around 1000 tonnes of soil off the site Found out that the approved plans that came with the house were unworkable for anyone whose ancestors originated  from somewhere other than The Shire, Middle Earth Come to the conclusion that while architectural technicians are great at CAD,

Act IV - Scene 2 - Can You Dig It?

I just realised that I missed a couple of things out from my previous post.   In December 2015, a boring rig was on site to do its thing for a mineral report. This was required (in addition to the coal authority report) to identify whether there were any coal seams in the area, and also to get a general view of the underground minerals which would feed into decisions on the preferred foundation design for the structural engineer. This was arranged through the builder.   The d

Act IV - Progressing the Design

It’s September 2015. We had our plot, we had approved planning permission, we had a builder who was about to start a build in the plot next door to ours and who had provided a build estimate that fitted with our budget. What could possibly go wrong?   18 months later, and I’m still not sure I can adequately answer that.   On the positive front, the 120 year old Farmhouse we’d put on the market a few months earlier had sold for a price we were very happy with. We were less enamour

Act III - Buying the Plot, Wayleaves and Servitudes

It’s May 2015 and around 4 months since we first saw the plot and 3 months since we decided not to buy it. There were various reasons for this:   The was a train line running along the rear of the plot, serving the local power station There was a BP pipeline running through the border of our plot, imposing a 3.5 meter no build zone on our plot We’d never done anything like this before. We were not self-builders. Buying a plot was for people on Grand Designs or Building

Act II - To Buy or Not To Buy

In my previous post, I explained how we came across our plot when out walking close to where my mother-in-law had moved over from Dublin.  It came with full planning permission for a modern house built into the hill, as shown on the boarding on site. Interestingly, the boarding was from a local builder (which I’ve blurred out here)     This is the image shown on the boarding:     Here’s another sample image of the house:     “Our” hou

Act I - Finding a Plot

Prior to purchasing the plot we’re planning to build on, we lived in a 120 year-old single-storey Farmhouse sitting in 1/3 acre plot with lovely views looking down onto a loch a few hundred meters down the valley. We loved living there, but with our daughter heading off to university in Autumn 2014, we realised that we did not need a 5 bedroom house, and the annual maintenance was expensive both in terms of time (tending to the gardens) and money (regular replacement of the slate tiles due to th

A Kingdom For My House!

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse - Shakespeare’s Richard III, Act V, Scene IV   Hello, and thanks for stopping by.   Firstly, apologies for the title of this blog.    I can’t really say that I’m a big fan of Shakespeare, but I was struggling to think of a title for the blog, and, like Shakespeare himself, I do like a play on words.    By way of explanation, for those not from Scotland, the region of Fife (the location of our plot) is known as the K

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