Skoobie joins an anxious team….
Entry posted by G and J in Da Bungalow
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Introducing Skoobie, a Skoda Fabia and the newest member of the team. Not the first purchase towards the build, we’ve already bought a twin battery Makita chainsaw and Trevor the trailer to help clearing trees, but they were back in January.
Skoobie is not in the first flush of youth so fits in well with my (G’s) seventh decade creaking knees, but we are hoping she (yes, this Scooby is female) will do great service in pursuit of our new home.
So where is the project now? We have full planning permission but we still don’t actually know how she is going to be built and by whom. It seems such minor details need to be sorted before we can assemble a credible budget. Who knew?
Our house is on the market but is garnering little interest, so the upside is we have time to plan everything to death and worry ourselves witless. We’ve done the CIL stuff and they’ve accepted the previous occupancy to reduce the CIL levy should we have to sell in the first three years and they’ve also confirmed our self build exemption.
A planning condition prevents starting before September anyway and although we may well start soonish from a CIL point of view with garden clearance and maybe demolish the garage the main action won’t start for a goodly while.
There is just so much to think about at once, and it is such a roller coaster of emotions. In the building technology Olympic race we are on the 115th lap (yep, going round and round in circles). Both traditional blockwork and ICF were non starters, kit build companies (SIPs and TF) fell at the high jump as they failed to clear the electric wires on site, so that leaves stick built on site by chippies and a TF kit assembled manually as the front runners, with a SIP kit manually assembled limping in third.
On the upside the delayed start has meant I’ve been able to visit two self build sites and learned tons as a result - with me asking more questions than a warranty application form but still being met with such kindness and patience.
But time to plan means time to worry too.
We thought we were nearing a design which we like which also met all the fire regs imposed by building so close to our boundaries, only to realise that we needed to check that the resulting design would be both mortgageable and lifetime mortgageable - we like to plan ahead and we do want access to funds to grow old disgracefully. We can hope!
That’s boiling our brains right now, and getting straight answers from underwriters about a possible future mortgage app is not easy! But we press on regardless…
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